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How does the Academy of Lagado parody England’s Royal Society?

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Illustration of Lemuel Gulliver lying on the ground, tied down by tiny Lilliputians, with crowds and small buildings in the background, from Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. — Gulliver’s Travels Lemuel Gulliver in Lilliput, illustration from an edition of Jonathan Swift's *Gulliver's Travels*.

In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift uses the Academy of Lagado as a biting travesty of England’s Royal Society. While the real Royal Society was established to promote "Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning," Swift satirizes the institution by depicting its fictional counterpart as a hub for "lunatic savants" engaged in absurd and impractical research.12

The parody functions by highlighting the disconnect between the society's intellectual pretensions and the lack of common sense in its pursuits. Gulliver observes researchers attempting to perform tasks such as reducing human excrement back into its original food, a project that exemplifies the pedantic and useless nature of the Academy’s work. Through these depictions, Swift mocks the 18th-century tendency toward abstract, detached intellectualism, portraying the scholars as imbalanced individuals who ignore practical reality in favor of deranged, speculative experiments. This critique serves as part of the novel's broader effort to satirize the follies and frailties of human institutions and the intellectual culture of Swift's day.13