1817 /. B. Biot; Alexander von Humboldt 253 



of science was probably the remarkable attractiveness of 

 his lectures and the eloges which he pronounced as Perpetual 

 Secretary of the Academy of Sciences. He was not only a 

 conspicuous man of science, but also took a prominent part 

 in the public affairs of France during the successive parlia- 

 mentary changes through which the country passed from 

 the fall of the first empire to the coup d'etat of 1852, which 

 he did not long survive. 



Jean Baptiste Biot, distinguished among the French 

 physicists, had come to England chiefly to make observa- 

 tions along the British arc of the meridian, in pursuance 

 of which design he penetrated into the Orkney Islands. 

 His researches on the polarisation of light were of great 

 value, which the Royal Society acknowledged by awarding 

 to him in 1840 the Rumford Medal. He died in 1862 at 

 the great age of eighty- eight. Biot, Alexander von Hum- 

 boldt, and Gay-Lussac, had been made Foreign Members 

 of the Royal Society on April 6th 1815. 



Baron Alexander von Humboldt enjoyed during his life- 

 time the reputation of being the greatest naturalist of his 

 age. He had early conceived broad views of nature as a 

 whole and he had the art of placing these views before the 

 world in a connected, if not always attractive form. He 

 was an experienced traveller, visiting vast regions of the 

 world of which little was then known, and accumulating 

 large stores of information regarding their physical features, 

 products and natural history. His great work on Central 

 America, which took him twenty years to prepare, is a 

 colossal monument of his genius. 



Besides the renewed advent of foreign visitors, the native 

 guests invited by the Club this year seem to present a 

 greater variety of interest than had appeared for some time 

 past. The most conspicuous of their number was Sir 

 Stamford Raffles, who dined eight times in the first half 

 of the year. This famous governor spent nearly twenty 

 years in the East, during which time he explored many of 

 the islands, learning their languages and natural history 

 and making extensive collections. To his sagacity and 



