47 



The insects, when sold by the late Mr. Capes, at his 

 auction rooms in Manchester, realized the sum of £44 10s., 

 and are now in the Peel Park Museum, Salford. 

 Altogether nearly £150 was obtained for the widow. The 

 last letter I received from the Professor was in the past 

 summer, when he presented to the Society photographic por- 

 traits of himself and his old friend the late Mr. Dawson, the 

 mathematician of Sedbergh, which are placed in our meeting 

 room. ' In the early days of the British Association he was 

 probably the most eloquent and humorous speaker amongst 

 its members, and few who had the pleasure of listening to 

 his reply to Dean Cockburn in the Geological Section at 

 York will ever forget it. 



Professor Williamson, F.RS., stated that the second 

 fossil plant described by Mr. Binney at the last meeting of 

 the Society, on January 21st, and of which a notice appeared 

 in the Society's Proceedings, does not belong to some new 

 genus, as Mr. Binney supposed, but is one that he has 

 already described on two or three occasions as being the 

 stem or branch of the well-known genus Aster ophyllites, 

 In his description of the Volkmannia Binneyi, published in 

 the Society's Transactions in 1871, respecting which Pro- 

 fessor WiUiamson showed that it possessed a vascular axis 

 exhibiting a triquetrous transverse section, the author gave 

 his reasons for believing that the strobilus was the fruit 

 of AsterophyUites. In a letter addressed to Dr. Sharpey 

 on Nov. 16, 1871, and published in No. 131 of that Society's 

 Proceedings, Professor Williamson gave a brief description 

 of a stem having a similar triangular vascular axis, with 

 lenticularly thickened nodes, and which he again referred 

 to the same verticellate leaved genus. In a second letter to 

 Dr. Sharpey, dated May 3, 1872, the author confirmed the 

 above conclusions by stating that he had "got an additional 



