XXX rROCEEDINaS OF THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



and after iiis return to London acted for some time as precis-writei 

 to the Foreign Office, under Lord Aberdeen. 



It was owing to the friendship subsisting between Mr. Hamilton's 

 family and Sir Eoderick Murchison that the young diplomatist as- 

 pired*^ to make himself a geologist, was elected a Fellow of our 

 Society in 1831, and in 1832 entered, in conjunction with Professor 

 Edward Turner, on the joint duties of the Secretaryship. In March, 

 1835, he read his first paper, on a bed of recent marine shells occur- 

 ring near Elie, on the southern coast of Fifeshire (Proc. Geol. Soc. 

 vol. ii.) ; and having had the misfortune to lose his wife, he arranged 

 shortly after this date to undertake a long exploratory journey to 

 the Levant, in company with that estimable man and naturalist, 

 Hugh Strickland, so untimely snatched from life by an accident on a 

 railway. The main object to be attained was an examination of 

 Asia Minor, of which we possessed extremely little accurate infor- 

 mation, in a geographical, geological, and antiquarian point of view. 

 Mr. Strickland returned home, after their joint tour through the 

 Ionian Islands, the neighbourhood of Constantinople, and the Kata- 

 kekaumene, in 1835-36, whilst Mr. Hamilton proceeded alone on an 

 adventurous series of journeys — first into Armenia, then across the 

 whole length of Asia Minor, from east to west, again into the inte- 

 rior to the great Salt Lakes and the culminating point of the Ana- 

 tolian mountains. Mount Erjish, which he ascended and determined 

 to be 13,000 feet in height, and, further touching on the flanks of 

 the south-eastern Taurus and returning westward by another route 

 to Smyrna. 



Some of the more important geological observations collected 

 during this protracted riding-tour were communicated to the Society 

 in a paper published in the ' Transactions,' 2nd Ser. vol. v., treating 

 of the country between the trachytic peak of Hassan Hagli and- the 

 salt lake of Kodj -hissar, and of the district around Kaisariyeh, ' in- 

 cluding Erjish Dagh, the ancient Argseus. Further joapers con- 

 nected with these regions were : — the ''Account of a Tertiary deposit 

 near Lixouri, in the island of Cephalonia " (Proceedings, vol. ii.) ; 

 a general description of the Geology of the north-western part of 

 Asia IMinor, from the peninsula of Cyzicus, on the coast of the sea of 

 Marmora, with a full notice of the Katakekaumene, that district so 

 weU named the " burnt-up," of whose extensive craters and lava- 

 streams we thus obtained a lively picture. 



A portion of his wanderings in the Levant led to another paper, 

 published in the ' Proceedings,' vol. iii., '' On a few deta-ched places 

 along the coast of Ionia and Caria, and in the island of Ehodes ;" 

 but the entire journey was described fuUy in his ' Eesearches in 

 Asia ISIinor, Pontus, and Armenia,' published in two volumes in 

 1842. Mr. Hamilton adopted the narrative style of description, as 

 most suitable to long lines of examination carried through a country 

 of which even the geography was extremely vague ; and the various 

 archseological and natural-history details are thus mingled through- 

 out as they happened to take their place in the caary. The dispo- 

 sition of the author, good-humoured, pains-taking, liberal, and en- 



