15 
of Edinburgh^ Session 1862 - 63 . 
bers or small committees to try experiments, and to report the re- 
sults to a succeeding meeting. 
This seems to be the most perfect constitution of a society for 
investigating nature which we can well imagine. It bears a close 
analogy to the Philosophical College of Bacon, — the Solomon’s House 
in the allegory of the New Atlantis, — which is generally believed to 
have been really an antecedent (in the way of suggestion) to the 
formation of the Eoyal Society of London. But it is now less prac- 
ticable than formerly, for many reasons, of which I will enumerate 
a few. For example, these Societies include in our time so many 
members that they can no longer consult as a committee, but must 
rather listen as an audience. Again, the minute subdivisions into 
which the sciences are now split, render a perfect comprehension of 
one science alone almost the occupation of a single life. Hence, un- 
less such a society were to consist all of chemists, all of astronomers, 
all of comparative anatomists, and so forth, the proceedings, and even 
the experiments, which in a former age interested nearly all well- 
informed men alike, are now interesting or intelligible to only a 
small section. In like manner, an experimental investigation is no 
longer the simple and absolute thing which it was. A member of 
the Koyal Society is no longer instructed, as in former times, to try, 
for instance, whether spirit of wine burns or not in an exhausted 
receiver; whether salt is separated from water in freezing; to dis- 
sect an oyster; to measure whether pebbles and other minerals 
grow or not ; whether eggs frozen continue fecund ; to repeat the 
Magdeburg and Torricellian experiments ; to determine the relative 
weight of lead and water ; and to report the result of any such ex- 
periment at next week’s meeting.* But the investigations are now-a- 
days complicated, the experimental means alone furnish matter for 
long and anxious preliminary consideration ; the precision needed, 
and the calculations on which it depends, are matters consuming 
time, and often can be better attained by the patient efforts of an 
individual, than through any amount of co-operation ; nay, the 
very results, unless involving a capital discovery (which is a rare 
and fortunate accident), cannot be stated without an amount of 
detail often wearisome to those who are not especially interested. 
* These instances are all taken from the early Journals of the Royal Society 
of London. 
