The British Association for the Advancement of Science was founded in 1831 with the following objectives: ‘to give a stronger impulse and more systematic direction to scientific inquiry; to obtain a greater degree of national attention to the objects of science, and a removal of those disadvantages which impede its progress; and to promote the intercourse of the cultivators of science with one another, and with foreign philosophers’. The venue for the annual meeting is a different town each year, disseminating the results of scientific research, including that funded by the Association, and the President, selected at each meeting, holds office until the end of the next meeting. Several early Presidents were major landowners near their meeting’s venue, so Prince Albert, the Prince Consort, was a natural choice to preside over the 1859 meeting in Aberdeen, fifty miles from the Royal estate of Balmoral. A Fellow of the Royal Society since 1840, he had shown an interest in the work of the Association, attending their annual meetings in 1846 in Southampton and in 1851 in Ipswich, when he is said to have attended five sessions between 11.30 and 2.30 on one day. In his Address to the meeting in 1859 he took the opportunity of ‘testifying …that your labours are not unappreciated by your Sovereign’. A similar message was conveyed in a message from King George V to the B.A.A.S. meeting in Oxford in 1926, read as part of his Presidential Address by Edward, then Prince of Wales.