Iviii PROCEEDI^'GS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. [May 1 898, 



placed in charge also of a working-men's mission in that city. In 

 1884 he was raised to the rank of Professor at the College. He 

 had travelled much. With Sir Archibald Geikie he went on a 

 geological expedition to the Eocky Mountains, as well as to Africa ; 

 and he had also visited more recently Australia, China, and Japan. 

 In his book 'Tropical Africa,' he gives a lively and eminently 

 readable account of his travels in the interior of that continent. It 

 showed him to be an acute observer, with a faculty for giving 

 vivid accounts of what he saw and learnt, and perhaps it was, on 

 the whole, the most generally popular of his works. Many of his 

 theories — that on the subject of native labour, for instance — excited 

 much opposition ; he even went so far as to look forward to the 

 time when the African elephant would be extinct, because he 

 believed that the slave-traffic and trade in ivory were inseparably 

 bound together. But the book was too graphic and too accurate to 

 suffer much from the extreme views of its author on a few 

 questions of this kind, and it remains one of the best and most 

 fascinating books of its class, so far as the general reader is con- 

 cerned. His well-known work, ' J^atural Law in the Spiritual 

 World,' has passed through many editions and has been translated 

 into French, German, Dutch, and Norwegian. He was elected a 

 Fellow of this Society in 1877. He died on March 11th, 1897, at 

 Tunbridge Wells, having been in weak health for some time 

 previously. 



THO]\rAS Tate died on April 27th, 1897. He communicated a paper, 

 ' Notes on Recent Borings for Salt and Coal in the Tees District,' 

 to the Society in 1892, and other papers to the Proceedings of the 

 Yorkshire Geological Society and the ' Naturalist.' He resided at 

 Leeds, and was elected a Fellow of this Society in 1879. 



Sir Augustus Wollaston Feais^ks, K.C.B., President of the 

 Society of Antiquaries, died in London, on May 21st, 1897, after 

 some weeks' illness, in his 72nd year. 



Sir A. W. Franks was the elder son of Captain Frederick 

 Franks, E.N., and Frederica, daughter of Sir John Sebright. He 

 was born in 1826 at Geneva, where, and at Eome, his parents lived 

 during his boyhood, and received his education at Eton and at Trinity 

 College, Cambridge. Even in his college days he developed the 

 taste for mediaeval archaeology, upon which in later Hfe he became 

 the leading authority, and he published in 184-9 a volume of 



