126 
HISTORY OF THE 
[1850-60 
In fact, the whole process of removing a Fellow’s name from the 
list on account of failure to pay his dues was then a much more 
formidable affair than at present. Failing to get any satisfaction 
at a personal visit, the Treasurer was obliged to recommend 
expulsion, a ceremony carried out with the utmost publicity at a 
Special General Meeting called for the express purpose. Nowadays 
the Council is more charitable, and recognising that a failure to 
pay may be due more to misfortune than to malice, allows the 
name to disappear quietly from the roll without publicity. 
The remaining years of our decade call for little notice. Bishop 
served the usual two years as President without ever once taking 
the chair owing to ill-health, and was replaced in 1859 by the 
Rev. Robert Main, who in the following year succeeded Johnson as 
Radcliffe Observer. Among new members of Council we may note 
A. Cayley, the famous algebraist, and A. R. Clarke, the geodesist. 
Admiral Smyth, the author of A Cycle of Celestial Objects, returned 
once more to the Council which he had served so well in previous 
years. 
During the whole period the two publications of the Society, 
the Memoirs and the Monthly Notices, grew in size and importance, 
and may justly be said to have contained almost everything of 
any permanent value in astronomy that was published in Great 
Britain. An old dispute, even in recent years not quite dead, as 
to the relative position as regards publications of scientific papers 
between the Royal Society on the one hand and the specialised 
Societies on the other, arose somewhat acutely at this time. 
The story of Sir Joseph Banks and his jealousy at the founding of 
the Astronomical and other societies has already been told in an 
earlier section of this history. Long after his time it was, however, 
still held by many claimants on behalf of the premier society that 
they had an absolute right to the publication of all scientific 
memoirs of the first order of importance, and that the others could 
only claim either work of second-rate merit or, if they cared to do 
so, might produce abstracts of work already issued by the Royal 
Society. It need hardly be pointed out that no question of claim 
or right arises. Anybody is entitled to send his papers to any 
Society of which he is a Fellow, failing that, he must get a Fellow 
to present it on his behalf, and the choice as to which Society he 
selects rests exclusively with him. It has never been seriously 
proposed, though we do not doubt that many of the out-and-out 
upholders of the extreme claims of the Royal Society would have 
supported it, that the Council of a Society such as the Astronomical 
should, if they judge a paper to be of sufficient merit, pass it on 
to the Royal Society for publication. No upper limit has ever 
been set, or could conceivably ever have been set, to the quality