520 
but from none of these labours will he derive more lasting fame, and — 
a higher title to the gratitude of posterity, than from the great im- 
provements in the agriculture of England which have followed from 
the example he has set; and from the completion he effected, of 
that great and difficult operation, the perfect drainage of the fens 
connected with the Bedford Levels. In this drainage he has finished 
a work fraught not only with private emolument to himself and the 
other proprietors of the vast tracts of valuable land recovered from 
a state of unwholesome and unprofitable swamps ; but pregnant also 
with national advantage, by augmenting the productive powers of 
the soil of England; and glorious, as forming the consummation 
of a work of ages, which beginning with the Roman conquerors 
of Britain, and continued at various intervals by the successive 
possessors of the country, has received its full accomplishment under 
the auspices of the noble family of Russell. 
In Mr. Ricuarp Bricut, of Ham Green, near Bristol, the Society 
has lost one of its first members. He was both a patron and cul- 
tivator of geology and mineralogy in a generation earlier than our 
own. Born in 1754, he died in 1840, at the age of 86. 
Throughout the more busy years of his life he was an intelligent 
merchant, much engaged in promoting the commercial improve- 
ments of his native city. Honest, warm, and disinterested, he won 
early and maintained steadily, during a period of more than sixty 
years, the universal love and respect of his neighbours ; and the best 
proof of this lay in that most enviable power he had acquired of 
conciliating and guiding men of all sects and opinions in the pursuit 
of objects of public utility, and the perfect confidence with which 
his friends resorted to his judgement and advice in the more deli- 
cate affairs of private life. 
Upwards of sixty years ago Bristol possessed many zealous and 
intelligent individuals who understood the value of science and had 
cultivated it; and several had already made good progress in form- 
ing valuable geological collections ; Catcott had bequeathed a large 
and interesting collection of minerals and organic remains to the 
Bristol Library. Bristol was then the cradle of English geology ; 
Townsend, Richardson, and Smith resided in its immediate neigh- 
beurhood, and there Smith commenced his most important genera- 
lizations. 
A love of chemistry acquired in youth under Priestley and Aikin, 
a personal intimacy with Whitehurst, and a commercial connexion 
with mines of Cornwall, made Mr, Bright an early collector, and 
William Smith and Richard Phillips lent him their willing assist- 
ance. 
Though the metropolis was never his place of residence, he availed 
himself of frequent visits thither in earlier years to acquire an ex- 
tensive and accurate knowledge of the pursuits of men of science. 
Before he had reached the age of manhood in 1774, we find him 
interested in the best construction of chemical furnaces, and study- 
ing Dr. Black’s ‘ Tables of Double and Single Attractions.’ In 
1780 he was a member of a private Philosophical Society in London, 
