Neville was one of that Committee, and the popularity of the Club among the soldiers and citizens must have strengthened his hands in the Committee.

Indeed for five months the Rota Club was to be one of the busiest and most attractive institutions in London, yielding more amusement of an intellectual kind than any such meetings as those of the few physicists left in London to be the nucleus of the future Royal Society.

It is worthy of remark that Harrington and the chief Harringtonians looked with contempt on these physical philosophers.

What were _their_ occupations over drugs, water-tubs, and the viscera of frogs, compared with great researches into human nature and plans for the government of states?
Dr.William Petty, who belonged to both bodies, seems to have taken pleasure in troubling the Rota with his doubts and interrogatives.[1] [Footnote 1: Harrington's Works (large folio, 1727), with Toland's Life of Harrington (1699) prefixed; Wood's Ath., III.

1115-1126; Commons Journals, July 6, 1659; Catalogue of the Thomason Pamphlets (for dates), with inspection of first editions of some of Harrington's Pamphlets in the Thomason Collection.] While the Rota was holding its first meetings, the Rump and the Wallingford-House Party were again in deadly quarrel.