204 Presidentship of Sir Joseph Banks 1796 



to his inability to attend the meetings desired to withdraw 

 from the Club, and that Dr. Heberden also " on account 

 of his advanced age and the infirmity occasioned by 

 an accident is deprived of the satisfaction of attending 

 the meetings of the Club, and desires to withdraw his 

 name." These resignations were accepted. It must have 

 been with no little regret that the venerable Heberden 

 severed his connection with a society with which he had 

 been intimately associated for not much less than half a 

 century ; nor could the members view without concern the 

 disappearance of the last of the old band who did so much 

 in the early days of the Club to give it vitality and success. 



The two vacancies thus arising were at once filled by the 

 election by ballot of John G. Walker (F.R.S. 1794) and 

 John Ord (F.R.S. 1780). 



Foreign visitors continued to be few. The only one that 

 need be recorded here is a " M. de Rossel," whom we 

 may with some confidence identify as a scientific French 

 sailor, the Chevalier de Rossel, who took part in the sea- 

 fights of the Comte de Grasse with the English fleet. He 

 joined the expedition sent out by France to discover traces 

 of La Perouse, and at the end of many vicissitudes, became 

 the head of that expedition. After a long stay in Batavia 

 he embarked there in a Dutch vessel, taking with him all 

 the papers containing the record of the expedition. He 

 was captured, however, by one of our cruisers among the 

 Shetland Isles, and taken to London in October 1795, re- 

 maining in this country until the Peace of Amiens in 1802. 

 He was thus at this time a prisoner of war on parole, but 

 so far from being interned in an insanitary camp, more 

 Teutonico, he was evidently at large and free to accept 

 the invitation to dine with the Club, under the kindly 

 auspices of Alexander Dalrymple, the Hydrographer to the 

 Admiralty. He spent the seven years of his exile in this 

 country on the preparation of his narrative of the voyage 

 in search of La Perouse, and his work in two quarto volumes 

 with a folio atlas appeared in 1809. 



On March loth the President had as one of his guests 



