Intelligence and Miscellaneous Articles. 73 



himself undertaken to assure the world that ' I have spent an immense 

 time in ransacking the records of the Society, with an industry worthy 

 of a better cause.' 



' ' I perfectly agree with the Secretary, that it is becoming in those 

 who bring forward charges, to attend to the accuracy even of the most 

 trifling circumstances which are connected with them ; and now that 

 the minutes of the Councils (of the dates to which he has referred) are 

 entered, I perceive that there is no entry of any Council held on the 

 11th of February. That officer possessed better opportunities than 

 myself of knowing the fact that a Council was summoned for that day 

 by order of the President, and that it did meet in consequence of that 

 summons. The Secretary is therefore inaccurate when he states that 

 ' no Council was held on that day.' And the circumstance of his having 

 neglected to enter its meeting in the Council book, and that the only 

 business it transacted probably was to resolve itself immediately into 

 a Committee of Papers, cannot prevent a meeting regularly summoned 

 from having been a Council ; nor if it could, ought it to be urged, at 

 least by him, as a reproach to me, had 1 fallen into a mistake. In fact, 

 as on the 1 6th of March, the minutes of the Council of the 4th of Fe- 

 bruary and 1 1th of March had not been entered, I could only know of 

 the existence of a Council on the 1 1 th of February, by inquiring of the 

 Assistant Secretary if he had been directed to summon one, to which 

 he replied in the affirmative. 



"Whether these are ' the only instances of inaccuracy in the minutes' 

 I have been able to adduce, can scarcely be within the knowledge of 

 the Secretary; time may enable him to correct that opinion. What- 

 ever value may be attached to the explanation he has given, the accu- 

 racy of my facts are fully admitted by all : indeed, in the statement 

 made by the President at one of the ordinary meetings of the Royal 

 Society, he not only fully admitted their correctness, but most can- 

 didly added that it was quite natural that, in my ignorance of the ex- 

 planation he was then about to offer, I should have viewed the subject 

 as I had done. 



Dorset Street, Manchester Square, C. Babbage." 



June 17, 1830. 



OBSERVATIONS BY DR. ROGET, IN REPLY TO MR. BABBAGE. 



" Mr. Babbage has printed a Paper in reply to my refutation of 

 his charges against me, upon which I beg to make a few obser- 

 vations. A slight attention to the arguments contained in the first 

 part of it will show, that they all proceed upon the gratuitous as- 

 sumption that the Paper which I gave to the Assistant Secretary, to 

 copy into the Minute-book, and which Mr. Babbage says ' pro- 

 fesses to be the rough minutes," is the identical Paper written at the 

 Council on the 26th of November. This it neither is, nor ever 

 professed to be. Every one conversant with business must know, 

 that it is generally impossible, during the time of a meeting, to take 

 down more than the heads of what is to form the minutes; and 

 that on many occasions it is requisite that the minutes, in order 

 that they may accurately express the sense of the meeting, should 



N. S. Vol. 8. No. 43. July ] 830. L be 



