ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. XXIX 



searches in Mesopotamia produced also a series of brilliant antiquarian 

 discoveries among the ruined cities of Assyria and Babylonia. On 

 his return from the East, he was appointed to the Geological Survey 

 of India ; but his health, injured among the swamps of Assyria, 

 failed entirely in India, and he died on his passage homewards, at 

 the early age of 37. We are indebted to him for a notice of his 

 geological observations on the structure of the plains of tho Tigris 

 and the mountain- ranges of Western Persia*. 



Mr. David Musket, besides communicating to the Society a sec- 

 tion of the strata in the Forest of Dean, has claims on the respectful 

 recollection of metallurgists on account of the attention he paid to 

 the processes of the Iron-manufacture, first in the vicinity of Glasgow, 

 and in later life in the Forest of Dean. In the latter district he was 

 long resident, and no one was better acquainted with the peculiar 

 oxides of iron thero abundant, or more fertile of ingenious inventions 

 in tho process for smelting these or the very different ores in 

 Lanarkshire. 



Sir G. T. Staunton, F.R.S. While accompanying the celebrated 

 embassy to China conducted by Lord Macartney, Sir G. Staunton 

 found leisure to attend to a subject which has grown much in im- 

 portance since the date of his volume (1797). He ascertained the 

 quantity of sediment in the water of the Yellow River (-jLth), tho 

 quantity of water transported daily by this great stream, and the pro- 

 bable time in which, at the ratio assumed, the Yellow Sea (125,000 

 square-miles) would be filled up (21,000 years). Died August 10, 

 1859, aged 79. 



Mr. Samuel Stutchbury, for some time Curator of the Bristol 

 Institution, and remarkably skilled in the various branches of natural 

 history, passed a portion of the later years of his life in the Geological 

 Survey directed by the Government in Australia. We are indebted 

 to him for a valuable account of tho Low Coralline islands of the 

 Pacific f, for notices of Pachyodon, Avictda, and Plesiosaurus, and, 

 in conjunction with the late Dr. Kiley, for a memoir on the Thecodont 

 Saurians of the Magnesian Conglomerate near Bristol. Died February 

 ]2, 1859, aged 61. 



The name of Professor Cli;vi land of Now England, familiar to 

 us by the application of it to a frequent kind of felspar, which ho 

 carefully studied, will also be gratefully remembered by geologists 

 who are acquainted with bis useful treatise OH -Mineralogy. 



Ai, i:\andeh voir Humboldt was bom in 17'ii), the annua magma 

 of births, which also gave to Geology William Smith and George 

 Cuvier. How differenl their destiny] — alike only in the eminent 



services each rendered to Bcience, Smith, thoroughly English, never 



quitted for a day the island whose stratification was the study of bifl 



* Gcol. Journ. vii. 2Gi5, ls.'j?. f Journul of tl>.- West of England. 



