l8 Preside7ifs Address. 



able powers and brilliant genius. The three had been united 

 in bonds of the closest friendship, cemented by a community 

 of taste and of interest in certain branches of science, the pursuit 

 of which was to Forbes a profession, to Thompson — a man of 

 means and leisure — an occupation ; but to Patterson — a man of 

 business — merely a relaxation. It occurred to him (the President) 

 that the acquisition by the Society almost simultaneously of 

 these mementoes of the three friends might fittingly be made the 

 occasion of a brief review of their lives. He could not recall 

 Mr. Forbes. He knew he had seen him ; but he remembered 

 Mr. Thompson very well indeed. He was the first of the three 

 to be called away. After speaking of the early life of Mr. 

 Thompson, the President pointed out that his first contribution 

 to the proceedings of one of the English learned societies seemed 

 to have been in 1833 — a communication on the Arctic Tisu and 

 other rare birds observed in Ireland made to the Zoological 

 Society of London. From that period up to the time of his 

 premature and lamented death he was a frequent and valued 

 contributor to the different English scientific journals. Visits 

 to London, and later the annual meetings of the British 

 Association for the Advancement of Science, brought him into 

 contact with the most eminent men of the day, who were not 

 slow in discovering what a power of observation, research, and 

 description lay in the modest, retiring young Irishman, who 

 soon took his place as their peer simply by the intuitive right 

 of genius among the foremost of them. Without reference to 

 Queen's College, which did not then exist, but to which they 

 since owed much, the Belfast of forty-five or fifty years ago took 

 a higher relative plane as regarded both literature and science 

 than did the much larger and wealthier city of to-day. Besides 

 Mr. Thompson, he remembered Dr. Hincks, Dr. Drummond, 

 Mr. Grattan, Mr. Hyndman, Mr. Richard Davidson, Sir James 

 Emerson Tennant, Rev. John Scott Porter, Mr. James Bryce, 

 Mr. Garrett, Mr. Bottomley, Dr. MacCormac, Mr. Gordon 

 Thompson, Mr. Edward Getty, Dr. Staveley, Mr. James 

 MacAdam, Dr. Andrews, and others only lately removed from 



