xl PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



much valuable information, and we consequently look with a more 

 than common interest to the past career and qualifications of the 

 minister who holds the seals of the Colonial Office. Unfortunately 

 Sir William Molesworth's tenure of office was too short to enable him 

 to carry out his long-matured plan of colonial government, which, 

 while developing the resources of the Colonies, would at the same 

 time, we trust, have laid open their productions in natural history, 

 and their mineral and geological wealth. 



Lewis Weston Dillwyn was another of that band of natu- 

 ralists whose loss we have to deplore, and who was one of the oldest 

 Members of this Society. Born at Ipswich in 1778, he was placed 

 by his father in 1801 at the head of the celebrated manufactory of 

 Cambrian Pottery at Swansea. Under the influence of Mr. Dillwyn' s 

 taste for riatural history, this establishment soon became remark- 

 able for its beautiful and no less faithful paintings of birds, butter- 

 flies, shells, and flowers. About the year 1814, this manufactory 

 became known for the high character of its porcelain ware, under the 

 name of Swansea China. This high degree of excellence was in a 

 great measure owing to the introduction of a Kaolin of a superior 

 quality, brought from the beds of decomposed granite in Cornwall, 

 remarkable for its great abundance of felspar. 



But natural history in its various branches was ever the chief 

 pursuit of Mr. Dillwyn. In 1802 he published the first part of his 

 work on the British Confervae, and in 1804 he was elected a Fellow 

 of the Koyal Society. In 180.5 he published, with the assistance of 

 Mr. Dawson Turner of Yarmouth, * The Botanist's Guide.' In 1 8 1 7 

 he printed in two thick volumes a Descriptive Catalogue of Recent 

 Shells, arranged according to the Linnsean method. Nor did Mr. 

 Dillwyn confine his attention to the zoology of recent times. An 

 enthusiastic admirer of the then rapidly developing views of geology, 

 he communicated to the Royal Society, in the form of a letter 

 addressed to Sir Humphry Davy, a paper on Fossil Shells, which 

 was printed in the Philosophical Transactions ; and in the same year, 

 he presented to the University of Oxford an Index to Lister's * Hi- 

 storia Conchy liorum,' which was printed at the Clarendon Press. 

 In 1824 he addressed a second letter to Sir Humphry Davy on Fossil 

 Shells, in which he already pointed out that the gradual approxima- 

 tion in form to recent shells first observed in the secondary strata, is 

 also carried on through the tertiary formations, but that it is only in 

 the upper crag beds that any fossil can be completely identified with 

 a living species. 



For many years Mr. Dillwyn held an influential position both as 

 a politician and man of science in his adopted borough and county ; 

 and when, in 1848, the British Association for the Advancement of 

 Science held its Meeting at Swansea, Mr. Dillwyn, as one of its Vice- 

 Presidents, and as President of the Section of Zoology and Natural 

 History, was one of the first to welcome its most distinguished mem- 

 bers with a genuine and hearty hospitality. 



