THE ROYAL GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY.
The Geographical Society has had its share in those graceful attentions which Prince Albert so willingly pays to all institutions for promoting art, literature, and science. His Royal Highness, who is Vice-Patron et the Society, attended its last meeting. The members were edified and gratified by the interest he evinced in the reports of recent discovery in the Himalaya and the interior of South Africa. But a matter of more importance for the general public was the intimation made by the Pre- sident, in the course of the evening, that he had reason to believe the Prince, as their Patron, would support a petition to the Queen for a grant of apartments to the Society. Sir Roderick Murchison pledged himself and his colleagues, in the event of such a favour being conferred upon them, to show their sense of it by affording the public "a good and useful map-office." This is a fair offer of a quid pro quo. The Society already possesses an extensive and complete collection of maps, includ- ing the results of the official surveys, by land and sea, of our own and every civilized government. The untiring zeal of the Society in adding to its stores is vouched by the extensive additions it has been instrumental in making to the knowledge of Turkish, Persian, African, and Australian geography. Much has been effected by the Society's own efforts ; much by the emulation it has excited among foreigners ; much by the publicity it has been instrumental in giving to discoveries that might otherwise have been left to slumber in the archives of our Foreign and Colonial departments and the Admiralty. The antecedents of the So- ciety prove that it deserves the confidence of the public ; and the numbers of its associates, and consequently its funds, are rapidly increasing. The boon of apartments at the public expense to such an institution would be amply repaid by the readier access to its rich and ample store of maps afforded to the public ; access which has ever been moat liberally open to all, so far as the inconvenient house accommodation with which the Society has been obliged to content itself, in order to leave its means fret for the promotion of geographical discovery, has permitted.
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