8 Anmversary Address by Sir William Huggins. [Nov. 80, 
but also, and to a greater extent, from the fuller recognition by the Government 
and the public of the need for scientific advice and direction in connection 
with many matters of national concern. 
It may not be inopportune, therefore, for me to say a few words on the 
advisory relation in which the Society has come to stand to the Government, 
and to review very briefly the great work which the Society has done, and 
is doing, for the Nation. 
Among Academies and Learned Societies the position of the Royal Society 
is, in some respects, an exceptional one. In the British dominions it holds a 
unique position, not only as the earliest chartered scientific Society, but in 
its own right, on account of the number of eminent men included in its 
Fellowship, and the close connection in which it stands, though remaining a 
private institution, with the Government. The Royal Society is a private 
learned body, consisting of a voluntary and independent association of 
students of Science united for the promotion of Natural Knowledge at their 
own cost. It asks for no endowment from the State, for it could not 
tolerate the control from without which follows the acceptance of public 
money, nor permit of that interference with its internal affairs which, as is 
seen in some foreign academies, is associated with State endowment. In one 
particular case, in which it can receive aid without any loss of independence, 
the Society gratefully acknowledges its indebtedness to the State. About 
1780 the Society received a communication from the Government offering 
to provide apartments for the Society at Somerset House; these were 
exchanged, in 1857, for rooms in old Burlington House ; after its rebuilding, 
in 1873, the Society moved into the apartments which it now occupies. 
It should not be forgotten that nearly a century before the opening of the 
British Museum in 1759, the Royal Society’s Museum, or Repository as it 
was calied, enjoyed the prestige of being regarded as the most important 
Museum in London, and must have been of great use to men of science, and 
have aided materially in promoting and disseminating the knowledge of 
natural history. The apartments offered to the Society at Somerset House 
were quite insufficient in capacity and in number to receive the Society’s 
Museum, and in consequence, this collection, which had been carefully 
maintained not only from the scientific side, but also with reference to the 
commercial value and importance of the foreign objects received, especially 
of the valuable zoological specimens frequently sent by the Hudson’s Bay 
Company from their territories, was presented by the Society to the Nation, 
a not unworthy acknowledgment, on the Society’s part, of the Government’s 
gift of apartments. This collection has not been kept separate, but is now 
