212 Presidentship of Sir Joseph Banks 1801 



Viscount Lewisham had been some years in the House of 

 Commons and this year he succeeded his father as third 

 Earl of Dartmouth. Three years later he was appointed 

 Lord Chamberlain. 



The most notable visitor to the Club this year was the 

 accomplished and original William Hyde Wollaston, M.D., 

 who came on the invitation of Henry Cavendish. He was 

 then in his thirty-fifth year, and had retired from medical 

 practice the year before in order to devote himself to scientific 

 research, especially in the domain of chemistry and miner- 

 alogy. To his inventive genius we owe the reflecting 

 goniometer that bears his name, the camera lucida, and 

 the method for making platinum malleable. He was the 

 first to notice the dark lines in the solar spectrum. He 

 discovered the metals palladium and rhodium. The Royal 

 Society, into which he had been elected in 1793, chose him 

 as one of its Secretaries in 1804 and when the Presidency 

 became vacant in the summer of 1820 by the death of Sir 

 Joseph Banks he was elected by the Council to fill the 

 Presidential chair until the anniversary election on 3oth 

 November. He was generous in the disposal of his wealth. 

 The Royal Society owes to him the establishment of its 

 valuable Donation Fund. To the Geological Society, of 

 which he was one of the earliest supporters, he bequeathed 

 the fund that established the highest prize which the Society 

 has to bestow the Wollaston Medal and also provided an 

 annual income which has been so usefully employed to assist 

 younger geologists in their labours. Sir Henry Holland has 

 left his impression of Wollaston as he used to see him at 

 Sir Joseph Banks' Sunday evening receptions in Soho Square 

 " Wollaston, sternly logical and sceptical, listening to 

 others as if ever ready to refute or rebuke ; and generally 

 doing so by pungent questions to which few could venture 

 to reply. I have often known a plausible theory, uttered 

 by some one unconscious of Wollaston's presence, suddenly 

 upset by two or three of these abrupt questions or com- 

 ments/' ! 



1 Recollections of Past Life, 2nd Edit. 1872, p. 213. 



