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
Res nullius control of an unclaimed territory by occupying it. This "terra nullius" principle was used to justify colonization of much of the world, as exemplified in the competition for influence within Africa by the European powers (see Scramble for Africa). The concept was applied even where there were indigenous peoples residing in what Europeans considered newly discovered land, as in Australia. Res nullius Res nullius (lit: "nobody's thing") is a Latin term derived from private Roman law whereby "res" (an object in the legal sense, anything that can be owned, even a slave, but not a subject in law such as