8 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Vol. viii. 



SOMMERVILLE LECTURES. 



The above course of free scientific lectures was duly delivered 

 as follows : 



1. March 4th, 1875. On Electricity, with experiments, by Dr. 



G. B. Shaw. 



2. March 11th, i: On the Adulteration of Food, by J. Ba- 



ker Edwards, Ph. D., D.C.L., F.C.S. 



3. March 25th, " The Grasshopper Plague of the North- 



West, by Prof. R. Bell, F.G.S., F.C.S. 



4. April 1st, " The Transit of Venus, by Richard Johnson, 



M. A., F. R. A. S., Chief Astronomer 

 at Kauai, Sandwich Islands, British 

 Transit Expedition. 



5. April 8th, " Matter out of place, by Dr. G. P. Gird- 



wood. 



6. April 15th, " The Nose, its Uses and Duties, by Dr. 



P. P. Carpenter. 



ANNUAL MEETING. 



The Annual Meeting was held on the 18th of May, 1875, 

 Rev. Dr. De Sola in the Chair. 



The minutes of the last Aunual Meeting having been read by 

 the Recording Secretary, Principal Dawson delivered the follow- 

 ing address, the President being absent in British Columbia. 



ANNUAL ADDRESS. 



I propose to devote the greater part of this address to memo- 

 ries of a man whose death may almost be said to close an era in 

 the history of geological progress, as the publication of his 

 greatest work, the Principles of Geology, may be held to have 

 begun an era in the study of that science, whose goal of to-day 

 will ever be its starting point for to-morrow. Sir Charles Lyell, 

 the greatest geological thinker of our time and nation, died on 

 the 22nd of February, in his seventy- eighth year. He was born 

 at Kinnordy in Forfarshire, on the 14th of November, 1797, 

 and graduated at Oxford, in 1819. He studied for the Bar, 

 and began the practice of his profession ; but his mind was 

 already occupied with inquiries as to the structure of the earth, 

 stimulated apparently by Buckland's lectures, to which he had 

 listened at Oxford. In 1824, he became an honorary secretary 

 of the Geological Society of London, and for a time he was Pro- 

 fessor of Geology in King's College, London. He was elected? 



