did not mention that they wanted their money back). On 3 January 1894, The New Zealand Herald printed a rebuttal by the former embezzler and writer Joseph Ostler (1827–1905), alias C. Frusher Howard F.S.Sc. He was referring to similar comments which had been printed in London Truth and the Herald. He had joined in 1885, and considered it a "worthy and useful institution." He said that its headquarters at Addison House, Kensington, was a large house containing a library, museum and lecture hall. He expounded on the aims and doings of the Society, the quality of the members and their satisfaction in supporting the Society financially, themselves. He also complained of "scandalous misrepresention." Those who declined Fellowship Lorimer Fison was president of the anthropological section of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, and he received an offer of Fellowship from the Society which he declined. Exposé On 21 August 1892, Henry Labouchère published an article in the investigative journal, Truth, exposing the Society as a fraud. The Hon. Secretary of the Society, Dr Edward Albert Sturman, M.A., F.R.S.L. had been following the example of a 20-year contemporaneous swindling operation entitled the International Society of Literature, Science and Art, known as the International, a hollow money-making venture in which the novelist Sir Gilbert Campbell was used as bait. William James Morgan, William Tolmie and others were tried and imprisoned for deception and fraud. The International and the SSLA were not rivals: while his swindle was still functioning Tomie has written to Sturman in friendship, saying, "There is plenty of room for both of us, and though we work on somewhat similar lines, they need not be opposing ones." According to Labouchère, Dr Sturman explained that his M.A. was an honorary degree from the University of Washington, and that he was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Even if this were true, it gives no evidence of a doctorate. According to Sturman, the Society had been established in 1882 with three other members: Goold, a Miss Button who had since died, and Rev. Irvine Coates. Sturman said that in 1892 the Society consisted of "1,500 men and women interested in learning and education" but that they were reluctant to continue to pay their guineas for membership, and that he "got as many as we can get out of them." From the Society's income, Sturman in