ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. XXUl 



coal-fields. He eventually amassed a very extensive collection of 

 these and other fossils, and in 1838 published a work entitled 'Ante- 

 diluvian Phytology,' containing numerous plates taken from his own 

 drawings. The chief labours of Mr. Artis were antiquarian, and his 

 principal work one which appeared in 1823, entitled ' Roman Anti- 

 quities, or the Durobrivse of Antoninus identified, in a series of plates 

 illustrative of the excavated remains of that Roman station in the 

 parish of Castor, Northamptonshire.' The late Earl Fitzwilliam 

 liberally assisted him in the publication of this work, and he also 

 found most kind patrons in the late Duke of Bedford and Lord Hol- 

 land. The last twenty-two years of his life Mr. Artis passed at 

 Castor, near Peterborough, ardent in the pursuit of the Roman re- 

 mains entombed beneath the surface around him. His labours were 

 'not without their reward, and eventually a mass of information and 

 many objects of interest were obtained. It is recorded of him, as 

 illustrating his persevering search for Roman remains, that ha^dng 

 discovered at Sibson such antiquities (now in the Woburn collection), 

 he bivouacked with his men in the depth of the winter of 1846-7 in 

 a wood adjoining, until the weather caused his party to desert and 

 leave him. He died at Doncaster on the 24th of December, 1847, 

 and his remains were carried to the churchyard of Castor, where they 

 now rest in the centre of his great field of research, the old Roman 

 town. 



We have to deplore the loss, from among our foreign members, of 

 the great chemist, Jacob Berzelius. This justly celebrated man 

 was born in 1779, at Linkoping, in Eastern Gothland. He studied 

 at Upsala, Gottingen, and Paris ; Professor Afzelius, a nephew of 

 Bergman, filling the chair of chemistry when he was at the former 

 place. It is also stated that Gahn, the discoverer of phosphorus in 

 bones, was the Swedish master of chemistry to Berzelius. 



Berzelius would appear early to have turned his attention to mine- 

 ralogy, a science which, when we regard its important bearing upon 

 many points in geology, we may hope again to see more cultivated 

 than it has lately been in this country by those who occupy them- 

 selves with geological investigations. In 1806, Berzelius and Hi- 

 singer commenced a periodical work, entitled ' Afhandlingar i Fysik, 

 Kemi och Miner alogi,' which extended to six volumes, the last being 

 published in 1818. These volumes contain forty-seven papers by 

 Berzelius, the greater part consisting of the analyses of minerals. 



In 1814 he published, in Swedish, an octavo tract, entitled 'An 

 attempt to establish a pure scientific System of Mineralogy, by means 

 of the Electro-chemical Theory and the doctrine of Chemical Pro- 

 portions.' He therein lays it down as a principle that mineralogy is 

 only a part of chemistry, and that the chemical is the only scientific 

 mode of treating it. He viewed each mineral compound as a salt, 

 consisting of an acid and a base, and considered that if each com- 

 pound were exposed to the action of a voltaic pile, one part would 

 be attracted to the positive, the other to the negative pole. 



In a paper pubhshed previously (in 1811 or 1812), taking up an 



