284 RECORD OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY 



up, in which, after reciting the constitution and Regulations of the Fund, 

 they furnished a table of the five years' Grants, with the following totals for 

 the whole period : 



Total amount applied for, 50,4-01. 



Amount granted for Personal Allowance, ,7,800. 



Amount granted for Non-Personal Expenses, ,11,800. 



The report suggests that if unused balances, instead of reverting to the 

 Treasury, * could be reserved and kept in hand, provision might be made for 

 some larger purposes than those to which the Fund has hitherto been devoted ' ; 

 and with respect to personal grants, while it does not suggest that these should 

 be entirely discontinued, it does not recommend 'the present method of 

 administering them '. Some correspondence between the Treasury, the 

 Committee of Council on Education, and the Royal Society ensued, and it 

 was finally agreed (March, 1882), (1) that the Grant of .1,000, which had 

 hitherto been provided under the Vote for Learned Societies, should be 

 discontinued ; (2) that the ,4,000 which had for the previous five years been 

 provided under the Vote for the Science and Art Department should be 

 replaced by a like sum * as a Grant in aid of the Royal Society ' ; (3) that this 

 Grant should be managed by a reconstituted Government Grant Committee, 

 and should be ' primarily applicable to non-personal payments ', but that the 

 Committee should be ' at liberty to recommend occasional personal payments 

 from it, which, however, would only be made with the express sanction of the 

 Treasury, obtained in every case'; (4) that accounts and vouchers of the 

 expenditure should be rendered as in the case of the Grant for Meteoro- 

 logical purposes, the money being issued by the Treasury 'only upon 

 satisfactory evidence that previous grants had been spent to a sufficient 

 extent, and that no excessive balance was being accumulated over a series 

 of years '. 



In the correspondence concerning details which followed this general 

 arrangement the Council again insisted, as they had done in 1855, that the 

 Grant was not a Grant to the Royal Society, but to Science. ' With regard 

 to the title under which the Vote is proposed to be made,' wrote the President, 

 ' inasmuch as the Society derives no pecuniary benefit from the Grant, but in 

 administering it undertakes an onerous and difficult task, the President and 

 Council would be glad if the terms could be so modified as to prevent any 

 misapprehension with regard to this point on the part of the public.' The 

 Secretary of the Treasury, in his reply, called attention to the fact that ' a Grant 

 in aid means a Grant of which the detailed expenditure is not subject to the 

 same detailed appropriation as the expenditure of an ordinary Grant ', and that 

 this was ' the reason for using the expression here '. Ultimately, in a Treasury 

 Letter dated April 8, 1882, it was agreed that the estimate should be 

 submitted to Parliament in the following terms : 



