1887 AN ENGLISH 'POUR LE MERITE ' 23 



June 7, 1887. 



Called on Lord Salisbury by appointment at 3 p.m., 

 and bad twenty minutes' talk witb bim about the "matter 

 of some public interest" mentioned in his letter of the 

 (29 th). 



This turned out to be a proposal for the formal re- 

 cognition of distinguished services in Science, Letters, 

 and Art by the institution of some sort of order analogous 

 to the Pour le Me'rite. Lord Salisbury spoke of the 

 anomalous present mode of distributing honours, intimated 

 that the Queen desired to establish a better system, and 

 asked my opinion. 



I said that I should like to separate my personal 

 opinion from that which I believed to obtain among the 

 majority of scientific men ; that I thought many of the 

 latter were much discontented with the present state of 

 affairs, and would highly approve of such a proposal as 

 Lord Salisbury shadowed forth. 



That, so far as my own personal feeling was concerned, 

 it was opposed to anything of the kind for Science. I 

 said that in Science we had two advantages — first, that 

 a man's work is demonstrably either good or bad ; and 

 secondly, that the " contemporary posterity " of foreigners 

 judges us, and rewards good work by membership of 

 Academies and so forth. 



In Art, if a man chooses to call Raphael a dauber, 

 you can't prove he is wrong ; and literary work is just 

 as hard to judge. 



I then spoke of the dangers to which science is exposed 

 by the undue prominence and weight of men who suc- 

 cessfully apply scientific knowledge to practical purposes 

 — engineers, chemical inventors, etc. etc.; said it appeared 

 to me that a Minister having such order at his disposal 

 would find it very difiicult to resist the pressure brought 

 by such people as against the man of high science who 



