Chapter 2

The Fellowship of the Royal Society is a distinction highly appreciated by all members of the scientific world. Fifteen men are annually selected by its council out of some sixty candidates, each candidate being proposed by six, and usually by more, Fellows in a certificate containing his qualifications. The candidates themselves are representatives of a multitude of persons to whom the title would be not only an honour but a material advantage. The addition of the letters "F.R.S." to the names of applicants to any post, however remotely connected with science, is a valuable testimonial and a recognised aid towards success, so the number of those who desire it is very large. Experience shows that no special education, other than self-instruction, is really required to attain this honour. Access to laboratories, good tuition, and so forth, are doubtless helpful, so far that many have obtained the distinction through such aid who could not otherwise have done so, but they are far from being all-important factors of success. The facts that lie patent before the eyes of every medical man, engineer, and the members of most professions, afford ample material for researches that would command the attention of the scientific world if viewed with intelligence and combined by a capable mind.

It is so difficult to compare the number of those who might have succeeded with the number of those who do, that the following illustration may perhaps be useful: By adding to the 53 registration counties in England, the 12 in Wales, the 33 in Scotland and the 32 in Ireland, an aggregate of 130 is obtained. The English counties, and the others in a lesser degree, have to be ransacked in order to supply the fifteen annually-elected Fellows; so it requires more than eight of these counties to yield an annual supply of a single Fellow to the Royal Society.

It is therefore contended that the Fellows of the Royal Society have sufficient status to be reckoned "noteworthy," and, such being the case, they are a very convenient body for inquiries like these. They are trained to, and have sympathy with, scientific investigations; biographical notices are published of them during their lifetime, notably in the convenient compendium "Who's Who," to which there will be frequent occasion to refer; and they are more or less known to one another, either directly or through friends, making it comparatively easy to satisfy the occasional doubts which may arise from their communications. It was easier and statistically safer to limit the inquiry to those Fellows who were living when the circulars were issued--that is, to those whose names and addresses appear in the "Royal Society's Year Book" of 1904. Some of them have since died, full of honours, having done their duty to their generation; others have since been elected; so the restriction given here to the term "Modern Science" must be kept in mind.

Another and a strong motive for selecting the F.R.S. as subjects of inquiry was that so long ago as 1863-1864 I had investigated the antecedents of 180 of those who were then living, who were further distinguished by one or other of certain specified and recognised honours. My conclusions were briefly described in a Friday evening lecture, February 27, 1864, before the Royal Institution. These, together with the data on which they were founded, were published in the same year in my book "English Men of Science." Readers who desire fuller information as to the antecedents conducive to success that are too briefly described further on should refer to the above book.

The epithet "noteworthy" is applied to achievements in all branches of effort that rank among the members of any profession or calling as equal, at least, to that which an F.R.S. holds among scientific men. This affords a convenient and sufficiently definite standard of merit. I could think of none more appropriate when addressing scientific men, and it seems to have been generally understood in the desired sense. It includes more than a half of those whose names appear in the modern editions of "Who's Who," which are become less discriminate than the earlier ones. "Noteworthiness" is ascribed, without exception, to all whose names appear in the "Dictionary of National Biography," but all of these were dead before the date of the publication of that work and its supplement. Noteworthiness is also ascribed to those whose biographies appear in the "Encyclopædia Britannica" (which includes many who are now alive), and, in other works, of equivalent authority. As those persons were considered by editors of the last named publications to be worthy of note, I have accepted them, on their authority, as noteworthy.