n Pringle as President of the Royal
Society, Sir Joseph Banks was placed in the chair, in 1778, almost by
acclamation. He had some obvious qualifications for the office, but he
as obviously wanted others. His opulence, his hospitality, and his zeal
for science, were valuable, and are nearly indispensable in the
president of a body which concentrates the chief intellectual force of
the community. But his favourite pursuit, botany, has never deserved the
name of a science, and inevitably bears a character of triviality in the
eyes of the mathematician and the philosopher. The distinction given to
a comparatively young man, known to the world only as a voyager, and a
collector of plants and animals, not unnaturally tended to breed
scoffing among the professors of the severe sciences. The feeling
spread, and the opportunity for its expression was soon found. Dr
Hutton, the mathematical professor at Woolwich, happened to be secretary
for foreign correspondence. His residence at Woolwich was said to
produce some inconvenience in his intercourse with the president; and
the council passed a resolution, in 1783, recommending that "the foreign
secretary should reside in London." The secret history of this
transaction is, that Hutton was one of the mathematical party; though we
cannot distinctly ascertain whether he had actually gone so far as to
sneer at the president. Upon this Hutton resigned the office; to accept
which, the emolument could not have been his object, the salary being
but L.20 a-year--a sum that cannot be mentioned without a sense of
disgrace to a society reckoning among its members some of the wealthiest
men of England.

Hutton's resignation, or rather dismissal, produced an open war in the
society. The mathematicians ranged themselves on the Huttonian side; the
cultivators of natural history, and the cultivators of nothing, ranged
themselves on the side of the president. The mathematicians were headed
by Horsley, afterwards the bishop--a man whom Lord Brougham
characterizes as extremely arrogant, of violent temper, and intoxicated
with an extravagant sense of his own scientific merits, which his noble
biographer pronounces to be altogether insignificant, heading this
charge with the unkindest cut of all, namely, that he was "a priest."
Horsley was certainly no great mathematician, as his publication of the
_Principia_ unluckily shows; but the picture is high coloured, which
represents him as a hot-tempered, lou