Two hundred years later …

Friday 16th December 2022

Two hundred years later

As regular followers of the blog will know, the Yorkshire Philosophical Society was founded on 7th December 1822 in the home of James Atkinson on Lendal.  Exactly two hundred years later, on 7th December 2022, members of the Society walked past that house (now the House of the Trembling Madness) to the Mansion House just a few yards further along the street to celebrate this milestone at a Bicentenary Dinner.

For some of the time, like our predecessors in last week’s entry, our minds may have been “intent on other things”:  the delicious food, the grand portraits on the walls or the view through the windows into St Helen’s Square with its Christmas tree and the façade of the church illuminated in a sequence of changing colours, but our after-dinner speaker, Professor Phil Manning, soon brought our attention back to the matter in hand.

As the last “Keeper of Geology” at the Yorkshire Museum, Professor Manning looked back with pride at the aims and achievements of the Society’s founders and of their first Keeper, John Phillips.  He emphasized the important role amateur societies can still play in providing an interdisciplinary approach in an increasingly specialized scientific world, and he laid down a challenge for our next two hundred years: to encourage the young to become involved in science.

How to set about this when we have no President, Secretary or Treasurer and will shortly see our Chair and the leader of our Activities Group step aside for a much deserved rest?  This will be our first task for 2023.

Happy Winter Solstice to all readers of the blog!

Photos: thanks to Paul Thornley & Rosemary Anderton