150 Royal Society. 



self, until within a few days of his death, with almost unexampled 

 industry, to those pursuits which had formed, throughout his whole 

 life, the means by which he sought to benefit his countiymen and 

 mankind. 



Mr. William Blane was the author of a paper in our Transac- 

 tions, written fifty years ago, on the production and preparation of 

 Borax, which is brought from Jumlat in Thibet, over the Himalaya 

 mountains into Hindostan. 



Dr. David Hosack, of New York, was the author of a paper in 

 our Transactions, published in the year 1794. It related to the ex- 

 planation of the power which is possessed by the eye of adapting 

 itself to different distances, which he attributed to the action of the 

 external muscles of the eye, and not to the dilatation and contraction 

 of the iris, nor to the muscularity of the crystalline lens, by which its 

 convexity could be increased or diminished, a doctrine which had 

 been promulgated in a paper by Dr. Thomas Young, in the preced- 

 ing year. This subject is one of great interest, and has been very 

 frequently agitated ; and though an illustrious foreigner, M. Arago, 

 has recently defended the theory of Dr. Young with great ingenuity 

 and warmth, yet physiologists and anatomists are by no means agreed 

 on the adoption of this or any other single explanation. 



Mr. John Bell was Senior Wrangler at Cambridge in 1786, and 

 a Fellow of Trinity College. Though labouring under physical dis- 

 advantages of no ordinary kind, and such as were apparently the 

 most adverse to success in the public exercise of his profession as a 

 lawyer, yet he conquered every difficulty and reached the highest 

 eminence by his great acuteness and strength of mind, his extensive 

 legal knowledge, and, not a little, likewise, by his sturdy integrity and 

 love of truth, which he respected, — a rare virtue — , even in advocating 

 the claims of a client. Mr. Bell, with an uncommon exercise of 

 philosophy, retired from the active duties of his profession, whilst in 

 the receipt of a splendid income from it, on the first warnings of 

 the approaches of the infirmities of old age. He was a man of great 

 liberality and kindness of heart, and remarkable for the steadiness 

 of his attachment to a large circle of professional and other friends. 



The Rev. William Lax, formerly Fellow of Trinity College, and 

 Lowndes's Professor of Astronomy and Geometry in the University 

 of Cambridge, was Senior Wrangler in the year preceding Mr. Bell, 

 and throughout life one of his most intimate friends : he contributed 

 two papers to our Transactions; one in 1796, on a subject of no 

 great importance, and the other in 1809, on the method of ex- 

 amining the divisions of astronomical instruments, in the same vo- 

 lume which contained papers on similar subjects by Mr. Cavendish 

 and Mr. Troughton. The method proposed by Mr. Lax, though 

 very ingenious, requires great labour and time, and is inferior in 

 accuracy and efficiency to that which was adopted by Mr. Troughton 

 for tabulating the errors of the primary divisions of circular instru- 

 ments. Professor Lax was the author of Tables to be used with the 

 Nautical Almanack, and he had built a small observatory at his re- 

 sidence in Hertfordshire, where he occupied himself for the last 



