1 6 " The Royal Philosophers " 



leather and gilding. The Dinner-registers were afterwards 

 kept in a series of much more homely pass-books, which 

 record the names of the members and guests, sometimes 

 with notes of the more important regulations adopted at 

 the Anniversary or other meetings. They extend without 

 a break up to June 2ist 1855. From that date onward 

 several volumes of these weekly registers have been lost. 

 Every effort to recover them has as yet proved fruitless. 

 The gap in time represented by the missing volumes 

 extends from June 1855 to November 1879. After the 

 latter date the dinner chronicle is continuous to the 

 present time. 



Up to the end of December 1785 the Dinner- registers 

 record not only the names of the members and guests pre- 

 sent at each dinner, but also the several dishes that were 

 set before them, thus supplying an interesting picture of 

 the culinary art in England for nearly fifty years of the 

 eighteenth century. 



/ At first the group of men who agreed to dine together 

 in the autumn of 1743 assumed no name or title for their 

 company. They could not call themselves a Club of the 

 Royal Society, for some of them did not belong to that 

 body. But when they were joined by the President of the 

 Royal Society, who was by acclamation made their President, 

 they chose as their designation that of " The Royal Philo- 

 Nysophers." Their Treasurers for nearly fifty years, in the 

 documents which have come down to us, seldom speak of 

 the company as a Club, but as " the Society " ; though now 

 and then, as if by a slip of the pen, they do refer to it as 

 " this Club." The record of the first general meeting which 

 has been preserved begins thus: "At a General Meeting 

 of the Royal Philosophers." The full title would appear to 

 have been " The Society of Royal Philosophers." This 

 appellation, however, would have been too long for common ; 

 use, at least among the landlords and waiters at the tavern 

 where the dinners were held ; it was accordingly shortened 

 there into simply " The Royals." It is noteworthy that 

 in his minute of the Annual General Meeting of the year 



