XXIV PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



able to secure the zealous services of sucli men as Darwin. Let 

 Mr. Darwin be assured that we hope to welcome him often in better 

 health, and personally to renew the congratulations which must be 

 agreeable to him when received through the hands of one of his 

 earliest friends and most illustrious fellow-labourers. 



Sis C. Ltell having received the Wollaston Medal from the Pre- 

 sident, replied : — 



Mr. President, — I thank you, Sir, for the kind and complimentary 

 manner in which you have spoken of me and my labours ; and on the 

 part of my friend Mr. Darwin, I have been requested by him to 

 acknowledge his gratitude for the high honour conferred on him, 

 which, he says, comes the more imexpectedly because the state of 

 his health has made it impossible for him to attend the meetings of 

 the Society, or to have intercourse with its members as frequently 

 as he could have wished. But the Wollaston Medal, he adds, is the 

 more prized by him as a mark of your sympathy, because it cheers 

 him in the seclusion ia which he finds it necessary to pursue his 

 studies and researches ; and at the same time, in thanking you for 

 the honour, he says he shall consider it not so much as a reward 

 deserved for work already done (a sentiment in which we shall not 

 agree with him), as an incentive to future exertion. 



The President then delivered to Sir Eoderick Murchison, for the 

 use of Mr. Charles Peach, the balance of the Proceeds of the "Wol- 

 laston Fund, addressLUg him in the following words : — 



Sir E. I. Murchison, — To you. Sir Roderick, who have watched 

 with interest the zealous labours of Mr. C. Peach, who have per- 

 sonally known his good qualities, and who have employed in your 

 latest work some of his latest discoveries, we commit this slight 

 acknowledgement, in testimony that the Geological Society knows 

 and values the efforts of its children, whether they work at the 

 Land's End of the Comubii, or at the northern extremity of Cale- 

 donia. In each of these districts Mr. Peach has been a real and 

 sagacious discoverer ; from each of these districts he has generously 

 and immediately communicated the new knowledge he had gathered; 

 and in each of these districts his modest and manly worth have won 

 him true friends and honest admirers. Were this purse as full of 

 good coins as his communications on Palaeontology and Marine Zoo- 

 logy have been full of precious truths, it would better express the 

 estimation in which we hold him and his labours. 



Sir R. I. Murchison replied as follows : — 



Sir, — On the part of my friend Mr. Charles Peach, to whom the 

 Council unanimously adjudicated the Proceeds of the Wollaston Fimd, 

 I am requested to express to you his most grateful thanks for an 

 honour which he had not the remotest idea of ever obtaining, and 

 which, he says, will serve as a powerful stimulus to his future 

 exertions. 



