142 Royal Society. 



he was appointed a Director of the East India Company. Colonel 

 Baillie was one of the founders and most active supporters of the 

 Royal Asiatic Society ; and he represented his native town, Inver- 

 ness, and its contributory burghs, in two successive Parliaments. 

 His collection of Persian, Arabic, and other Oriental Manuscripts is 

 said to have been one of the most extensive and valuable that was 

 ever brought to this country. 



Mr. Joseph Whidbey was for nearly fifty years a Master in the 

 Navy, and had been one of the companions of Vancouver in his voy- 

 age round the world. He was a person of great practical know- 

 ledge and skill, and possessed of more than ordinary general attain- 

 ments ; and he was in consequence selected by the Government to 

 superintend, under the direction of the late Mr. Rennie, the exe- 

 cution of that great national work, the Breakwater at Plymouth. 

 He was the author of three papers in our Transactions : one on the 

 means adopted for raising the Dutch frigate Ambuscade, which had 

 been sunk at the Nore ; and the other two on certain fossil bones 

 discovered in the limestone quarries at Oreston, near Plymouth. 



Adiuen Marie LeGendre, one of our Foreign Members, and one 

 of the most illustrious analysts in Europe, was born in Paris in 1752, 

 and died on the 10th of January last, in the eighty-first year of his 

 age. After the completion of his studies at the College Mazarin, he 

 devoted himself to mathematical and scientific pursuits, which he 

 continued, with singular perseverance and industry, for the remainder 

 of his life. At the age of thirty he gained the two prizes proposed 

 by the Academies of Berlin and Paris ; the one for a memoir on the 

 motion of projectiles in a resisting medium, and the other for a me- 

 moir on the attraction of spheroids upon any external point what- 

 ever. It was this second memoir which gained him, in the follow- 

 ing year, a place in the Academy, as the successor of D'Alembert, 

 and which attracted in a peculiar degree the attention of mathema- 

 ticians. The problem which it treated was one of the greatest im- 

 portance and difficulty, particular cases only of which had been suc- 

 cessfully treated by Newton, MacLaurin and Clairaut, but which he 

 attacked in all its generality, and mastered its difficulties " sword 

 in hand," to use the expressive language of Lagrange, when speak- 

 ing of this admirable memoir. An important proposition discovered 

 by Laplace led to a second, and a happy substitution, proposed and 

 applied by Mr. Ivory, to a third resumption of this problem, which 

 has finally terminated in such an organized system of approaching 

 its difficulties, that it has lately been reduced to the order of those 

 propositions which are included in the higher class of elementary 

 books *. 



It was in the course of his researches upon the attraction of 

 spheroids that his attention was first drawn to the subject of elliptic 

 integrals, concerning which his first memoir was jiublished in 1786. 

 He continued to pursue this most interesting and difficult branch of 

 analysis in a succession of works, for a period of nearly forty years, 



* Poisson, (Traite de Mecanique, second edition,) who has obtained an expres- 

 sion for the attraction under a finite form. 



