&nnitor*ttrs JUfortas of the finsiknt. 



Unavoidably postponed Jrom the Annual Meeting, May 7th, 1S9G, and 

 read November 20th, 1896. 



COMMENCE my anniversary address, as usual, with the 

 notice of members who have been removed by death 

 during the past year. Sir Joseph Prestwich, F.R.S., 

 one of the most distinguished British geologists, is 

 lost to us. He was one of the few survivors of those 

 who were led by Buckland, Sedgwick, Fitton, de la 

 Beche, Murchison, Scrope, and Lyell. He had for his 

 contemporaries Agassiz, Owen, Phillips, Godwin- 

 Austen, E. Forbes, Ramsay, and Warrington Smythe, 

 all of whom have passed away, whilst his older surviving friends, 

 Sir John Evans, Rev. 0. Fisher, J. Rupert Jones, R. Etheridge, and 

 II. Woodward, are still living. He was the first to demonstrate to 

 the English men of science that the flint-implements found in the 

 valley of the Somme (France) were of human workmanship, and that 

 they were lying in undisturbed beds of sand and gravel, in conjunc- 

 tion with the remains of extinct mammalia, as had been asserted 

 by Boucher de Perthes. His paper before the Royal Society gained 

 acceptance of his views amongst geologists. Among many of his 

 papers brought before the Institute of Civil Engineers is one " On 

 the Origin of the Chesil Bank." Differing from previous observers, 

 who attributed it to shingle drifted from the Devonshire and 

 Dorsetshire coasts, he showed it was due to the wreck of the old 



