It is very unlucky for me that I signed the memorial requesting the Council of University College to reconsider their decision about Mrs. Besant and Miss Bradlaugh when I was quite innocent of any possibility of holding the P.R.S.

I must go to the meeting of members to-day and define my position in the matter with more care, under the circumstances.

Mrs. Besant was a student in my teacher’s class here last year, and a very well-conducted lady-like person; but I have never been able to get hold of the “Fruits of Philosophy,” and do not know to what doctrine she has committed herself.

They seem to have excluded Miss Bradlaugh simply on the noscitur a sociis principle.

It will need all the dexterity I possess to stand up for the principle of religious and philosophical freedom, without giving other people a hold for saying I that have identified myself with Bradlaugh.

[It was the same a little later with the Sunday Society, which had offered him its presidency.  He writes to the Honorary Secretary on February 11, 1884:—­]

I regret that it is impossible for me to accept the office which the Sunday Society honours me by offering.

It is not merely a disinclination to add to the work which already falls to my share which leads me to say this.  So long as I am President of the Royal Society, I shall feel bound to abstain from taking any prominent part in public movements as to the propriety of which the opinions of the Fellows of the Society differ widely.

My own opinions on the Sunday question are exactly what they were five-and-twenty years ago.  They have not been hid under a bushel, and I should not have accepted my present office if I had felt that so doing debarred me from reiterating them whenever it may be necessary to do so.

But that is a different matter from taking a step which would, in the eyes of the public, commit the Royal Society, through its President, to one side of the controversy in which you are engaged, and in which I, personally, hope you may succeed as warmly as ever I did.

[One other piece of work during the first half of the year remains to be mentioned, namely, the Rede Lecture, delivered at Cambridge on June 12.  This was a discourse on Evolution, based upon the consideration of the Pearly Nautilus.

He first traced the evolution of the individual from the ovum, and replied to the three usual objections raised to evolution, that it is impossible, immoral, and contrary to the argument of design, by replying to the first, that it does occur in every individual; to the second, that the morality which opposes itself to truth commits suicide; and to the third that Paley—­the most interesting Sunday reading allowed him when a boy—­had long since answered this objection.

Then he proceeded to discuss the evolution of the 100 species, all extinct but two, of Nautilus.  The alternative theory of new construction, a hundred times over, is opposed alike to tradition and to sane science.  On the other hand, evolution, tested by paleontology, proves a sound hypothesis.  The great difficulty of science is in tracing every event to those causes which are in present operation; the hypothesis of evolution is analogous to what is going on now.