Vv 
cations of this society showed, did Jonathan Couch and son on 
other portions of the Cornish coast; so did Sars and son to still 
greater depths off the steep coasts of Norway ;* so that they 
were led to demur to the dictum of Forbes, that there was no life 
in the ocean at a greater depth than 300 fathoms; until at length 
the English Government had been induced to send such naturalists 
as Carpenter, Gwyn Jeffreys, and Wyville Thomson, in men-of- 
war, on those devious, deep-dredging expeditions which were 
astonishing the scientific world with the news that life, under 
favourable conditions, might exist at, perhaps, the utmost oceanic 
depth, and that beings were now daily being hauled up from the 
bottom of the sea, which were nearly related to forms that had 
been imagined by Geologists and Zoologists to have been extinct 
since the cretaceous and odlitic strata of the solid earth had been 
deposited. There would be a Paper too by Mr. Henwood, which 
would bring to their recollection that it was among the Cornish 
mines that he earned his spurs as an eminent geologist. Then 
again, in the Antiquarian department, one of their younger 
members, Mr. Copeland Borlase, by the publication of his Nena 
Cornubic, which had been done since they last met, had acquired 
for himself a general reputation as an archeologist, however much 
he might have wounded the prejudices of some, by labouring to 
explode the idea that certain of the sepulchral barrows in this 
county were of Celtic origin. Sir John Maclean, who had now 
contributed a Paper, had just completed his History of Trigg 
Minor, which was esteemed as a model of antiquarian research. 
Lastly, this Institution could not forget their recent loss of an 
Honorary Member, one of the most illustrious of linguists, Dr. 
Edwin Norris, it being recorded of him that he was able to speak 
and write in some five-and-twenty languages. If Mezzofanti could 
converse in more tongues than Norris, the world owed far more to 
the latter, as a philologist, who had advanced our knowledge of 
at least three defunct languages of eastern peoples. From the 
old Cornish Tongue he had translated, if he remembered rightly, 
three Miracle Plays; and those members of this Institution who 
made his acquaintance on the occasion of the Cambrian Archeo- 
logical Association’s visit to Cornwall in 1862, would have a 
kindly remembrance of his simple and genial disposition. Since 
Norris’s translations, another Cornish Miracle Play had come to 
light, in Wales, and had been rendered into English by Mr. 
Whitley Stokes of Dublin, as they would hear about from Dr. 
* The Chairman here made reference to one of the books just presented 
to the Institution by the University of Christiania. 
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