Vol. 60.] ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. lxxi 



Department of the British Museum, where he remained for ten 

 years until he retired from the public service in 1891. While 

 there he had a still ampler field for the exercise of his special 

 gifts. After his retirement, his mental activity remaining un- 

 impaired, he was employed in preparing and arranging in the 

 Museum a stratigraphical collection of British rocks illustrative of 

 the geological formations of our islands. This task afforded, again, 

 full scope for his facility in drawing neat and effective sections, 

 which, with coloured maps also constructed by him, make the 

 specimens greatl} more interesting and instructive. 



In his later years he was often consulted as an expert in 

 questions of water-supply, search for coal, and other cognate 

 subjects. Among these employments the latest, on which he was 

 engaged almost up to the time of his death, was the coal-boring at 

 Dover, in relation to which he acted as geological adviser to the 

 promoters, and where his knowledge of the Secondar}' rocks enabled 

 him to recognize each stratigraphical horizon that was pierced 

 before the boring-rods entered the Palaeozoic formations. 



Etheridge became a Fellow of this Society in 1854, while still 

 Curator of the Museum at Bristol. After he settled in London 

 he was a constant attendant at our meetings, and some of his 

 phrases and mannerisms are pleasantly remembered by his surviving 

 contemporaries. He was elected into the Royal Society in 1871. 

 In 1880 he received the Murchison Medal, and in the same year 

 was elected President of the Geological Society. He was the first 

 recipient of the Bolitho Gold Medal of the lloyal Geological Societv 

 of Cornwall. His gentle, kindly nature gained him troops of 

 friends. He was ever ready to assist anyone who came to profit 

 by his knowledge and experience. Up to the last he had enjoyed 

 excellent health, and dined out with friends on the anniversary of 

 his birthday, on December 3rd. Soon thereafter, however, he 

 caught a chill, which rapidly developed into bronchitis, to which 

 he succumbed on the 18th of the same month, in the S5th year 

 of his age. A representative company of his friends, among whom 

 were a number of Fellows of this Society, gathered round his 

 grave in the Brompton Cemetery, and saw him laid not far from 

 where his old chief Murchison rests. 



In Maxwell Henry Close Ireland has lost her most distinguished 

 glacialist, one of the pioneers to whose labours we are not a little 

 indebted for the progress of glacial geology in the British Isles. He 



