Vol. 6$.~] ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OP THE PRESIDENT. lxiii 



French, took refuge in England at the time of the Revolution of 

 1848. He thus became a domiciled Englishman, and was educated 

 at King's College School, London. At the age of one-and-twenty 

 he joined the Geological Survey of England under A. C. Ramsay, 

 shortly after the great enlargement of the staff in 1867. He was 

 employed in the survey of portions of Cheshire, Elintshire, and 

 Lancashire, and he prepared the published descriptions of the tracts 

 which he had examined. In the course of these official duties his 

 attention was particularly called to the importance of geological 

 structure in regard to questions of water-supply. He was the chief 

 motive power in the British Association's Committee on the Circu- 

 lation of Underground Waters, of which he was Secretary. He 

 also took part in the work of the Congresses convened by the Society 

 of Arts in 1878 and 1879 to consider the question of Water-Supply. 

 The contributions made by him to these meetings formed the basis 

 of a volume which he published in 1882, on ' The Water-Supply of 

 England & Wales.' In this useful compilation the details are 

 given of the several river-basins of the Kingdom, including their 

 length, area, population, and geological structure, together with 

 such other information as the author was able to procure bearing 

 on the main purpose of the book. 



His attention to questions of water-supply led to his obtaining 

 some amount of employment as a consulting geologist on this 

 subject. At last, in 1898, he gave up his appointment in the 

 Geological Survey, and devoted himself to private practice as a 

 mining and water-engineer at Blackpool. But probably in some 

 degree from bad health, aggravated by domestic unhappiness, he 

 seems to have gradually lost touch with science, and to have 

 dropped out of sight of his old friends, who remember him in his 

 earlier years as a versatile and lively companion. He died from 

 the effects of an accident on April 28th, 1906. 



The name of Robert Phillips Greg, which, appears in our 

 Obituary-list this year, cannot but excite a thrill of surprise in 

 the minds of many geologists and mineralogists of this country who 

 were under the belief that both the authors of the familiar and 

 indispensable ' Manual of the Mineralogy of Great Britain and 

 Ireland ' had long since passed out of the land of the living 

 Mr. Greg was born at Manchester on March 23rd, 1826, and from 

 his boyhood must have been imbued with a sense of the attractive- 

 ness of minerals. His father, an active and successful member of 



