Dr Fye Smith — and M. Beudant, 135 



sors ; but I feel convinced that if that voluminous class of books 

 commonly called Scriptural Geologies, several of which have 

 issued from the press even since our last anniversary, had 

 been written w^ith the same candour and fairness of spirit as 

 that of Dr Pye Smith, the public mind would have become 

 ere this too enlightened to waste any more of its energies on 

 controversies of this nature. 



The amiable disposition and unaffected piety of Dr Pye 

 Smith secured to him the love and admiration of all who 

 knew him ; and it redounds to the honour of the congrega- 

 tional sect, in which for nearly half a century he held a pro- 

 minent station, that the work I have cited was generally 

 well received ; and when he retired from his academical 

 office, the sum of £3000 was subscribed to provide for him an 

 annuity during his life, and to endow after his death Div^inity 

 scholarships, bearing his name, in the New College now 

 founded in St John's Wood. — Lyell. 



3. M. Beudanty Member of the French Academy of Sciences, 



M. Beudant, a member of the French Institute, and Pro- 

 fessor of Mineralogy in the College of France, is best known 

 to us by his work on the Volcanic Mountains of Hungary, 

 entitled " Voyage Mineralogique et Geologique dans la 

 Hongrie, pendant 1818," published in 1822. It contains an 

 excellent classification of the different varieties of trachyte, 

 perlite, pitchstone, obsidian, and pumice, together with the 

 opals and other silicious minerals. His theory, that the 

 lamination of trachyte and obsidian may have been due to 

 the motion of the mass when in a fluid or semifluid state, has 

 since been very generally adopted. 



Among his early papers we find a memoir read to the Aca- 

 demy of Sciences in 1816, on the possibility of causing fluvia- 

 tile mollusks to live in salt water, and marine mollusks to 

 exist in fresh water. The mixture of marine and fresh water 

 shells observed in a tertiary sandstone, called the Gres de 

 Beauchamp, near Paris, excited his curiosity on this subject, 

 and he enjoyed facilities of making illustrative experiments 

 and observations when appointed Professor in the College at 

 Marseilles, near which the brackish water at the mouths of 



