122 Royal Society. 



The list of Fellows whom the Society has lost during the last 

 year is more extensive than usual, and the time will not allow me 

 more than to take a brief and passing notice of some of them, whose 

 labours have brought them into a more immediate connection with 

 this Society and the great objects which it proposes to pursue. 



Mr. Abernethy was one of those pupils of John Hunter who ap- 

 pears the most completely to have caught the bold and philosophical 

 spirit of investigation of his great master. He was the author of 

 various works and memoirs upon physiological and anatomical or 

 surgical subjects, including three papers which have appeared in 

 our Transactions. Few persons have contributed more abundantly 

 to the establishment of the true principles of surgical or medical 

 practice in those cases which require that minute criticism of the 

 symptoms of disease, upon the proper knowledge and study of which 

 the perfection of medical art must mainly depend. As a lecturer he 

 was not less distinguished than as an author ; and he appears to 

 have possessed the art of fixing strongly the attention of his liearers, 

 not less by the just authority of his opinions, than by his ready com- 

 mand of apt and forcible illustrations. He enjoyed during many 

 years of his life a more than ordinary share of public favour in the 

 practice of his profession; and though not a little remarkable for 

 the eccentricities of his manners and an affected roughness in his 

 intercourse with his ordinary patients, he was generally kind and 

 courteous in those cases which required the full exercise of his skill 

 and knowledge, and also liberal in the extreme when the infliction 

 of poverty and privation was superadded to those of disease. 



Captain Henry Foster was a member of the profession which, under 

 all circumstances, is so justly celebrated for activity and enterprise, 

 and which, when wanting the stimulus of war, has on many occasions 

 lately distinguished itself by the zealous and successful cultivation 

 of those studies and the practice of those observations which are so 

 essentially connected with the improvement of navigation. He ac- 

 companied Captain Basil Hall, in the Conway, in his well-known 

 voyage to South America, and assisted him materially in his pendu- 

 lum and other observations. He afterwards joined Captain Parry 

 in the second of his celebrated voyages ; and at Port Bowen and 

 other stations within the Arctic Circle, he made, with the assistance 

 of Captain Parry and others, a most valuable and extensive series 

 of observations upon the diurnal variation, diurnal intensity and dip 

 of the magnetic needle, and upon other subjects connected with ter- 

 restrial magnetism and astronomical refractions, which formed an 

 entire fourth part of our Transactions for 1826, and was printed 

 at the especial expense of the Board of Longitude. For these papers 

 he received the Copley Medal ; and the Lords of the Admiralty ac- 

 knowledged their sense of the honour which was thus conferred upon 

 the profession to which he belonged, by immediately raising liini to 

 the rank of Commander, and by appointing him to the command of 

 the Chanticleer upon a voyage of discovery and observation in the 

 South Seas. It was during the latter part of this voyage that he 



perished 



