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Your very trite and well timed remarks on the constitution of the literary and scientific societies of this metropolis are calculated to draw attention to the root of the evil, under which, not one, but all the old established institutions are subject to and suffering from a direct and progressing atrophy of credit and means.

It is, as you say, in the defective machinery which sets to work so feebly the springs of these societies, that we must look for the cause and effect of their decline. The effect indeed is but too manifest in their utter inability to carry out the principals, which are the declared object and purpose of their formation; and in their lingering existence, the labour of which barely supplies means for its support and sustenance.

For all practicable purposes their existence is but negative; the only evidence of animation which they evince