258 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
1846. He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Union 
College in 1829, and from Harvard University in 1851. He was President 
of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1849; was 
chosen President of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 
1868: President of the Philosophical Society of Washington in 1871; and 
Chairman of the Lighthouse Board of the United States in the same year; 
the last three positions he continued to fill until his death. Prof. Henry 
made contributions to science in electricity, electro-magnetism, meteorology, 
capillarity, acoustics, and in other branches of physics: he published valuable 
memoirs in the Transactions of various learned societies of which he was a 
member; and devoted thirty-two years of his life to making the Smithsonian 
Institution what its founder intended it to be, an efficient instrument for 
the “increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” He is succeeded 
in the post of Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution by Professor 
Spencer Baird. 
PROCEEDINGS OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES. 
Linnean Society oF Lonpon. 
Annual General Meeting, May 24, 1878.—Professor ALLMAN, F.R.S., 
President, in the chair. 
The President, in his Anniversary Address, in accordance with the plan 
he had adopted on previous occasions, selected for exposition a group of 
organisms—the Polyzoa—on which recent investigations had thrown more 
than usual light, and gave a resumé of the principal discoveries by which 
our present knowledge of the group has been brought about. Commencing 
with their anatomy and development, and certain important features in 
their systematic grouping, he pointed out the advance made in our 
acquaintance with their primary groups by the labours chiefly of Busk 
and Nitsch. Discussing certain disputed points which recent investigations 
have tended to clear up, such as the nature of the ‘ Brown Bodies,” and 
the so-called “‘ Colonial Nervous System,” he maintained that the evidence 
of such investigations was mainly in favour of the “ Brown Bodies” being 
merely the residuum of degraded and withered polypides, and that they 
have no real morphological or physiological importance ; and further, with 
Nitsch, Joliet, and Busk, that the so-called “ Colonial Nervous System ” 
was merely an irregular plexus of cellular and protoplasmic cords and 
filaments derived from the walls of the zocecium, or polypide-cell, and 
that it has nothing to do with a true nervous system. Joliet has proposed 
for it the convenient name of “ Endosarc,” and refers to it the origin of 
the reproductive elements of the new polypide buds, and of certain minute 
corpuscles which are found floating free in the liquid which fills the cavity 
