248 
the crystallographic notation proposed by Professor Whewell in his 
paper on a General Method of calculating the Angles of Crystals, 
and the laws according to which they are formed, published in the 
Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1825 ; and Professor 
Neuman’s method of indicating the positions of the faces of a cry- 
stal by the points in which radii, drawn perpendicular to the faces, 
meet the surface of a sphere. The expressions which have been 
thus obtained are remarkable for their symmetry and simplicity, and 
are all adapted to logarithmic computation, and for the most part 
new. 
NOTICE OF DECEASED MEMBERS. 
In proceeding to speak of the losses which, during the past year, 
our science has sustained by death, I shall offer my first tribute of 
respect to the memory of one, whom a predecessor of mine in this 
chair has justly called the father of English geology; since to his 
discoveries we owe the first diffusion of exact knowledge as to the 
order of superposition of the secondary formations which occupy so 
large a portion of our island, and the first demonstration of that 
constancy of the organic remains, which he proved to be cha- 
racteristic of the component strata of each different formation. It 
was the especial merit of Mr. Wirtram Smirtu to establish a series 
of types of these groups, many of which have been adopted as 
classical, in such a manner as will perpetuate his name among the 
original discoverers of the age in which he lived. 
If, as it has been truly said, the honour of the first discoveries in 
tertiary geology belongs to France, where the labours of Cuvier and 
Brongniart gave to this great division of the strata of the earth a 
systematic arrangement before unknown, so the establishment of 
the types in secondary geology, from the chalk down to the new 
red sandstone, is due to England ; and the discovery of the leading 
natural divisions of that important portion of them which consti- 
‘tutes the oolite formations, was almost exclusively the work of Mr. 
William Smith. 
His earliest publication was a treatise on irrigation, 1806, a sub- 
ject on which his experiments gained him a medal from the Society 
of Arts. 
In 1801 he printed proposals for publishing accurate delineations 
