VoL 70.] AirsmrEBSAJftT addkess or the president, lxxix 



managed the Newbury Collieries, but on the retirement of Mr. Gr. 

 C. Greenwell, he succeeded him in his post and occupied it for 

 -10 years. During this period McMurtrie took a prominent part in 

 the settlement of the difficulties which arose from time to time 

 between owners and men, and was largely instrumental in intro- 

 ducing the sliding scale and in establishing a Conciliation Board. 

 During his management of the Radstock Collieries he deepened the 

 pits below the Radstock Series, which alone had been worked, and 

 succeeded in winning the Farrington Series of seams, thus adding 

 considerably to the local coal-resources. 



McMurtrie was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society in 

 1873. Although he did not contribute to our Journal, he made his 

 profound knowledge of the Somerset Coalfield available in other 

 ways. Sir Joseph Prestwich, in his report on the coalfield to the 

 Royal Coal Commission of 1871, included a valuable section drawn 

 by McMurtrie to illustrate the relative positions of the productive 

 strata, the form of the coalfield, and its extension beneath the 

 Mesozoic formations. Thirty years later McMurtrie eontributed 

 a tabular statement of the sequence of strata near Radstock to the 

 Royal Commission on Coal- Supplies, which reported in 1905. 



Other papers relating to the geology, archaeology, and mineral 

 resources of the district that he knew so well, appeared in the 

 publications of the Somerset local scientific societies, in the 

 Reports of the British Association, the Transactions of the Insti- 

 tution of Mining Engineers, and the Proceedings of the South 

 Wales Institute of Engineers ; of the last-named Institute he was 

 President in 1879-81. A valuable collection of fossil plants from 

 the Coal-Measures of Somerset was made by McMurtrie, and was 

 referred to by Morris in the ' Geological Magazine ', vol. v. It was 

 presented to the British Museum in 1894, and is now exhibited 

 among the Natural History collections. McMurtrie died on 

 February 2nd, 1911, at the age of 71. 



Hexey Franklin Parsons, M.D.. was bom on February 27th 

 1816. He was educated at private schools and at St. Mary's 

 Hospital, subsequently enjoying a distinguished career at the 

 London University, where he gained the Gold Medal in Physiology, 

 Histology, & Comparative Anatomy in 1865, and that in Public 

 Health in 1876. After six years of medical practice, he was 

 appointed Medical Officer of Health for the Goole and Selby 

 district of Yorkshire in 1871, and was made a Medical Inspector 



