The Fellowship of the Royal Society is a distinction highly
appreciated by all members of the scientific world. Fifteen men are
annually selected by its council out of some sixty candidates, each
candidate being proposed by six, and usually by more, Fellows in a
certificate containing his qualifications. The candidates themselves
are representatives of a multitude of persons to whom the title would
be not only an honour but a material advantage. The addition of the
letters "F.R.S." to the names of applicants to any post, however
remotely connected with science, is a valuable testimonial and a
recognised aid towards success, so the number of those who desire it
is very large. Experience shows that no special education, other than
self-instruction, is really required to attain this honour. Access to
laboratories, good tuition, and so forth, are doubtless helpful, so
far that many have obtained the distinction through such aid who
could not otherwise have done so, but they are far from being
all-important factors of success. The facts that lie patent before
the eyes of every medical man, engineer, and the members of most
professions, afford ample material for researches that would command
the attention of the scientific world if viewed with intelligence and
combined by a capable mind.
It is so difficult to compare the number of those who might have
succeeded with the number of those who do, that the following
illustration may perhaps be useful: By adding to the 53 registration
counties in England, the 12 in Wales, the 33 in Scotland and the 32
in Ireland, an aggregate of 130 is obtained. The English counties,
and the others in a lesser degree, have to be ransacked in order to
supply the fifteen annually-elected Fellows; so it requires more than
eight of these counties to yield an annual supply of a single Fellow
to the Royal Society.
It is therefore contended that the Fellows of the Royal Society have
sufficient status to be reckoned "noteworthy," and, such being the
case, they are a very convenient body for inquiries like these. They
are trained to, and have sympathy with, scientific investigations;
biographical notices are published of them during their lifetime,
notably in the convenient compendium "Who's Who," to which there will
be frequent occasion to refer; and they are more or less known to one
another, either directly or through friends, making it comparatively
easy to satisfy the occasional doubts which may arise from their
communications. It was easier and statistically safer to limit the
inquiry to those Fellows who were living when the circulars were
issued--that is, to those whose names and addresses appear in the
"Royal Society's Year Book" of 1904. Some of them have since died,
full of honours, having done their duty to their generation; others
have since been elected; so the restriction given here to the term
"Modern Science" must be kept in mind.
Another and a strong motive for selecting the F.R.S. as subjects of
inquiry was that so long ago as 1863-1864 I had investigated the
antecedents of 180 of those who were then living, who were further
distinguished by one or other of certain specified and recognised
honours. My conclusions were briefly described in a Friday evening
lecture, February 27, 1864, before the Royal Institution. These,
together with the data on which they were founded, were published in
the same year in my book "English Men of Science." Readers who desire
fuller information as to the antecedents conducive to success that
are too briefly described further on should refer to the above book.
The epithet "noteworthy" is applied to achievements in all branches
of effort that rank among the members of any profession or calling as
equal, at least, to that which an F.R.S. holds among scientific men.
This affords a convenient and sufficiently definite standard of
merit. I could think of none more appropriate when addressing
scientific men, and it seems to have been generally understood in
the desired sense. It includes more than a half of those whose names
appear in the modern editions of "Who's Who," which are become less
discriminate than the earlier ones. "Noteworthiness" is ascribed,
without exception, to all whose names appear in the "Dictionary of
National Biography," but all of these were dead before the date of
the publication of that work and its supplement. Noteworthiness is
also ascribed to those whose biographies appear in the "Encyclopædia
Britannica" (which includes many who are now alive), and, in other
works, of equivalent authority. As those persons were considered by
editors of the last named publications to be worthy of note, I have
accepted them, on their authority, as noteworthy.