Ixxxii proceedings or the geological society. [April 1914, 



Herbert Kelsall Slater, son of the Rev. T. E. Slater, a 

 missionary in Mysore, was born on August 28th, 1875. He was 

 educated at Bishop's Stortford College and the Central College, 

 Bangalore. In 1894 he received an appointment in the Mysore 

 Geological Department ; but in 1901, and again in 1909, he returned 

 temporarily to England in order to study those branches of geology 

 in which his professional duties lay. 



The record of work which he has left in the publications of the 

 Mysore Geological Department, proves that by his death we have 

 lost one of the most promising of the younger geologists. The 

 last number, published since his death, contains a map and report 

 by him on crystalline rocks comparable to the Keewatin formation 

 of Canada. 



He had been elected a Fellow of our Society in 1902. 



On May 2nd, 1913, while in camp in the Shimoga District, 

 Slater trod upon a venomous snake and was repeatedly bitten. He 

 died about twelve hours later. 



Thomas Henry Cope, Managing Director of the firm of 

 Messrs. Cope Brothers, tobacco manufacturers, was an assiduous 

 student of geology, and devoted much attention to the volcanic 

 rocks of North Wales. He was elected into the Geological Society 

 in 1905. On April 28th, 1913, he died at the early age of 46. 



Russell Frost Gwinnell was elected into this Society in 1903. 

 He was engaged as lecturer at the Imperial College of Science, 

 South Kensington, and his life came to a premature end on March 

 15th, 1913. 



In addition to the losses from the ranks of this Society to which 

 I have referred, we have to deplore the deaths during the past year 

 of two workers of notable originality in the physical and biological 

 branches of geological science. 



George Howard Darwin, by profession an astronomer, was 

 engaged for many years in calculations of far-reaching importance 

 on the age and history of the Earth and its satellite. His first 

 paper on a geological subject, published in 1877, was devoted to 

 testing the theory that glacial epochs could be explained by a 

 Avandering of the pole in the Earth's figure due to geological earth- 

 movements together with associated changes in the obliquity of the 

 ecliptic. His conclusions, to quote his own words, were 

 ' absolutely inconsistent with the sensational speculations as to the causes 



