Notes

Abstract

EARLY in this year a petition praying for the incorporation of a British Academy for the Promotion of Historical, Philosophical and Philological Studies was presented to the King, and referred to a committee of the Privy Council. Acting upon the advice of this committee, His Majesty has granted the Academy a Royal Charter. The Charter has not yet been pub lished, but according to the Times it states that the Academy aims at “the promotion of the study of moral and political sciences, including history, philosophy, law, politics and economics, archæology and philology.” The forty-nine first fellows of the British Academy include leading representatives of many branches of scholarship, but not of poetry or fiction or other departments of pure literature. The Academy will be an independent body, with a separate organisation of its own; and it will not have any closer relationship to the Royal Society than has the Royal Academy of Arts. Our institutions for the advancement of learning and the development of intellectual activity will not, therefore, be coordinated in the way they are in France and several other countries.