132 Royal Irish Academy. 



work was a contribution to a Flora of Ireland, published in the 

 Memoirs of the Survey; another work, under the name of Cylele 

 Hibernica, giving the geographical distribution of Irish plants, was 

 published by him in conjunction with A. G. More, !F. L. S. In 

 later years, amid all the distractions of his daily duties, engaged as he 

 was in labours that have produced in the Glasnevin Gardens one of 

 the best stocked collections in Europe for its size, his studies took 

 the special direction of investigations into Irish mosses and liverworts, 

 on which he contributed several Papers to the Proceedings of the 

 Academy. The scholars of other countries were not slow to recognise 

 the great worth of his researches, and the University of Leipzig 

 bestowed on him a Degree, in token of its appreciation of the sound- 

 ness of his knowledge, and the value of his observations. 



By the death of the Yery Rev. C. W. Eussell, D. D., President of 

 Maynooth College, Ireland has been deprived of one of her most re- 

 spected scholars. Born in 1812, in the County Down, and educated 

 in Maynooth College, he subsequently held for many years the Chair 

 of Ecclesiastical History in his College, of which he finally became 

 President in 1857. A man of singular refinement and courtesy, as well 

 as of a clear and penetrative intellect, he could not fail to exercise a 

 remarkable sway over the minds of those with whom he came in con- 

 tact. His sympathies with Irish Archaeology were manifested as far 

 back as 1851, in an interesting essay on the subject of early Christian 

 art in Ireland ; but his first work of consequence was his Life of the 

 celebrated linguist Cardinal Mezzofanti, published in 1858. Since 

 then many of his writings have attracted public notice, notably his 

 editions of several volumes of the Calendars of State Papers re- 

 lating to Ireland. In 1869 he published, in the Proceedings of the 

 Academy, the following] Papers: — "On an Agreement in Irish 

 (with fac-simile) between Gerald, first. Earl of Kildare, and the 

 Mac Eannalls," of the date of 1530; and "On the 'Duties upon 

 Irishmen' in the Kildare Eental-Book," in illustration of the 

 Mac Eannall Agreement, in which Dr. Russell recognised evidence of 

 a system of irregular exaction on the part of the Geraldines from the 

 Irish population outside the Pale. No more significant proof could 

 be given of the wide-spread appreciation of his merits as a scholar 

 and a writer than his appointment in 1869 to be a Member of the 

 Royal Commission on Historical MSS. 



