300 Anniversary Meeting. 



course of his address, observed : " The Kew Observatory, the petted 

 child of the British Association, may possibly become an important 

 national establishment ; and, if so, while it will not, I trust, lose its 

 character of a home of untrammelled physical research, it will have 

 superadded some of the functions of the Meteorological Department 

 of the Board of Trade, with a staff of skilful and experienced 

 observers."^ Although the British Association long ago handed 

 over the care of its " petted child" to a Committee appointed by the 

 Royal Society, the Society and the Association have lately appointed 

 a joint Committee to urge the Government to supply the funds for 

 converting the Kew Observatory into a " national establishment " 

 similar to the Reichsanstalt at Charlottenburg. We are thus striving 

 to realise to-day the suggestion thrown out, thirty years ago, by 

 Grove. 



In Sir Joseph Prestwich we have lost almost the last link that 

 remained which connected geologists of the present day with the 

 founders of the science in the first half of this century. To him we 

 are indebted, not only for the first comprehensive classification of the 

 tertiary beds of this country to several of which he assigned the 

 names by which they will henceforth be universally known but, 

 also, for their correlation with the strata of the Paris Basin. To 

 him, also, is due the credit of having been the first to establish the 

 authenticity of the remains of human workmanship found in the 

 drift-deposits of the valley of the Somme, and of thus having laid 

 secure foundations on which arguments as to the extreme antiquity' of 

 man upon the earth may be based. In France his name was known 

 and respected as much as in England, and it would be hard to say 

 how much of the advance in geological knowledge during the last 

 sixty years was not due to his unintermitted labours, which extended 

 over the whole of that period. 



The earliest scientific investigation of Armand Hippolyte Louis 

 Fizeau was 011 the use of bromine in photography, and was published 

 in 1841. He will always be remembered as the first who carried out 

 experiments designed to measure the velocity of light produced by a 

 terrestrial source, and travelling through a comparatively small dis- 

 tance near the surface of the earth. These observations, made in 

 1849, were very difficult ; but the value of the method employed is 

 attested by the fact that a quarter of a century afterwards it was 

 adopted by M. Cornu, and- that with the improved apparatus employed 

 by him it gave results of the highest accuracy. 



A few years afterwards Fizeau performed another classical experi- 

 ment by which he measured the change in the velocity of light pro- 

 duced by the motion of the medium in which it travels. 



* ' Correlation and Continuity.' Fifth Edition, 1867, p. 278. 



