Ajimial Report of the Council. Ixv 



Chemistry " of the " Challenger " expedition, show his skill as an 

 experimenter. 



He was awarded a Royal Medal by the Royal Society of 

 London in 1886, and the Keith Medal of the Royal Society of 

 Edinburgh in 1869 and again in 1874. He was for more than 

 twenty years General Secretary to the latter Society, whose 

 affairs he guided with his characteristic " clearness of vision and 

 purity of purpose." 



(See obituary notice by Lord Kelvin in Proc. Roy. Soc 

 Edin., Vol. xxiii. {igoi), p. 4g8.) C. H. L. 



John Hampden Beckett, only son of James Marshal 

 Beckett, died at his residence, Corbar Hall, Buxton, on October 

 3rd, 1 90 1, in his 46th year. He was elected a Fellow of the 

 Chemical Society in 1882, and became an ordinary member of 

 this Society on January 9th, 1894. 



By the death of Dr. Henry Browne, the Society not only 

 lost one of its oldest members, but a man who was a remarkable 

 personality in relation to the period in which he lived. As a 

 physician and teacher, he may be said to have belonged to the 

 period preceding the development of the doctrine of evolution 

 and the germ theory of disease, though he outlived both 

 Darwin and Pasteur — the first born a few years before him and 

 the second a few years later. As a thinker in an age of 

 criticism and scepticism, he was distinguished for the depth of 

 his religious feeling, and he retained into the twentieth century 

 an undiminished faith in the divine authority of the Scriptures. 

 Nevertheless, alike as a medical practitioner and as a theologian, 

 he was essentially scientific and critical. In the exercise of his 

 profession, his religious convictions had a large influence ; 

 though, at the time of his death, nearly a quarter of a century 

 had passed since his retirement from professional labour, and, 

 owing to his exceptional length of life, very many of those who 

 best knew him had preceded him to the grave, yet the number 

 of persons in humble life who attended his funeral testified to 



