NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY GF GLASGOW. Ixix 



THE THIRTY FOURTH ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING. 

 27th October, 1885. 



Dr. James Stirton, F.L.S., President, in the Chair. 



Mr. D. A. Boyd referred to the death of Dr. Thomas Davidson, 

 Brighton, one of the Honorary Members, which took place on 

 the 14th inst. 



IN MEMORIAM. 



Thomas Davidson, LL.D., F.R.S., F.G.S., F.L.S. 



Thomas Davidson was the eldest son of Captain William 

 Davidson of Muir House, Midlothian. He was born in 

 Edinburgh but spent his youth on the Continent, studying art 

 in Paris under Horace Vernet and Paul Delaroche, and science 

 tinder Brogniart, St. Hilaire, Milne Edwards, and others. 

 After matriculating at the University of Edinburgh, he pro- 

 ceeded to Rome, where he resumed the study of art. The 

 illustrations of his numerous monographs show how closely his 

 favourite pursuits were afterwards linked, and how successfully 

 his work — scientific, literary, and artistic— was pursued under 

 the powerful stimulus of combined tastes. 



At the suggestion of the eminent Prussian geologist. 

 Baron von Buch, Mr. Davidson undertook the study of the 

 JBracJiiopoda, a much-neglected group of Mollusca, of whose 

 structure and distribution very little was then known. The 

 remarkable assidviity with which this work was pursued may 

 be realized from the fact that nearly 1,000 species, from the 

 British fossiliferous rocks alone, were figured and described by 

 him ; and of these less than a third had been previously known 

 to science. During the progress of this inagnuin opus he 

 received contributions from Carpenter, Owen, and Murchison ; 

 and the work, when completed, was translated into French 

 and German. 



For more than forty years he laboured incessantly. Monograph 

 after monograph appeared ; and, in addition to these, numerous 

 articles in the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society of 

 London, Transactions of the Llnnean Society, Annals and 

 Magazine of Natural History, Geological Magazine, &c. The 

 article on "Brachiopoda," in the recent edition of the Encyclo- 

 paedia Brltannlca, was from his pen ; and, in the first Zoological 

 Report of the Challenger expedition, the descriptions and figures 

 of the recent species of these molluscs were contributed by him. 



In 1857 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and in 

 1870 he received one of the Queen's gold medals in recognition 

 of his scientific researches. For two years he acted as Honorary 

 Secretary of the Geological Society, and in 1865 he received the 

 WoUaston gold medal of that Society. At the meetings of the 



