392 Anniversary Meeting. [Nov. 30, 



of the first current of high electromotive force is to break up some of 

 the molecules of gas, and that the wandering atoms can then yield to 

 small electrical forces to which the complete molecule is insensitive. 



Professor Schuster has worked in many branches of physics, and 

 has advanced the knowledge of each. 



ROYAL MEDAL. 

 Professor H. Marshall Ward, F.E.8. 



Professor H. Marshall Ward's claims to the recognition by the 

 Royal Society implied in the award of a Royal Medal rest mainly 

 on the series of brilliant investigations he has carried out, having for 

 their object the elucidation of the phenomena of life exhibited by the 

 Fungi and the Schizomycetes, and the effects of the life of these 

 plants, whether exhibited in a hurtful form as disease in living 

 organisms, or in an useful form in the production of substances of 

 economic importance. These investigations, planned with ingenuity, 

 and completed with resourceful industry, have resulted in most 

 valuable contributions to natural knowledge. In the additions 

 they make to the sum of our knowledge regarding the plant 

 forms dealt with they are admirable and weighty, but, over and 

 above the botanical interest attaching to the work, it has a far- 

 reaching importance in the whole world of biology, touching as it 

 does the fundamental point of the interaction of living organisms 

 and the conditions under which symbiosis, whether beneficial or 

 baneful, is developed and maintained ; and its conclusions are of vital 

 value in their immediate bearing upon such large industries as 

 agriculture, horticulture, forestry, and brewing, and in relation to the 

 scientific basis of sanitary procedure. 



The series of purposeful and practical researches which place 

 Professor Marshall Ward in the front rank of biologists was initiated 

 by his investigation of the disease which devastated, a decade or so 

 ago, the coffee plantations in Ceylon. Undertaking this work at the 

 invitation of the Ceylon Government, Professor Marshall Ward 

 exposed, in a detailed account of the life history of Hemileia, vastatrix, 

 the fungus which immediately caused the disease, and whilst his 

 work contributed many new morphological and physiological facts, 

 its chief importance lay in the scientific basis it established, upon 

 which any method of treatment that might be adopted should be 

 founded. Following up the line thus entered upon, Professor 

 Marshall Ward took up the better known questions of the salmon 

 disease, the damping off of seedling plants, and the potato disease, 

 and, in an admirably recorded series of observations upon the Fungi 

 connected with these diseases, brought to light many points of great 

 importance, especially in the direction of .showing the influences 



