THE ROYAL SOCIETY AND THE STATE 



the time and energy of the Officers and Members of Com- 

 mittees. The Society regards this outside work, important 

 as it is, as extraneous, and therefore as subordinate, and 

 would not be justified in permitting such work to interfere 

 with the strict prosecution of pure natural science as the 

 primary purpose of the Society's existence, upon which, 

 indeed, the Society's importance as an advisory body 

 ultimately depends. 



The array of national undertakings of which the Society 

 has been wholly or in part in charge, or to which it has 

 given advice or assistance from time to time, is so very 

 great, that any attempt to point out, even in broad outline, 

 the more important of the directions in which the Society's 

 influence has been actively employed for the public service 

 must necessarily be fragmentary and very incomplete. 

 On this occasion it is not possible to do more than to give, 

 in a few sentences, a rapid presentation of a few typical 

 examples of the Society's public work. 



It must be borne in mind that the bare statement in 

 a few sentences of the public work accomplished by the 

 Society fails altogether to bring before the imagination 

 an adequate conception of the large amount of free labour 

 ungrudgingly given by those Fellows who composed the 

 several Committees to which the work was entrusted. 



Going back to the first century of the Society's existence, 

 the work done for the National Observatory at Greenwich 

 may be fairly taken as typical of the Society's outside 



activity at that time. It is not too much to say that the 



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