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 and when the "terra nullius" concepts were used. The debate has been especially prevalent in Australia where it was ignited by the history wars caused by the Mabo case in 1992. The history wars caused Australian historians to reevaluate the country's history, the dispossession of Aborigines and whether the land should best be characterized as having been "settled" or "conquered". A part of this debate concerned whether "terra nullius" as a concept was ever used by England and other European powers to justify territorial conquest. On one side of the debate are historians such as Alan Frost and Henry Reynolds