130 Presidentship of Sir John Pr ingle 1775 



before the Council of the Royal Society in the form of 

 " undoubted documents " that " divers frauds and gross 

 breaches of trust " had been committed by one of the 

 foreign members, lately librarian to the Landgrave of Hesse. 

 The President and Council came to the formal resolution 

 " that it would be highly reproachful to the Society, that 

 he should any longer continue a member thereof ; and there- 

 fore do recommend to the Society that the said Rudolf 

 Eric Raspe be ejected/' This recommendation was carried 

 out by the Society at the ordinary meeting of the same date, 

 before the admission of the strangers of the day. And 

 yet, strange to say, the officials neglected to efface Raspe's 

 name from the printed list of members. It has remained 

 there ever since and still appears in the last revised edition 

 of the Society's " Record " published in 1912. 



It has been stated that the delinquent threatened to 

 retaliate by exposing blunders in the Philosophical Transac- 

 tions, in the spirit of John Hill already mentioned (p. 29). 

 But he does not seem to have gone further than a threat. 

 He did not leave London for some years, probably con- 

 sidering that he had a better chance of making a livelihood 

 there than anywhere else now open to him. His expulsion 

 from the Royal Society and his acts that led to it do 

 not appear to have become widely known ; at least they 

 did not prevent him from obtaining a certain amount 

 of occupation for his pen, on the slender profits of which, 

 together with what he could earn by giving lessons in Ger- 

 man, he eked out a precarious living. The year after his 

 arrival in London he published in English a little volume 

 entitled " An account of some German Volcanos and their 

 Productions," which, though somewhat crude, was in advance 

 of the general opinions of his fellow-countrymen, who, fol- 

 lowing Werner, regarded basalt as a rock of aqueous origin, 

 and volcanic phenomena as due to the subterranean com- 

 bustion of seams of coal, so that no volcanoes could arise 

 until after the appearance of vegetation on the surface 

 of the globe. Raspe likewise translated some German 

 mineralogical works. But the sales of such books would 



