14 
Proceedings of the Royal Society 
either may appear to be in danger of flagging, resting well assured 
that the development of knowledge, and the intellectual resources 
of new generations, will ever from time to time give lustre and 
importance to associations destined not to meet the caprices or 
fashions of a time, but to promote the great cause of scientific and 
literary progress. 
III.— I now proceed to consider what changes the progress of 
science or of society renders necessary or desirable in the ivorhing of 
associations such as the Royal Society^ and how far such changes are 
safe and 'prudent ? 
The most casual reader of history, or observer of men, knows 
that the inevitable progress of change — material, intellectual, and 
social — deprives of the character of permanence all human institu- 
tions. Those Institutions are most likely to be perpetuated, in 
which a wise forecast of progressive change adapts their parts to the 
wants and circumstances of the age. If this be true of political 
Constitutions, of Churches, of Universities, of Charities, nay even 
of public Amusements, it is no less true of learned Societies. Con- 
sidering that the Eoyal Society of London and the French Academy 
of Sciences are each two centuries old, we rather must wonder — 
taking into view the astonishing progress, or indeed reconstruction, 
of the sciences during that time — that so much of their original 
constitution still remains, than that changes have been needed, or 
are still required, to meet the wants of successive generations. 
I shall consider some of the most obvious changes of condition 
under which learned associations pursue their vocation now and 
formerly. In doing so, I shall speak principally of their relations 
to the natural and experimental sciences. 
The Florentine Academy was an excellent type of what a physical 
association of the seventeenth century was and ought to have been. 
The members collected apparatus, they had a laboratory, they fur- 
nished funds for these ; and the associated philosophers (who were 
select in number) met to witness the experiments, and to argue 
upon the conclusions to be drawn from them. The Eoyal Society 
of London, as well as the lesser societies from which it sprung, 
took a precisely similar course : they had a paid Operator and 
Editor of their Transactions ; and they remitted to individual mem- 
