366 SIR JOSEPH BANKS. 



Maskeljne, the Astronomer Royal, really considered his 

 friend Dr. Hutton as ill-treated; so might Baron 

 Maseres, and one or two others; but the most active 

 moyer, who indeed took the lead in the opposition to 

 the Council, was Dr. Horsley, a priest of intolerant 

 nature, of extreme arrogance, of violent temper, and 

 guided by a most inflated estimate of his own import- 

 ance as a cultivator of mathematical science, in which 

 capacity he was nearly if not altogether insignificant. 

 Finding himself joined with Dr. Maskelyne and Baron 

 Maseres, he chose to hoist a standard for the mathema- 

 tical sciences in opposition to natural history, which the 

 President and his especial friends chiefly cultivated ; and 

 he considered the treatment of Dr. Hutton to be an overt 

 act of hostility to those studies to which he untruly 

 represented his own life as devoted. 



The motion was carried, by a majority of thirty to 

 twenty-five, that Dr. Hutton be thanked for his services 

 as Foreign Secretary; and Sir Joseph Banks's party 

 committed their first error in opposing this proposition, 

 on a ground, plausible, but wholly insufficient, that the 

 Council alone, and not the Society at large, had the means 

 of judging how far the duties of Dr. Button's oifice had 

 been well performed. The New Council coming into office 

 29th November, affirmed, with a single dissentient voice, 

 the resolution of their predecessors, requiring the Foreign 

 Secretary to reside in London. Before the next meeting 

 of the Society, Dr. Button's written defence was read, 

 and a resolution was passed by a large majority (45 to 

 15), that, "if he had been censured, he had fully justi- 

 fied himself." Here the matter might have ended, and 

 here it certainly would have ended, had the case of Dr. 



