32 Presidentship of Martin Folkes 1748 



in 1740 he had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. 

 More remarkable and more frequently to be seen at the 

 table of the Club was Juan y Santacilla, more commonly 

 known as Don Jorge Juan, a Spanish mathematician born 

 in 1712. His energetic nature led him at the age of 

 scarcely 23 to take command of a small vessel with a single 

 sail in which he crossed the Atlantic Ocean and examined 

 a long extent of the American Coast-line. He was one of 

 a commission (which included La Condamine) sent in 1736 

 to measure terrestrial degrees in equatorial America, during 

 which operation he determined the heights of the ground 

 barometrically. He remained some months in London in 

 1748-49, often dining with the Club, and being on gth 

 November of the latter year elected a Fellow of the Royal 

 Society. Another visitor, Johann Nicholaus Sebastian 

 Allamand, Professor of philosophy and natural history at 

 Franeker in the Netherlands, had been elected a Fellow 

 of the Royal Society in 1746. The Cavaliere Ossorio, who 

 dined with the Club on i6th February of this year, had 

 been made F.R.S. in the preceding April, and Nicholas 

 de Montaudouin, who was a guest at the Club on 2Oth 

 and 27th October 1748, was chosen into the Royal Society 

 in the following spring. 



1749. It has been remarked in the previous chapter that in 

 the Minute-books and Dinner- registers allusions to contem- 

 porar}? events, either at home or abroad, are almost entirely 

 absent. The Club records of 1745 and 1746 if they had been 

 preserved, would probably not have contained any reference 

 to the Jacobite rebellion and invasion of England, to 

 its sanguinary suppression, or to the trials of the unfor- 

 tunate leaders at Carlisle and in London. In 1749 at the 

 meeting of the Club on 27th April it is recorded, " This 

 being the day the fireworks for the Peace of Aix la Chapelle 

 were played off, only three members attended." 1 The three 

 heroes who preferred their duty to the Club were the two 

 divines, Mr. Birch and Mr. Squire, and the never-failing 

 Josiah Colebrooke. The latter, perhaps foreseeing that 



1 Dinner Register No. i. 



