mixture of tides,
    The good with the evil, the blessing and bane,
    The Amazon rushing far into the main,
    Until, from this skill’d combination of notes,
    Bound earth to the heavens His overture floats!”

CHAPTER XXVII.

F.R.S.

A page or two about my connection with the Royal Society may have some small interest.  When my father (who had long been a Fellow) died in 1844, I wished to give to the Society his marble bust by Behnes as a memorial of honour to him; but my mother preferred to keep it, as was natural.  Meanwhile, however, some of my father’s friends, and in particular his old patron, Lord Melbourne, then recently elected, put me up as a candidate, and as I find recorded in my Archive-book, vol. ii., my certificate “was signed by Argyll, Bristol, Henry Hallam, Thomas Brande, Dr. Paris, P.B.C.S., Sir C.M.  Clarke, and Sir Benjamin Brodie:  in due time I was elected, and on the 8th of May 1845 was admitted by Lord Northampton.”  At my election occurred this very strange and characteristic incident.  There was only one ball against me among twenty-seven for me in the ballot-box; the meetings were then held at Somerset House, the Society on a less numerous scale than at present, and the elections easier and more frequent.  When the President announced the result, up jumped Lord Melbourne, begging pardon for his mistake in having dropped his ball into the wrong hole!—­an amusing instance of the laissez-faire carelessness habitual to that good-humoured Minister.

As I have now been more than forty years a Fellow, I ought to be ashamed to confess that I never contributed a Paper to its learned Proceedings; all of which as they come to me I give appropriately enough to the famous Wotton Library, belonging to my excellent friend Evelyn, heir and successor to the celebrated John Evelyn of the Sylva, one of the Society’s founders.  That I have seldom even read them is also a pitiful truth; for the mysterious nomenclature of modern chemistry, the incomprehensibility (to my ignorance) of the higher mathematics, the hopeless profundity of treatises on the tides, dynamics, electricity, and microscopic anatomicals, are, I am free to avow, worse to me than “heathen Greek,” nay (for I can in some sort tackle that), more difficult than the clay tablets of Assyria or a papyrus of Rameses II.  So I must confess to being an idle drone among the working bees.

Only thrice have I ventured to ask questions of consequence, scarcely yet answered by the pundits.  One regards Spectrum Analysis:  How can we be sure that the lines indicative of gases and other elements are not mainly due to the emanations from our own globe, swathed as it is by more than forty miles of an atmosphere impregnated by its own salts and acids in aerial solution?  May we not be deducing false conclusions as to the varying lights of stars and nebulae, if all the while to our vision they are as it were clouded by our own smoke?  Telescopes have to pierce so thick a stratum of earth’s aura and ether that it is expectable they, would show us only our own composites in those of other worlds.  The spectra are varied, I know, but so may be our wrappings of atmosphere from one night to another.  Let this ignorant query suffice about Dr. Huggins’ great discovery.