May 23, 1859.] OBITUARY.— THE EARL OF RIPON— WARBURTON. , 24j5 



.led to the emancipation of tlie Catholics, the abolition of the Slave 

 Trade, the repeal of the Corn Laws and of the Test and Corporation 

 Acts, and even to the Eeform Bill itself — to one and all of these 

 national enactments he gave his steady support. He was, indeed, 

 mainly instrumental in propounding one of those great questions — 

 a change of the Corn Laws — to the House of Commons, and finally 

 he carried another (the Abolition of Slavery) through the House of 

 Peers. 



Of our first President let me also say, that in the last years of his 

 life he was specially exempt from that failing — the passion for 

 worldly distinctions — which, usually increasing with advancing 

 years, has of late prodigiously increased. For although he might 

 surely have obtained the honourable distinction of a broad riband 

 at the hands of his Sovereign for his long public services, he never 

 sought it, but lived on unostentatiously and happily in the bosom 

 of his attached family, and surrounded by friends who best knew 

 how to appreciate his private worth and public virtue. 



Warburton. — In the decease of Mr. Henry Warburton I have 

 lost one of my earliest geological friends, to whom I was indebted 

 for much sound advice and assistance when I first wielded the 

 hammer of the geologist, and became an author. 



Mr. Warburton, who had received a good classical and mathe- 

 matical education at Cambridge, where he was distinguished, de- 

 voted himself much to the pursuits of physical science. At the 

 early age of twenty-four, and in the year 1809, he became a member 

 of the Royal Society. Joining the Geological Society in 1803, or 

 soon after its foundation, we find that in the year 1814 he was 

 already one of its secretaries, his friend WoUaston being then also 

 upon the Council, and in 1816 he became a Vice-President of the same 

 body. When the Geological Society acquired a Eoyal Charter, the 

 name of Henry Warburton was associated with the names of William 

 Buckland and George Bellas Greenough in the deed of incorporation. 

 The progress and welfare of that Society were, indeed, ever dear 

 to Mr. Warburton ; and although his name appears rarely in the 

 Geological Transactions (his principal memoir being on the Bag- 

 shot Sands),* I can appeal to all his surviving geological contempo- 

 raries for a confirmation of the fact, that his literary labours were un- 

 ceasing, whether in drawing up those rules and regulations where- 

 by the rising Society was held together, or in assiduously preparing 



* Transactions of the Geological Society, vol. 1., 2nd series, p. 48. 



