Yol. 68.] ANNIVERSAEY MEETING MrECHISON MEDAL. xli" 



work in life has been much influenced by two Wollaston Medallists, 

 Prof. P. von Groth and the late Prof. Maskelyne. In the year 

 1876, when I was Demonstrator in Physics for Prof. Clifton at 

 Oxford, I saw a new book lying on his study table : it was Groth's 

 ' Physikalische Kristallographie,' then just published. I was so 

 much interested in scanning its pages that T ordered a copy, and 

 read it slowly and carefully at my leisure. Prof. Clifton mentioned 

 my interest in crystals to his Oxford colleague, that enthusiastic 

 crystallographer. Prof. Maskelyne, and I was invited to call at the 

 British Museum ; the visit had for result a brief official connexion 

 with him in the Mineral Department, and, what was still more 

 important, a long-continued friendship that ended only with his 

 life thirty-four years later. To both of them I am thus under a 

 heavy debt of gratitude. 



Award of the Mtjechison Medal. 



The Peesidext then presented the Murchison Medal to Prof. 

 Louis Dollo, P.M.G.S., addressing him as follows : — 



Prof. Dollo, — 



The Council have awarded you the Murchison Medal in recog- 

 nition of the importance of your numerous contributions to our 

 knowledge of Vertebrate Palseontology. Twenty-three years ago 

 they encouraged your early work by the award of the Lyell 

 Fund, and since that time the Society has continued to follow your 

 researches with interest, enrolling you first as a Foreign Corre- 

 spondent and then as a Foreign Member. The promise of your 

 earliest publications on the Wealden Reptiles of Bernissart has 

 been fulfilled in your later papers on the Cretaceous Mosasaurians 

 and various other vertebrate fossils ; and your philosophical insight 

 has illumined many difficult problems which other authors found 

 obscure. I need only refer to your interesting essays on the 

 evolution of the Dipnoan Fishes, on the auditory apparatus of 

 Mosasaurians and Ichthyosaurians, and on the feet of Marsupials, 

 which are classics in modern palseontological literature. Your 

 demonstration of the principle of 'irreversibility' in organic 

 evolution has led to important conclusions which are now generally 

 appreciated ; and your treatise on ethological palaeontology has 



VOL. LXVIII. d 



