The Foundation of the lloyal Agricultural Society. 
19 
regulatiug principle of the exclusion of all those questions of 
debate on which the people of every individual country enter- 
tain sentiments so much at variance with each other, cannot fail 
to lead to results affecting in the highest degree the prosperity 
of our people and the national wealth of our kingdom," had 
authorised the petitioners to form themselves into one body 
politic and corporate, for the aforesaid purposes, under the name 
of the Royal Agricultural Society of England. The usual 
powers of suing and being sued, of holding lands, of framing 
by-laws and of appointing officers were granted, and the Charter 
ordered three General Meetings of Governors and Members to 
be held in each year, viz. : two in London in the months of May 
and December respectively, and the third " in such other part of 
England or Wales as shall be deemed most advantageous in time 
and place for the advancement of the objects of the Society." 
Here for the present we may leave the young Society. Its 
subsequent career is told in the pages of the Journal, and forms 
a prominent feature of the agricultural history of the times. In 
the words of His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales at the 
banquet given by Her Majesty the Queen as President of the 
Society to the Council and Officers on March 2G, 1889 — 
" Throughout the whole of its life the Society has been 
constant to its original aims, so tersely summed up in its 
motto ' Practice with Science ' ; or, in other words, scientific 
inquiry brought to a practical issue in developing the resources 
of the soil and increasing its productiveness, in stimulating 
the improvement of live-stock and farm implements, and in 
bringing to early maturity animals which provide food for the 
people." 
This brief summary of the Society's early history cannot be 
more fitly concluded than by a quotation from His Royal 
Highness's peroration in proposing the toast of the Society on 
the same memorable occasion : — 
" Looking to all that the Society has achieved in fostering 
the practice and science of Agriculture, we are entitled to claim 
for it that it has nobly done its duty, and deserves well of the 
country at large. That it may prove in the future as active in 
well-doing as it has been in the past must be the earnest prayer 
of us all ; and I am confident that we shall each and all of us 
strive to the utmost of our power to increase the Society's sphere 
of usefulness, and to do our part in ' the general advancement 
of English Agriculture.' " 
Ernest Clarke. 
