Name of the Club 1 7 



1774, which was the last he wrote, Josiah Colebrooke con- 

 tinues to speak of " the Society " ; but at the very end he 

 is betrayed into the use of the word " Club " where he has 

 to allude to " Binding the first volume of the Memoirs of 

 this Club, when a Preface is wrote." But obviously the 

 Royal Philosophers were now being called a club, and the 

 word appears in the handwriting of the Treasurers from 

 1787 onward. The title of " Royal Society Club " is first 

 met with in the Account-book of 1794-5, in which an enumer- 

 ation of the membership is thus designated " List of the 

 Members of the Royal Society Club subsequent to Annual 

 Meeting on the 2d July 1795." The title is continued in 

 subsequent Account-books. 



I purpose in the following Chapters to present a succinct 

 account of the proceedings of the Club during each year 

 from its foundation onwards. The business transacted at 

 the Annual General Meeting, when new regulations were 

 made and new members were elected, will naturally come 

 first in the account of each year. As this meeting has always 

 been held in the summer, its purview extends over the first 

 half of the current year and the second half of the previous 

 year. There can be no doubt that much of the interest in 

 this history lies in the record of the guests who have been 

 entertained at the dinners. I have selected in each year 

 a few of the more conspicuous or representative visitors, 

 and given a brief biographical notice of them, thus con- 

 necting the Royal Society Club with the social, political, 

 and scientific life of the time 



In perusing the records of the Royal Society and of the 

 Dining- Club connected with it throughout the course of 

 the eighteenth century, one is apt to lose sight of the fact 

 that during that period Great Britain was almost constantly 

 at war in some part or other of the Old world or the New. 



Hardly ever in these records do we meet with an allusion 

 to the stirring events that marked the rapid rise of the 

 British Empire beyond the seas. The social intercourse 

 of the scientific men of the day is chronicled week after 



