REPORT ON THE TRANSACTIONS OF THE SOCIETY OF PHYSICS AND OF NAT- 

 URAL HISTORY OF GENEVA, FROM JUNE, 1868, TO JUNE, 1869. 



By Di:. H. C. Lombard. 



\_2Vanslated for the Smithsonian Institution from the memoirs of the society : Geneva, 1869.] 



I am about to perform the last act of the presidency with ^Yhich my 

 highly respected colleagues have beeu i)leased to honor me, by render- 

 ing an account of our transactions and of the changes which have 

 occurred in our society during the academical year which now draws to 

 an end. 



Death, that visitor who is almost always unlooked for, has robbed us 

 of several members, emeriti or honorary. In the first category, we 

 recall M. Isaac Macaire, who, after being long one of our members in 

 ordinary, was, at his own request, classed in the number of the emeriti. 

 In the second category, or that of honorary members, we have to record 

 three individuals whose labors have contributed greatly to exteiul the 

 boundaries of the natural and physical sciences, and whom we had the 

 honor to number among our correspondents. I speak of M^I. Von Mar- 

 tins, Matteucci, and Forbes. But if our ranks have sustained some 

 losses, the vacancies thus left have been promptly filled, not, iiuleed, 

 by savants already numbered, like the honorary members just named, 

 in tlie first class, with whom our new colleagues would not excuse me 

 for instituting a comparison, but by four members in ordinary, most 

 of them young, and bearing names endeared to us by more than one 

 title. One of these. Professor De La Harpe, already an adjunct of the 

 society under the title of associate, became a member in ordinary in the 

 course of the winter, after having read an original essay on a question 

 of mathematics. Of the three others, who are still of an age which 

 promises a longer career than remains for most of us, one has taken, 

 after several years interval, the place of a colleague regretted by each 

 of us. It is with great satisfaction, therefore, that we have enrolled in 

 our society a second Dr. Jean Louis Prevost, devoted, like his prede- 

 cessor, to the researclies of experimental physiology. Tlie second of our 

 young members, M. Ernest Favre, in taking his place among us, renews 

 the tradition of those geological researches which earned an honored 

 name for his father. Professor Alphonse Favre. Finally", if the last of 

 our young members, M. Edouard Sarasin, has no direct ascendants in 

 the cultivation of the sciences, he numbers warm friends in tliose pur- 

 suits, who will aid him in openhig a path of his own in the physico-chem- 

 ical studies to which he has earnestly devoted himself. 



After this summary review^ of our losses and acquisitions, let us recur 

 to the former and briefly recount the labors of those whom death has 

 removed from us. 



M. Isaac Francois Macaire was born, in 179G, at Geneva, where he 

 fulfilled the customary circle of academic studies. He succeeded his 

 father as pharmaceutist, and availed himself of that circumstance to 

 apply more especially to chemistrj" and the natural sciences. We need 

 not recall here the obligations of chemistry to the laboratories of phar- 



