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
Mike Sutton (criminologist) to conclude that "even by the turn of the twentieth century errors in earlier measurements were readily apparent without the need to invoke decimal places." In 2014, Sutton published a non-peer reviewed e-book, "Nullius in Verba: Darwin’s Greatest Secret", alleging that Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace plagiarised the theory of natural selection from Scottish grain merchant and arboriculturist Patrick Matthew. Matthew had published "On Naval Timber and Arboriculture" in 1831, twenty-eight years before Darwin's "On the Origin of Species". Darwin biographer James Moore declared it a "non-issue", and said that "I would be extremely surprised if there was any new