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been found in England during the last few years, and that it was 
not generally known that the Lias shales of our own neighbour- 
hood had been found to yield that gas, though not of any 
commercial value ; he advocated the Neptunean theory of the 
production of Minerals, therein differing from the writer of the 
paper who had held the theory of the gaseous state of the earth’s 
centre and had attributed Bitumen to that origin. 
On February 15th, 1881, the evening Meeting was set 
apart for Charles Moore and myself, when he was to have 
communicated his latest investigations on the ‘“ Eozoon and 
Micropalzeontology,” embodying some of his recent microscopic 
researches in the Paleozoic rocks. Death, however, had taken 
away my geological friend, and the pen of the earnest, hard- 
working student of nature had ceased to write; he had gone 
to his rest, literally worn out and a victim (may we not say a 
martyr ?) to the cause of science, for which he had laboured and 
for which he lived. How well I remember the closing scene, or 
at any rate the last hours spent with him in endeavouring to 
elucidate the fibre mystery. Possessed with the idea that even in 
the earliest rocks of the earth’s crust he could trace the presence 
of organic life, he had selected the room in the Institution 
where the least chance of any adventitious or external accidents 
could interfere with his researches; he had prepared some glass 
slides coated with glycerine over-night, these we were to examine 
the following morning microscopically and compare the results of 
the night’s capture with the residue he proposed to test after 
decalcification of the rock by hydrocloric acid in the morning. 
The specimen so tested was a slice of the Laurentian rock 
containing the so-called Eozoon Canadense. Every precaution 
had been taken to exclude any accidental introduction of dust 
from the experiment. After two hours work in the room bare of 
any furniture that might possibly interfere, he succeeded in fixing 
en his glass slides certain transparent fibres or tubes obtained 
from the residue, which, when compared with the dust caught’ on 
