On the resignation of Sir John 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, loud-tongued, bustling personage--a sort of bravo of science and theology, who took up the first opinion which occurred to him, scorned to rectify it by any after-thought, and plunged from one absurdity into another, for the sake of consistency. The eloquence of his attacks upon the chair, of whose possession he was supposed to be foolishly ambitious, was vaunted a good deal by his partisans. But, as the only evidence of his rhetoric in these squabbles ever quoted, is one sentence, it is like the pretension to wit on the strength of a single pun, and may be easily cast aside. This boasted sentence was uttered, in threatening the secession of the mathematical party. "The president will then be left with his train of feeble amateurs, and that toy (the mace) upon the table--the ghost of the Society in which Philosophy once reigned, and Newton officiated as her minister."