Geological Society, 55 



The concluding part of the third volume of our Transactions is in 

 the press, and the recent arrangements of the Council induce me to 

 hope that not this part only, but also the first part of the fourth vo- 

 lume will be ready for delivery in the course of the present year. 



The number of our Fellows has received an addition of forty-two 

 and a diminution often j of those whom we have lost, three only are 

 known to me as Contributors to the Transactions or as Geological 

 Authors. 



To the liberality of Mr. Matthew Culley, the chief of a family 

 greatly celebrated for the practical improvements they have intro- 

 duced into agriculture, our Museum is indebted for a large series 

 of primitive rocks collected in the remoter parts of Sutherland- 

 shire, as also for some fine specimens of the fossil fishes which occur 

 at Banniskirk, situated eight miles south of Thurso in Caithness. 

 The geological relations of these last have been since investigated 

 by Mr. Murchison and Professor Sedgwick, and their zoological 

 characters determined by M. Agassiz*. Mr. Culley also transmitted 

 to us an account of the prodigious power occasionally exerted by 

 rivulets when swoln by heavy rain. 



Major James Franklin was a younger brother of Captain Sir John 

 Franklin, R.N. ; he commenced the survey of Bundelcund in India 

 in 1813, and continued it during four years, after which he joined 

 the army in the field, under the Marquis of Hastings. In December 

 1818, Captain Franklin returned to the duties of his survey, and 

 shortly afterwards was promoted to the rank of Assistant Quarter- 

 Master General. In 1820, he commenced at Calcutta the construc- 

 tion of his maps. He afterwards made a careful survey of Sincapore 

 and the adjacent strait. Having repaired to England in 1823 for 

 the benefit of his health, he soon learned by communication with 

 members of this Society, how much the value of his surveys would 

 have been enhanced by geological descriptions. On his return to 

 India in 1826, his first care was to supply this desideratum : he 

 solicited, though unsuccessfully, the appointment of Geologist to 

 the trigonometrical survey then carrying on in India, and strenu- 

 ously recommended that all officers employed on that service should 

 be qualified and encouraged to collect materials for the construc- 

 tion of a geological map of the entire Peninsula. Declining health 

 brought him again to England in 1829, where he remained till 

 his death, which took place in the summer of last year. He trans- 

 mitted to us a paper on the geology of a portion of Bundelcund f 

 and other districts in Central India; and to the Asiatic Society of 

 Bengal a description of the Diamond Mines of Panna, published in 

 the Transactions of the respective Societies. Among his MSS. 

 have been found Observations on several Iron Mines, and on the 

 mode in which the ore extracted from them is manufactured in 

 Central India, together with an account of different beds of coal 

 in that country. 



* Proceedings of the Society, May 1829. 



t Transactions of the Geological Society, 2nd Series, vol. iii. Part I. 



