ANNIVERSARY MEETING. WOLLASTON MEOAL. XIV 



gracious Sovereign and from the Emperor of the French ; and I 

 have now only to assure you that no one of his well-merited honours 

 will be more highly estimated by him, than the marked approba- 

 tion of his brother geologists in bestowing upon him their highest 

 distinction, the WoUaston Medal. 



On delivering to the Secretary the Balance of the Proceeds of the 

 WoUaston Fund, the President addressed him as follows : — 



Mr. Prestwich, — I have great pleasure in placing in your hands 

 the proceeds of the WoUaston Fund for this year, awarded by the 

 Council of the Geological Society of London to M. Deshayes ; and 

 in requesting you to transmit them to that gentleman, I must beg 

 you to inform him that the Council have came to this decision, not 

 only in recognition of the great services he has already rendered to 

 palaeontology, and especially to that of the tertiary epoch by the 

 exertions he has bestowed on the development of the molluscous 

 Fauna of the Paris basin, but more especially with the view of 

 assisting him in the further completion of his great work, * Description 

 des CoquiUes Fossiles des Environs de Paris.' Those who hke yourself 

 have laboured at the investigation of the different beds of the Paris 

 basin can best appreciate the merits of M. Deshayes. We all know 

 that for many years he has regularly spent a considerable por- 

 tion of each year in examining the different localities in the neigh- 

 bourhood of Paris, for the purpose of making himself acquainted 

 with their fossil molluscous fauna, and of verifying in situ the occur- 

 rence of specimens collected by others, and that each successive year 

 has greatly added to the number of new species. 



It is also well known that since the publication of that great work 

 (from 1824 to 1836), the attention of many new labourers in the 

 field of tertiary geology has been directed to this subject. ^They have 

 not only settled satisfactorily the order of succession of the beds, but 

 have collected their organic remains in large numbers, and these 

 have in most cases been brought under the notice of M. Deshayes in 

 addition to those collected by himself. Thus finding the number of 

 new species rapidly increasing, and that his own collection contained 

 many hitherto unpublished specimens, he resolved to publish a sup- 

 plement to his original work, now become doubly necessary, since 

 without a knowledge of these new forms the true correlation of the 

 Paris beds with those of England, Belgium, and Germany is impos- 

 sible. Such is the accumulated mass of materials, that he has now 

 about six hundred new species to figure and describe, requiring from 

 sixty to seventy plates, in the preparation of which considerable pro- 

 gress is already made. At the same time he proposes to re-examine 

 the species described in his former work, and to class them all 

 according to the present position of geology and conchology, thus 

 bringing up the materials of his old work to the standard of the 

 new one. 



The Council would also wish by this award to testify their appre- 

 ciation of M. Deshayes' talents as a conchologist, and of the manner 

 in which he has made the study of recent MoUusca subservient to 



