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In your hands, as Foreign Secretary, I place the Copley Medal which 

 the Council have awarded to M. Agassiz, requesting you that, when 

 you have the opportunity of transmitting it to him, you will at the 

 same time express that as it is the greatest honour the Royal Society 

 has to bestow, so it sufficiently shows the high estimation in which 

 they hold his scientific labours. 



A Royal Medal has been adjudicated to Dr. William B. Carpenter, 

 F.R.S., for his Researches on the Foraminifera, contained in four 

 memoirs in the ( Philosophical Transactions,' his Investigations into 

 the Structure of Shell, his Observations on the Embryonic Develop- 

 ment of Purpura, and his various other writings on Physiology and 

 Comparative Anatomy. 



Dr. Carpenter has long held a high place as a systematic writer on 

 Human and Comparative Physiology, and his well-known works 

 have served, more perhaps than any others of their time, to spread 

 the knowledge of those sciences and promote their study among a 

 large class of readers. These writings, moreover, while they admi- 

 rably fulfil their purpose as systematic expositions of the current 

 state of knowledge on the subjects which they comprehend, afford 

 evidence throughout of much depth and extent of original thought 

 on most of the great questions of Physiology. 



While not unmindful, however, of these merits on the part of Dr. 

 Carpenter, or of his earlier special contributions to science, the 

 Council have awarded him the Medal, in accordance with the existing 

 terms of its adjudication, on account of his researches on various 

 branches of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology published in later 

 years. 



Among those researches which more especially demand notice on 

 this occasion, the first in point of time is the series of elaborate in- 

 vestigations on the intimate structure of Shell. By these inquiries 

 Dr. Carpenter discovered that a very definite structural arrangement 

 exists in the shells of many mollusca, and presents modifications 

 which serve, in many instances, to characterize natural groups, as 

 being in harmony with the general affinities of the animal. The 

 group of Brachiopoda, in particular, he showed to be thus distin- 

 guishable from other bivalves ; and he further found that, among the 

 Brachiopoda themselves, certain groups of species are differentiated 



