﻿PROCEEDINGS 



AT THE 



ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING, 

 15th FEBRUARY, 1861. 



Award op the Wollaston Medal. 



After the Report of the Council had been read, the President, 

 Leonard Horner, Esq., F.R.S. L. & E., delivered to the Foreign 

 Secretary, William John Hamilton, Esq., F.R.S., as representative 

 of Professor Bronn of Heidelberg, the Wollaston Medal, addressing 

 him as follows-: — 



. Mr. Hamilton, — The Council have awarded the "Wollaston Medal 

 to Professor Bronn of Heidelberg, for his long-continued and suc- 

 cessful labours in- aiding the progress of geological science in general, 

 and more particularly for the assistance he has afforded to the 

 progress of palaeontology by his ' Index Palseontologicus,' and espe- 

 cially by his last work, on the " Laws of Development of the Organic 1 

 World." 



A very wide range of subjects is embraced in his numerous publi- 

 cations, which extend over a period of nearly forty years. Among the 

 earner ones I may refer to his 'Travels in 1824-1827 in Switzer^ 

 land, the South of Prance, and Italy,' in which many important 

 topics of Natural History and Geology are treated of. These were 

 followed, in 1831, by a 1 description of the Italian tertiary formations 

 and their fossil shells and other organic contents. I may next 

 mention the well-known ' Lethgea Geognostica,' which has gone 

 through three editions since 1834, and which was followed by those 

 most useful volumes called the ' Index Palaeontologicus, or Review 

 of all known Possil Organisms,' prepared with the co-operation of 

 Professor Goppert of Breslau and of Hermann von Meyer of Frank- 

 furt. The compilation of this work, however laborious, must have 

 been beneficial, not only to the public, but to the author himself, by 

 obliging him to study that vast store of materials on which he has 

 since generalized with so much originality and success in several 

 treatises on the philosophy of paleontology. It is impossible to 



