XXlll 



PROCEEDINGS 



AT THE 



ANNUAL GENERAL MEETING, 

 25th FEBRUARY, 1857. 



Award of the Wollaston Medal and Donation Fund. 



The President having been inadvertently detained. Sir C. Lyell, 

 as Vice-President, was requested to take the Chair, and, the prehmi- 

 nary business having been concluded, he placed in the hands of Sir 

 R. I. Murchison the Wollaston Medal, awarded to M. Barrande, 

 saying :— 



Sir Roderick Murchison, — I am called upon very unexpect- 

 edly, in the absence of our President, to explain to the Meeting the 

 grounds on which the Council have awarded the Wollaston Medal of 

 this year to M. Barrande, and to request you to take charge of the 

 same and to transmit it to its owner. I might well have hesitated 

 to undertake this task, to do full justice to which would be no easy 

 matter, had I not had the good fortune in the course of the last 

 summer to visit the neighbourhood of Prague, and to explore, in 

 company with M.. Barrande, the field of his successful labours. In 

 this way I had an opportunity of learning by what means this emi- 

 nent palaeontologist had been able, after more than twenty years of 

 persevering research, to accumulate single-handed so wonderful a col- 

 lection of organic remains. I saw several of the large quarries, which 

 he had opened at his own cost for the express purpose of collecting 

 fossils, and heard him converse in their native Bohemian with the 

 workmen whom he has taught to be his skilful fellow-labourers. I 

 believe I am under the mark if I estimate at 1500 the number of 

 new species of Invertebrata which M. Barrande has added to palaeon- 

 tology ; and it is a singular fact that all the Bohemian fossils found 

 by him in palaeozoic strata older than the Devonian have proved, 

 with the exception of a few brachiopods, to belong to species unknown 

 elsewhere. When I beheld the quantity and beautiful preservation 

 of the fossil stores heaped up in his Museum at Prague, they ap- 

 peared to be more like the results of a Government Survey than the 

 acquisitions of a private individual, and I felt convinced that no 

 amount of zeal or pecuniary resources could have achieved this ob- 

 ject had not the collector possessed also a profound knowledge of 



