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United Kingdom and abroad ; and stronger reasons than any yet 

 assigned will be required to induce it to break with its past, and 

 undertake the task of winning a character anew. 



It must further be remembered that the proposal is to fuse the 

 Academy, not with the Royal Dublin Society, as it once was, or even 

 now is, — a body of large resources and with an important sphere of 

 action, — but with that Society, deprived of nearly all the depart- 

 ments once connected with it, shorn of almost all its public functions, 

 -and reduced to a shadow of its former seK. 



2. Further, the Council have unanimously adopted a Eesolution ad- 

 verse to the transfer of the charge of the vote for the Eoyal Irish 

 Academy from the Irish Government to the Science and Art Depart- 

 ment, for the following reasons : — 



The Department of Science and Art, like the Committee of Council, 

 of which it is a branch, is a purely educational body. It has no con- 

 cern with learned societies established for original research, scientific, 

 literary, or archseological. In the present instance, for the first time 

 it is sought to bring under its control, through the machinery of 

 finance, a body of this kind. The Royal Society (London), and the 

 Royal Society of Edinburgh — the two institutions most nearly analo- 

 gous to our own — receive their grants direct from the Treasury. This 

 Academy is entitled to the same freedom fi'om the interference of 

 the Science and Art Department, and would, in our opinion, be lowered 

 in the estimation of the country by being subordinated to a Depart- 

 ment whose proper business connects it, not with independent re- 

 search, but with the humbler office of instruction in the practical 

 sciences and industrial arts. 



Though this Institution alone is directly affected by the present 

 proposal, we think the attempt thus to enlarge the sphere of action of 

 the Science and Art Department well deserves the attentive observa- 

 tion of similar Societies in England and Scotland. Were the Depart- 

 ment a merely administrative body, without scientific pretentions or 

 ambition, the subordination sought to be imposed on the Academy 

 would be less open to objection. Learned societies cannot reasonably 

 object to such governmental supervision as is necessary to secure 

 grants of public money from being diverted from the purposes to 

 which they may have been appropriated by Parliament. But it is to be 

 feared that a department, which by its nature is connected with the 



