THE SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES 



themselves confined and trammelled by the necessary 

 limitations of one Society. The pressure from within 

 became gradually too great to be controlled, and could 

 find relief only in one of two ways by the division of 

 the Society itself into a number of sections or branches 

 which remained integral parts of the Society, or else by, 

 what actually happened, the successive formation and 

 swarming off, as the need arose, of special Societies re- 

 stricted to the study and promotion of a single branch 

 of science. 



These new, but in no respect rival associations, were 

 from the first independent bodies, which retained no 

 connection with the Royal Society, other than the 

 purely friendly one which necessarily followed from the 

 leadership of the new Societies being in the hands of its 

 Fellows. 



Even as Fellows, we must place before the interests 

 of the Society itself, those of the object for which it was 

 founded and still exists, namely, the " promotion of 

 natural knowledge " ; we must rejoice, therefore, and 

 indeed the more so in this case, as the interests of the 

 Society and of science do not clash but support and pro- 

 mote each other, that the new and ever-increasing needs 

 following upon the specialisation of the Fellows into 

 groups, engaged in the study of some differentiated branch 

 of knowledge, were not met by the inadequate and inelastic 

 plan of sectional division of the Society itself. No argu- 

 ments are necessary to-day ; we have but to look at the 



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