I had intended to have printed a list of those persons to whom the Royal Society had in past years awarded the Copley medals, and the reasons for which they were given; but having applied to the Council for permission to employ an amanuensis, to copy those awards, either from the minutes, or from the volumes of the Philosophical Transactions, I was surprised at receiving a refusal. I confess it appeared to me, that as a whole, those adjudications did us credit, although I doubted the propriety of many individual cases. As, however, the Council seem to have had a different opinion, and as I had made the application through courtesy, I shall decline printing a list, every individual portion of which has been already published in many ways, although the whole has never been printed in a collected form.
Charles Babbage
English Polymath—mathematician, philosopher, inventor and mechanical engineer, father of computers.
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