THE PRESIDENTS ADDRESS. 125 
the past year. Permit me, in thus referring to the honored name of 
Franklin, to couple with it that of a personal friend, Mr. Henry 
Goodsir, formerly Curator of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edin- 
burgh, who volunteered his services as Naturalist of the Franklin 
Expedition, and has doubtless perished, like his chief, though we lack 
the poor consolation of even learning his fate. I have watched with 
liveliest interest each detailed account of the relics of that ill-fated 
expedition, in the hope of recognising traces of one, not the least 
gifted or worthy among those whom Britain justly mourns. A young, 
enthusiastic, and highly gifted student of science: Henry Goodsirhas 
fallen on a field more honorable, and striving in a nobler cause than 
most of those which furnish the laurels of heroes. Yet it is impos- 
sible not to revert with mournful regret to the ardent, sanguine votary 
of science, thus perishing before one desire had been accomplished, or 
one hope realized; going forth with the accumulated knowledge that 
constituted his weapons for that dread field, like the young soldier 
ardent for the strife : 
| “ And lost to life, and use, and name, and fame.” 
It is a duty which generally devolves on the President of a Society 
like this, to commemorate on such occasions, those whose loss we 
have to lament during the past year; for, alas, no year passes over 
us, in which we have not to mourn some blank which death has 
made in our own numbers, or in that great Commonwealth of Science 
and Letters in which we claim to take our humble part. Among 
the ranks of our own members death has removed some who were 
wont to take a lively interest in our proceedings; and all of us, I 
doubt not, have deeply sympathised in the very painful circumstances 
which attended the loss of one of our number, the only son of His 
Excellency, Sir Edmund Head : a youth of great promise, and of rare 
enthusiasm in his early devotion to science. And when we look abroad 
on that wider circle which our sympathies embrace, we see that the 
Old World and the New have shared with an impartial equality in 
death’s irrevocable bereavements. Hallam and Prescott, Brunel and 
Stephenson, De Quincy and Washington Irving, have, during the past 
year, followed one another to the grave; and it will not, I trust, be 
deemed an intrusion on the special duties of this occasion, if I turn 
aside for a moment to refer to another loss which science has recently 
sustained, but in which I claim a larger personal share. Death has 
been busy of late among Edinburgh men whom I counted my personal 
Vou. V, L 
