412 Linnean Society. [May 24, 



friends, and enabled him to pass through life almost without an 

 enemy. 



George Bellas Greenough, Esq., F.R.S. 8;C., one of the founders 

 and first President of the Geological Society, was educated first at 

 Peter House, Cambridge, and subsequently at the University of 

 Gottingen. In his youth he was ambitious of political distinction, 

 and deriving from his father an ample fortune, he purchased a seat 

 in parliament for the borough of Gatton, for which he sat from 1807 

 to 1812. But he soon abandoned politics and attached himself 

 wholly to science, devoting the remainder of his life to geological 

 and geographical studies, which he cultivated in close combination 

 with each other. In the year 1807, in conjunction with Mr. Charles 

 Greville, Sir John St. Aubyn and Sir Abraham Hume, each of whom 

 possessed a splendid mineralogical collection (for the arrangement 

 and enlargement of which they were all mainly indebted to the 

 mineralogical knowledge of Count Bournon), and with Dr. Wollas- 

 ton. Dr. Babington, Mr. Arthur Aikin, Mr. William Phillips, Mr. 

 Leonard Horner, Dr. Roget and others, he took a leading part in 

 forming an association for the cultivation of mineralogical and geo- 

 logical science, which subsequently took the name of the Geological 

 Society, and of which he was named the first President. This office 

 he subsequently again filled on several occasions, and although he 

 has written (or rather published) little, yet his time, his money and 

 his talents continued to be actively employed in the promotion of 

 geological knowledge. His first substantive work, ' A critical Exa- 

 mination of the First Principles of Geology,' appeared in 1819, and 

 was two years afterwards translated into German. The principles 

 of this work have been described as having now become " anti- 

 quated ;" but this result was fully anticipated by the author himself, 

 " being satisfied," as he states at the end of his preface, " that if 

 geological science continues to advance at the rate it has done lately, 

 the essays now submitted to the public will, before many years have 

 elapsed, be found to contain as many errors as they presume to 

 correct." In the same year he gave to the world his ' Geological 

 Map of England and Wales, in six sheets, with an accompanying 

 Memoir,' compiled from an extensive collection of maps and surveys, 

 and enriched with much original matter, contributed both by himself 

 and his numerous geological friends. A second edition, greatly 

 improved by the materials collected during the interval of twenty 

 years, was published in 1839. He occupied himself continually in 

 increasing his collection of maps, and in noting upon them all the 

 geological data which he could obtain either from books or from the 



