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