The Royal Society, the full title of which is The Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natural Knowledge, has its anniversary meeting and dinner on St. Andrew’s Day. The health of the medallists of the year 1907 was given from the chair by Lord Rayleigh, and they replied one by one to the toast. Professor Michelsen, of Chicago, received what is considered the greatest honour the society has to bestow—the Copley Medal (founded more than two hundred years ago) for his researches on light. He related in his speech how he had tried to interest a wealthy business man in the experiments going on in his laboratory, in the hope that his friend might be moved to give pecuniary aid for the provision of new apparatus. One by one, he showed his delicate instruments and explained their uses; no impression was produced. At last he explained how the bright lines of the spectrum of flame, coloured by incandescent elements (such as theatre-goers know as red fire, green fire, blue fire, &c.), can be recognised by means of the spectroscope in the light of the sun—proving the presence of the metals and other elements of this earth in that remote body. He especially explained and showed his friend the experiments by which sodium, the metal of which caustic soda is the “rust,” is thus proved to be present in the sun. At last his friend spoke. He said: “Who the —— cares if there is sodium in the sun?” Professor Michelsen did not tell the fellows of the Royal Society how he replied to that abrupt inquiry.

A more encouraging speech was that of Lord Fitzmaurice, the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, who replied to the toast of the guests. He declared, in so many words, “It is every day becoming more and more certain that science is the master.” He said that in his own business as a diplomatist he found that the chief matters which he had to discuss and decide depended on scientific knowledge and the information and guidance given to him and his colleagues by scientific men. In the beginning of the eighteenth century the British Government had sent a bishop and a poet to negotiate the Treaty of Utrecht. But neither would be of any use in modern diplomacy. What they always had to seek at the present day was the aid of the scientific departments of the Navy or the Army, or of the Royal Society. Such matters as the relative merits of a Channel tunnel or a Channel ferry, the limitations of territory by land, by sea, or above the land in the air, the international agreements as to measures for checking the spread of disease or of insect pests, and, indeed, most matters which had come before him since he had been in office, had to be decided by the scientific experts. He did not propose that diplomatists should at once vacate their posts and endeavour to secure the occupation of them by men of science, but he thought that at no distant date such a course would be considered not only reasonable, but necessary!