disposal of Sir
Godfrey Copley's medal; an office I have undertaken at their request, and
with the greater satisfaction, as I am confident you will be no less
unanimous in giving your approbation, than they have been in addressing
you for it upon this occasion. For though they were not insensible of the
just title that several of the Papers, composing the present volume of
your Transactions, had to your particular notice, yet they did not
hesitate in preferring that which I presented to you from Captain Cook,
giving An account of the method he had taken to preserve the health of
the crew of his Majesty's ship the Resolution during her late voyage
round the world*. Indeed I imagine that the name alone of so worthy a
member of this society would have inclined you to depart from the
strictness of your rules, by conferring upon him that honour, though you
had received no direct communication from him; considering how
meritorious in your eyes that person must appear, who hath not only made
the most extensive, but the most instructive voyages; who hath not only
discovered, but surveyed, vast tracts of new coasts; who hath dispelled
the illusion of a terra australis incognita, and fixed the bounds of the
habitable earth, as well as those of the navigable ocean, in the southern
hemisphere.

[* The paper itself, read at the Society in March last, with an extract
of a letter from Captain Cook to the President, dated Plymouth, the 7th
of July following, are both subjoined to this discourse.]

I shall not, however, expatiate on that ample field of praise, but
confine my discourse to what was the intention of this honorary premium,
namely, to crown that Paper of the year which should contain the most
useful and most successful experimental inquiry. Now what inquiry can be
so useful as that which hath for its object the saving the lives of men?
And when shall we find one more successful than that before us? Here are
no vain boastings of the empiric, nor ingenious and delusive theories of
the dogmatist; but a concise, an artless, and an incontested relation of
the means, by which, under the Divine favour, Captain Cook, with a
company of an hundred and eighteen men*, performed a voyage of three
years and eighteen days, throughout all the climates, from fifty-two
degrees north, to seventy-one degrees south, with the loss of only one
man by a distemper**. What must enhance to us the value of these salutary
observations, is to see the pr