1873.] President's Address. 3 



those parts of this great city in which commerce or manufacture is most 

 active, or in which the demands of the State are most imperative. 



Our Foreign Secretary, Professor W. H. Miller, has intimated to the 

 Council his wish to withdraw from the duties and the labours of the 

 office which he has held for many years with advantage to the Society, 

 and for which he is eminently adapted. In offering to Professor Miller 

 your thanks for his long-continued services, I have to add my confidence 

 that the office will be well sustained by the gentleman whom the Council 

 submit for your election. 



It has not been usual for your Presidents to allude by name to those 

 of your Ordinary Members whose decease the Society has had to lament 

 during the year last elapsed. But I hope that an intimate friendship of 

 more than fifty years will justify me, in your opinion, in alluding to one, 

 the only Copley Medallist in our British List lost in the last year, the 

 late Professor Sedgwick. I cannot sufficiently express my veneration 

 for the unselfishness, the love of truth, the kindliness of heart, which 

 distinguished that extraordinary man ; and I cannot conceal the expres- 

 sion of my admiration of his general ability, and my strong confidence in 

 the soundness of his judgment on controverted points which might come 

 before him. After this notice, I am bound to allude briefly to others 

 whose names will appear in our official Obituary. Confining my re- 

 marks to those who have furnished papers to our ' Transactions,' there 

 are : the Eev. Gr. Fisher, first known by magnetic observations in an Arctic 

 Expedition, and afterwards by his instructions to our Naval Service; 

 Sir Henry Holland, the senior Fellow of the Society, equally distin- 

 guished by his reputation in the Medical profession, by his fame as a 

 traveller, by his literary records of political and personal life, and by the 

 mixture of science and sociality which endeared him to all who knew 

 him. Dr. H. Bence Jones will be remembered for his labours in 

 reference to urinary chemistry, W. J. M. Rankine for his mathematical 

 labours in problems of engineering and in the motions of fluids, Sir F. 

 Ronalds for his knowledge of electricity, his introduction (collaterally 

 with others) of photographic self-registration, and his attempts at esta- 

 blishing a telegraph not by galvanism but by electricity, and A. Smith, 

 a Royal Medallist, for his general mathematical acumen, and for the 

 application of it to the theory of the induced magnetism of iron ships. 



But nothing prevents me from alluding to the losses among our 

 Foreign Members. The Baron Liebig, a Copley Medallist, was the 

 founder of a branch of chemical science, not entirely new, but carried 

 out by him to an extent and perfection that have given it importance 

 which we could hardly have expected it to attain. Professor Hansteen 

 personally observed terrestrial magnetism over a great extent of country, 

 and was I believe the first person in modern times who endeavoured to 

 combine all the magnetical observations in different parts of the earth 

 then available, his own attempt to explain them being founded on an 



B 2 



