Ward's record is evidence of the existence of the Royal Society Club, in 1709, before the date of the Minutes. Dr. Hutton, too, records the designation of Halley's Club--undoubted testimony; about 1737, he, Halley, though seized with paralysis, once a week, within a very short time of his death, met his friends in town, on Thursdays, the day of the Royal Society's meeting, at "Dr. Halley's Club." Upon this evidence Admiral Smyth establishes the claim that the Royal Society Club was actually established by a zealous philosopher, "who was at once proudly eminent as an astronomer, a mathematician, a physiologist, a naturalist, a scholar, an antiquary, a poet, a meteorologist, a geographer, a navigator, a nautical surveyor, and a truly social member of the community--in a word, our founder was the illustrious Halley--the Admirable Crichton of science."
A memorable dinner-party took place on August the 11th, 1859, when among the visitors was Mr. Thomas Maclear (now Sir Thomas), the Astronomer-Royal at the Cape of Good Hope, who had just arrived in England from the southern hemisphere, after an absence of a quarter of a century. "On this day, were present, so to speak, the representatives of the three great applications by which the present age is distinguished, namely, of _Railways_, Mr. Stephenson; of the _Electric Telegraph_, Mr. Wheatstone; and of the _Penny Post_, Mr. Rowland Hill--an assemblage never again to occur." (_Admiral Smyth's History of the Club._)
Among the anecdotes which float about, it is related that the eccentric Hon. Henry Cavendish, "the Club-Croesus", attended the meetings with only money enough in his pocket to pay for his dinner, and that he may have declined taking tavern-soup, may have picked his teeth with a fork, may invariably have hung his hat on the same peg, and may have always stuck his cane in his right boot; but more apocryphal is the anecdote that one evening Cavendish observed a very pretty girl looking out from an upper window on the opposite side of the street, watching the philosophers at dinner. She attracted notice, and one by one they got up and mustered round the window to admire the fair one. Cavendish, who thought they were looking at the moon, bustled up to them in his odd way, and when he saw the real object of their study, turned away with intense disgust, and grunted out "Pshaw;" the amorous conduct of his brother Philosophers having horrified the woman-hating Cavendish.