SECTION 6. OF THE FUNDS OF THE SOCIETY.
Although the Society is not in a state approaching to poverty, it may be useful to offer a few remarks respecting the distribution of its money.
EXPENSE OF ENGRAVINGS FOR SIR E. HOME'S PAPERS.—The great expense of the engravings which adorn the volumes of the Philosophical Transactions, is not sufficiently known. That many of those engravings are quite essential for the papers they illustrate, and that those papers are fit for the Transactions, I do not doubt; but, some inquiry is necessary, when such large sums are expended. I shall endeavour, therefore, to approximate to the sum these engravings have cost the Royal Society.
Previous to 1810, there are upwards of seventy plates to papers of Sir E. Home's; in many of these, which I have purposely separated, the workmanship is not so minute as in the succeeding ones. Since 1810, there have occurred 187 plates attached to papers of the same author. Many of these have cost from twelve to twenty guineas each plate; but I shall take five pounds as the average cost of the first portion, and twelve as that of the latter. This would produce,
70 X 5 = 350
187 X 12 = 2244
...... ——-...... L2594
As this is only proposed as a rough approximation, let us omit the odd hundreds, and we have two thousand pounds expended in plates only on ONE branch of science, and for one person! Without calling in question the importance of the discoveries contained in those papers, it may be permitted to doubt whether such a large sum might not have been expended in a manner more beneficial to science. Not being myself conversant with those subjects, I can only form an opinion of the value from extraneous circumstances. Had their importance been at all equal to their number, I should have expected to have heard amongst the learned of other countries much more frequent mention of them than I have done, and even the Council of the Royal Society would scarcely have excluded from their Transactions one of those productions which they had paid for as a lecture.
It might also have been more delicate not to have placed on the Council so repeatedly a gentleman, for whose engravings they were annually expending, during the last twenty years, about an hundred pounds. On the other hand, when the Council lent Sir E. Home the whole of those valuable plates to take off impressions for his large work on Comparative Anatomy, of which they constitute almost the whole, it might have been as well not to have obliterated from each plate all indication of the source to which he was indebted for them.
THE PRESIDENT'S DISCOURSES.—I shall mention this circumstance, because it fell under my own observation.
Observing in the annual accounts a charge of 381L 5s. for the President's Speeches, I thought it right to inquire into the nature of this item. Happening to be on the Council the next year, I took an opportunity, at an early meeting of that Council, to ask publicly for an explanation of the following resolution, which stands in the Council-books for Dec. 21, 1828.
"Resolved, That 500 copies of the President's Discourses, about to be printed by Mr. Murray, be purchased by the Society, at the usual trade price."