
1904.] Anniversary Address by Sir William Huggins. 13 
Bill was drawn up by Peter Davall, the Secretary of the Society, aided and 
supported by Lord Macclesfield, who became President the same year. 
The change was approved and assisted by the actual President, Martin 
Folkes. The feeling of the people was so strongly against the change that 
the illness and death of Bradley, who as Astronomer Royal had assisted the 
Government with his advice, which took place not long afterwards, were 
popularly attributed to a judgment from Heaven. 
Very brief must be the mention of some of the other works in the public 
service which were carried out at a no small cost of labour to the Fellows 
of the Society. 
About 1750, the Lord Mayor of London, two of the Judges and an 
Alderman, having died in one year from jail-fever caught at the Old Bailey 
Sessions, the Society was called upon for advice and assistance. A com- 
mittee was appointed to investigate the wretched state of ventilation in jails. 
A ventilator, invented by one of the committee, was erected in Newgate, 
reducing at once the number of deaths from eight a week to about two a 
month. Of the eleven workmen employed to put up the ventilator, seven 
caught the fever and died. 
At the request of the Government, committees were appointed to consider 
the best form of protection of buildings, and, later on, of ships at sea, from 
lightning. 
The Society took a very active part in the measurement of a degree of 
latitude, afterwards in the length of a pendulum vibrating seconds in the 
latitude of London, and in the comparison of the British Standards with the 
Linear Measure adopted in France. A committee was appointed to compare 
the Society’s Standard yard with that of the Exchequer. Later, in 1854, 
when the Standard yard was lost in the destruction by fire of the Houses 
of Parliament, a Commission (all the members of which were Fellows of the 
Royal Society) was appointed to consider the steps to be taken for the 
restoration of the Standards. 
It was at the instance of the Council of the Society, who petitioned 
George III. for the necessary funds, that the King gave his consent to 
a geodetical survey in 1784, with the immediate object of establishing a 
trigonometrical connection between the Observatories of Greenwich and 
Paris. The work, under General Roy, for which the Copley Medal was 
awarded to him, served as a basis for the operations of a more extensive 
nature, embracing a survey of the British Islands, which were commenced 
nine by | 
Since its foundation the Society has taken an active part in many 
