42 Annals of the Philosophical Club 



in public service. He became F.R.S. in 1850, and received a Royal 

 Medal in 1871, as well as the Lyell Medal of the Geological Society 

 in 1878 and its Wollaston Medal in 1885. He died at his house in 

 Harley Street, August loth, 1886. 



PROFESSOR THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY 

 was son of a schoolmaster, born at Ealing on May 4th, 1825. He 

 became a medical student in 1841, and soon afterwards suffered 

 from blood-poisoning, the result of which was chronic dyspepsia. 

 Matriculating at the University of London in 1842, be graduated 

 as M.B., with the gold medal for anatomy and physiology, in 1845. 

 From the end of the next year to November, 1850, he was attached 

 to the Rattlesnake, then surveying the sea between Australia and 

 the Great Barrier Reef. Here his studies of floating hydrozoa, 

 especially the medusae, tunicata, and perishable mollusca, enabled 

 him to place their classification on a sound basis. As a result he 

 was elected F.R.S. in 1851, and in the following year was awarded 

 a Royal Medal. On obtaining, in 1854, permanent work in teaching 

 at the Royal School of Mines, he soon showed that his powers of 

 exposition equalled those of investigation, and proved to be great in 

 organization on its removal to South Kensington. An intimate 

 friend of Charles Darwin, he was a champion of the Origin of 

 Species, and his chastisement of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, who 

 had unwisely attacked it at the Oxford Meeting of the British 

 Association in 1860, will not readily be forgotten. With all this 

 work, especially on Cartesian criticism, during the ten years previous 

 to 1870, his ' output ' of scientific literature was surprising. So 

 great was his influence on the public mind that he went on the School 

 Board for London. In 1871 he had to take a long holiday, but 

 became Secretary of the Royal Society, and President in 1881. 

 From this, however, failing health obliged him to retire in 1885 and 

 to give up all public work. In 1890 he removed to Eastbourne, 

 where he died on June 29th, 1895, and was buried at Fincbley. He 

 received the Copley Medal in 1888 and the Darwin in 1894, besides 

 honorary degrees and other distinctions, among them that of a Privy 

 Councillor (he refused knighthood) in 1892. 



SIR GEORGE GABRIEL STOKES, son of the Rector of Skreen, County 

 Sligo, was born there on Aug. isth, 1811. He went to Pembroke 

 College, Cambridge, where he was senior wrangler and first Smith's 

 prizeman in 1837, and obtained a Fellowship. Elected in 1849 

 to the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics, he won distinction 

 in many departments, among his notable researches being those 

 on the motion of fluids, including viscous, the dynamical theory of 

 diffraction, and the general theory of the propagation of disturbances, 

 the development of spectrum analysis, which, as his correspondence 

 proved, he had foreseen before it was actually investigated by 

 Bunsen and Kirchoff, the phenomena of sound, the variation in 



