Passages from the Life of a Philosopher

CHAPTER XIII. RECOLLECTIONS OF WOLLASTON, DAVY, AND ROGERS.

IN 1826, one of the secretaryships of the Royal Society became vacant. Dr. Wollaston and several others of the leading members of the Society and of the Council wished that I should be appointed. This would have been the more agreeable to me, because my early friend Herschel was at that time the senior Secretary.

This arrangement was agreed to by Sir H. Davy, and I left town with the full assurance that I was to have the appointment. In the mean time Sir H. Davy summoned a Council at an unusual hour—eight o’clock in the evening—for a special purpose, namely, some arrangement about the Treasurer’s accounts.

After the business relating to the Treasurer was got through, Sir H. Davy observed that there was a secretaryship vacant, and he proposed to fill it up.

Dr. Wollaston then asked Sir Humphry Davy if he claimed the nomination as a right of the President, to which {187} Sir H. Davy replied that he did, and then nominated Mr. Children. The President, as president, has no such right; and even if he had possessed it, he had promised Mr. Herschel that I should be his colleague. There were upright and eminent men on that council; yet no one of them had the moral courage to oppose the President’s dictation, or afterwards to set it aside on the ground of its irregularity.

A few years after, whilst I was on a visit at Wimbledon Park, Dr. and Mrs. Somerville came down to spend the day. Dr. Somerville mentioned a very pleasant dinner he had had with the late Mr. John Murray of Albemarle Street, and also a conversation relating to my book “On the Decline of Science in England.” Mr. Murray felt hurt at a remark I had made on himself (page 107) whilst criticizing a then unexplained job of Sir Humphry Davy’s. Dr. Somerville assured Mr. Murray that he knew me intimately, and that if I were convinced that I had done him an injustice, nobody would be more ready to repair it. A few days after, Mr. Murray put into Dr. Somerville’s hands papers explaining the whole of the transaction. These papers were now transferred to me. On examining them I found ample proof of what I had always suspected. The ob­ser­va­tion I had made which pained Mr. Murray fell to the ground as soon as the real facts were known, and I offered to retract it in any suitable manner. One plan I proposed was to print a supplemental page, and have it bound up with all the remaining copies of the “Decline of Science.”

Mr. Murray was satisfied with my explanation, but did not wish me to take the course I proposed, at least, not at that time. Various objections may have presented themselves to his mind, but the affair was adjourned with the understanding that at some future time I should explain the real state of {188} the facts which had led to this misinterpretation of Mr. Murray’s conduct.

The true history of the affair was this: Being on the Council of the Royal Society in 1827, I observed in our accounts a charge of 381 l. 5 s. as paid to Mr. Murray for 500 copies of Sir Humphry Davy’s Discourses.

I asked publicly at the Council for an explanation of this item. The answer given by Dr. Young and others was—

“That the Council had agreed to purchase these volumes at that price, in order to induce Mr. Murray to print the President’s speeches.”

To this I replied that such an explanation was entirely inadmissible. I then showed that even allowing a very high price for composing, printing, and paper, if the Council had wished to print 500 copies of those Discourses they could have done it themselves for 150 l. at the outside. I could not extract a single word to elucidate this mystery, about which, however, I had my own ideas.

It appeared by the papers put into my hands that Sir Humphry Davy had applied to Mr. Murray, and had sold him the copyright of the Discourses for 500 guineas, one of the conditions being that the Royal Society should purchase of him 500 copies at the trade price.

Mr. Murray paid Sir H. Davy the 500 guineas in three bills at six, twelve, and eighteen months. These bills passed through Drummond’s (Sir H. Davy’s banker), and I have had them in my own hands for examination.

Thus it appears that Mr. Murray treated the whole affair as a matter of business, and acted in this purchase in his usual liberal manner. I have had in my hand a statement of the winding-up of that account copied from Mr. Murray’s books, and I find that he was a considerable loser by his {189} purchase. Sir H. Davy, on the other hand, contrived to transfer between three and four hundred pounds from the funds of the Royal Society into his own pocket.35

It was my determination to have called for an explanation of this affair at the election of our President and officers at our anniversary on the 30th November if Sir H. Davy had been again proposed as President in 1827.