the royal society in thomas henry huxley's time

The Royal Society in Thomas Henry Huxley's TimeAuthor(s): Marie Boas HallSource: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Mar., 1984), pp.153-158Published by: The Royal SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/531815 .

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153

THE ROYAL SOCIETY IN THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY'S TIME*

BY MARIE BOAS HALL

14 Ball Lane, Tackley, Oxford

IT is very gratifying to have a part to play in this happy and auspicious cen-

tenary occasion which celebrates Thomas Henry Huxley's appointment as President of the Royal Society and at the same time demonstrates the com- memorative sense of recent Councils in nominating his grandson to the same

position at such a suitable time. As I am an historian you will no doubt expect me to give you at least a few

more dates; and as this audience is mainly composed of scientists, I imagine that

you would like to be provided with at least some facts. I shall try to meet these

joint expectations while avoiding excess-for I am all too conscious of my pre- sumption, as a complete outsider to both the Royal Society and the Huxley family, in speaking to you at all about my assigned subject.

To begin with, let me briefly describe the state of the Royal Society as it was in 1846 when Thomas Henry Huxley first encountered some of its Fellows, shortly after his appointment to the Haslar Naval Hospital. His chief, Sir John Richardson, had been a Fellow for 20 years and he introduced the young man of 21 to a number of 'the scientific folks' as Huxley himself called them. They must have been encouraging, a point, you will agree, much in their favour, for in 1849 Huxley, cruising in Australian waters, sent back a

paper on Medusae which was read, printed in Phil. Trans. (not merely abs- tracted in the Proceedings) and was later to be the ground for the bestowal of a Royal Medal (I852). Now the Royal Society itself was just then plunging into a period of intense internal reform, a reform which ultimately effected a major transformation, and one which Huxley both exemplified and, in its later stages, assisted. Some years earlier, in I830 when political and social reform was being painfully introduced in England through Parliamentary action, criticism and agitation had shaken the Royal Society as well. As in England as a whole, the radicals lost and a moderate liberalism secured modest reforms capable of

* Paper read at the Royal Society on 7 July I983 at the commemoration of the centenary of T. H. Huxley's election as President of the Royal Society in I883, together with the remarkable coincidence that oo00 years later one of his grandsons, Sir Andrew Huxley, is President.



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further development. That is, to be more specific, the Royal Society shed many traces of its eighteenth-century being: in the early nineteenth century it was still a cross between a club for intellectuals and a scientific society to which entrance was secured by desire and by patronage, while by 1846 it was pre- dominantly composed of scientific Fellows in fact though not yet in principle (for many doubted still the advisability of excluding potential patrons and

well-wishers). But whether it was to be a government-supported Academy on Continental lines as the radicals wished (a point of view which Huxley as an officer of the Society later specifically repudiated), or whether it should con- tinue to be a totally independent and private body advising the Government when requested but dependent on subscriptions and benefactions for finance; whether its Presidents should be first and foremost men of influence, preferably noblemen, or first and foremost distinguished professional scientists, was open to question. Opinion was so confused that when in 1848 the Society elected as President Lord Rosse, arguably the most distinguished British astronomer since William Herschel, some thought him just another 'noble Lord', while some

deplored that devotion to astronomy which kept him in Ireland in the winter months. (He was in fact to prove an effective Parliamentarian and jealous of Presidential power.)

Now in looking at past reform it is always tempting to assume that whatever is, is right (or in the immortal words of o166 and All That, A Good

Thing) and so, I imagine, those of you who are Fellows will much approve of the decision which made reform at this time and later a matter of restricting the

Fellowship to a limited number of professional scientists, thereby creating the basis of the Royal Society you know today. (So far had this reform gone by Huxley's death in I895 that the Royal Society had shortly afterwards some

difficulty in joining the nascent International Union of Academies, and had to initiate the invention of the British Academy to cover subjects it had once included but had come to exclude rigidly.) By quiet but profound reform the

Royal Society during the almost 5o years of T.H.H.'s association with it

changed more, and more decisively, in character and orientation than it had ever done before or (probably) than it will ever do again.

1847 was the official year of reform, while Huxley was on the Rattlesnake, a dramatic reform, quietly effected, creating a practice so like the modern one that it is difficult to see what the fuss was about. In essence, the Council

officially took over the President's power to nominate the Officers and Council, while the scientific calibre of ordinary Fellows was raised by limiting the number elected in any one year to I5, these to be nominated by the Council each spring for election in June. Further, it was a tacit assumption that



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all candidates should now be possessed of obvious and proven scientific attainments. Thus it was to a reformed and determinedly scientific Royal Society that T.H.H. was elected in 1851. (You will no doubt share my disappointment that a hundred years later the then Council of the Society missed creating a centenary coincidence by four years.) The young Huxley (still only 26, but with the large output for those days of 14 papers published or in press) well realized his good fortune; he wrote proudly, 'Without canvassing a soul or making use of any influence, I have been elected into the Royal Society at a time when that electon is more difficult than it has ever been in the history of the Society'. As it happened, I851 was a very good vintage year: of those elected at the first time of being put up (Io out of IS), there were, besides Huxley himself (the youngest by a couple of years), G. G. Stokes, the future Lord Kelvin, James Paget (surgeon and anatomist), A. W. Hofmann of the Royal College of Chemistry, and Admiral Fitzroy, former captain of the Beagle and about to create the art of weather forecasting. Thus began Huxley's long and close association with this Society.

What was it like to be a Fellow in the I850's? In the first place, the Society was housed in rather cramped rooms in Somerset House, next to the rooms of the Society of Antiquaries. Meetings were held at 8.30 p.m. and consisted of the reading of a paper or papers; afterwards coffee and tea were served (at the President's expense) and the Library was open. (The President was also

expected to provide soirees at his own expense.) Before the meeting some Fellows, including the President, dined together as the Royal Society Club, to which Huxley was to be elected only in 1884; in addition, up to 47 members dined together as the Philosophical Club, to which Huxley was elected in I855: this commemorated the year of reform, and encouraged brief research

reports as well as serious discussions about the Society and its role in the world of science. The social side was important for the opportunity it gave for free discussion. At the meetings themselves discussion was limited; it had been banned in the first half of the century, in direct contrast to the case in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and was only cautiously re-introduced in 1845 'under the direction of... the Chair'. There was no printed programme, but at the end of each meeting the subjects of the papers to be read at the next meeting were announced. Council Meetings (Huxley was first elected to the Council in 1853) were normally held on meeting days at 4 p.m., and between then and dinner the Council discussed routine business, received the reports of the various committees and, finally, sat as the Committee of Papers.

In 1857 the Society was translated from Somerset House to Burlington House. More room, especially for the Library, had long been needed, and now



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the government wanted some of its existing rooms (for tax offices!). And there was strong sentiment for having the various metropolitan chartered societies brought physically closer together. The Royal Society, the natural leader in such matters, was asked to approach the Government. The plan was almost too successful: there was great enthusiasm for a 'Palace of Science', a grandiose project, to be housed on the site of the Great Exhibition. Everyone reacted with horror, as the Royal Academy had already done, South Kensington being regarded as too remote and 'too inconvenient' even by tradesmen (Huxley always thought this to be the case, even later when the School of Mines moved there). The President (Rosse) sucessfully negotiated instead for the central block of Burlington House, with the Chemical and Linnean Societies adjacent, and London University sharing the use of the Great Hall (where T.H.H. delivered the Croonian Lecture in i858, the year after the Society moved). Ten years later the Royal Society was ousted by the Royal Academy, to exist some- what uncomfortably in temporary buildings in the courtyard until it could move in I873 to the purpose-built rooms of the East Wing, which many of you will remember, and other Societies could move in around it.

Meanwhile, Huxley had become more and more involved in the Society's administrative affairs, both officially and unofficially. He served on the Council under four Presidents: I853-55 under the noble astronomers, Lords Rosse and Wrotttesley; I859-6I under the first surgeon to be P.R.S., Sir Benjamin Collins Brodie; and I866-68 under the elderly General Sabine, known for his devotion to the organized study of terrestrial magnetism, who had encouraged Huxley to leave the Navy for a scientific career, but whom Huxley later regarded with distrust as a partisan of Richard Owen and insufficiently appreciative of Darwin. Unofficially, T.H.H. was closely associated with a number of the Society's Officers and members of Council. For in 1863 (while not himself on the Council) he founded the x Club, a private dining group composed of nine friends (there was never the intended tenth) all but one of whom (Herbert Spencer) were not only Fellows, but active in the Society's affairs, furnishing one Treasurer, one Secretary, one Foreign Secretary and three Presidents. The original aim of the Club was merely to allow busy friends to meet; but as they dined between Council and ordinary meetings, they inevitably talked of Royal Society affairs and in some sense acted as a caucus. Public opinion credited the x Club with great influence; Huxley himself later reported overhearing a conversation in the smoking room of the Athenaeum when one scientist asked another what the x Club did, and was told 'Well, they govern scientific affairs, and really, on the whole, they don't do it badly'. Some exaggeration here, but some truth.



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In 1871 Sabine, the last President to serve an indefinite term of office, was

persuaded to retire. According to gossip among the staff, Huxley was in the running to succeed him, to the expressed dismay of some, like Stokes. In the event the Astronomer Royal, Airy, was chosen instead; he agreed to serve for two years only (and provided that the Society assume the expense of the soirees), being succeeded by Huxley's intimate friend Joseph Hooker.

(After this, Presidents served for five years only, by custom, and, also by custom, represented A and B alternately.) By 1872 a new Biological Secretary was needed. As the Assistant Secretary, Walter White, reported, the outgoing Secretary, William Sharpey, sounded out Huxley early in the New Year and found him willing. He had many supporters. White reported that Darwin, who came to the Society's rooms especially to discuss the prospect and promised to support the nomination, Odling (a well-known chemist), George Busk and W. S. Savory (the first a member of the x Club and both successful medical men) all 'express[ed] their full satisfaction', while White himself was

pleased. The only disapproval he noted was that by Dr Beale (physician and

microscopist), who at a soiree at the College of Physicians 'delivered himself of a growl at the prospect of Huxley being Secretary'. Stokes, the Physical Secretary, seems to have accepted him readily as a colleague; both were exceptionally hard-working and conscientious, as the Society's archives demonstrate. As junior Secretary T.H.H. was charged with the supervision of the Society's official publications as well as with biological matters. There was

plenty to do. A particular concern of his arose from the Society's responsibilities for the Challenger expedition (1872-74), an innovative three- year survey of the world's oceans for oceanographic and marine zoological purposes, novel because mounted for mainly biological purposes, not, as

usually earlier, for Admiralty purposes with natural science, however

important, a subsidiary feature, or for physical science alone. The Society was well used to such supervision; the Challenger Committee, on which Huxley sat first as Secretary and later as Fellow, was in charge of all detail including over-

seeing publication of results (50 volumes published over a quarter of a

century!). No wonder that Huxley groaned that the office was too time-

consuming. During Huxley's secretaryship, and while Hooker's successor William

Spottiswoode (mathematician, physicist and business man and member of the x Club) was President, there were two changes in the life of the Society: the first was the introduction of electric lighting to Burlington House in I878 (Spottiswoode paid for two Siemens dynamos-Siemens was himself a

Fellow), and the hour of the meetings was changed in I880 from evening to



afternoon. (Spottiswoode wanted the Fellows to be able to return to their homes by 7 p.m.) The Council Meetings were now to begin at two o'clock; the evening tea and coffee were replaced by afternoon tea, and club dinners were held after the meetings instead of before them, while the meetings themselves began at half past four, as today.

The then unsatisfactory state of England's water supplies was responsible for ending Spottiswoode's Presidential term after less than five years, for he died of typhoid on 27 June 1883. The Council, meeting on 5 July, provided the occasion for today's celebrations by unanimously choosing Huxley as President until November. (Evidently Stokes no longer feared him; they never agreed on politics and religion, but were united in admiring each other's scientific and administrative attainments.) Huxley accepted gladly, but was more doubtful about accepting the nomination in November when this was offered to him. As he told his daughter 'there was more work connected with the

Secretaryship-but there is more trouble and responsibility and distraction in the Presidency'. (Hooker, on the other hand, had found the Presidency a joy, writing 'matters are so ably and quietly conducted by Stokes, Huxley and

Spottiswoode [then Treasurer] that to me they are of the same sort of relaxa- tion that Metaphysics are to Huxley'). Many colleagues, especially among the

younger men, urged Huxley to accept, and hesitantly he did so lest worse

might befall in having the President a mere rich man or, as he declared 'have the noble old Society exploited by enterprising commercial gents who make their profit out of the application of science', and he hoped to be able to try 'to

keep the Royal Society straight'. Once he accepted the idea there was no doubt what the Council would do. He was, of course, duly re-elected in November I883. Sadly, he had little influence as President, since ill-health forced him to

spend the winters out of England, and compelled him to resign in I885. He was succeeded by Stokes, to his great pleasure-although he disapproved of

many of Stokes's private actions.

Huxley continued to uphold publicly what he felt to be the highest professional standards for the Society. In return the Society delighted to honour him: with the Copley Medal in I888 (95 years before his grandson received it) and with the Darwin Medal in 1894. I do not doubt but that his memory will be honoured on other suitable occasions, perhaps even by another like that of today, in the twenty-first or twenty-second century.



the royal society in thomas henry huxley's time

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