Abstract
AT a meeting of the Royal Society of South Africa on June 20, Mr. L. Crawford read a paper on the South African Literary and Scientific Institution (1833-1857). The South African Literary Society was started in 1824John Fairbairn and Thomas Pringle were two of its sponsors, but it encountered the hostility of the Governor, Lord Charles Somerset. He refused to grant it a licence and the project was dropped until 1829. The Society then began to hold meetings, papers were read and prizes offered for essays, one of these being limited to students of the South African College, founded in the same year. The South African Institution was founded also in 1829 on the same lines, and in 1832 the two societies amalgamated, becoming the South African Literary and Scientific Institution. Reports of the meetings and papers read appeared in the South African Quarterly Journal, but in 1835 that Journal came to an end and information about the later history of the Institution is difficult to find. The Institutions own minute books, etc., have disappeared. In 1834, Sir John Herschel arrived in South Africa. He was a strong supporter of the Institution during the four years he was therefor nearly three years he was president. He specially pressed the claims of meteorology on the Institution. In 1836 the Cape Almanac speaks of the rooms of the Institution and its Museum. After 1838 it is certain the Institution declined, so much that in 1850 John Fairbairn suggested in the Commercial Advertiser that a new Institution be formed and for permanence should be attached to the public library. This appeal met with no response. The Institution disappeared from the list of societies in the Almanac and Annual Register in 1858, so it may be taken that it came to an end in 1857, but from the first annual report of the South African Museum in 1856 it is learned that, in the previous year, what was left of its collections, books, etc., had been handed over to the Museum.
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Scientific Institutions in South Africa. Nature 134, 352 (1934). https://doi.org/10.1038/134352a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/134352a0