Royal Society a compliment to Lord Brouncker, a peer and the first President of the Royal Society. The society's motto, "Nullius in verba", is Latin for "Take nobody's word for it". It was adopted to signify the fellows' determination to establish facts via experiments and comes from Horace's "Epistles", where he compares himself to a gladiator who, having retired, is free from control. The society's core members are the fellows: scientists and engineers from the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth selected based on having made "a substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathematics, engineering science and medical science". Fellows
Terra nullius who claims that in the 15th and 16th century, European writers adopted the "res nullius" concept for territorial conquest. Frost writes: Historians debate whether "first discovery and effective occupation" was applied to territory inhabited by indigenous people that European empires sought to acquire or not. According to Frost: On the other side of the debate are historians which claim that "terra nullius" is a much younger concept, which did not become formalized before the end of the 19th century. Historian Merete Borch writes: These historians claim instead that territorial conquest was justified from natural law — that which has no