Vol. 65.] ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OP THE PRESIDENT. lxvii 



Saint-Hilaire by the boldness and grandeur of his philosophic con- 

 ceptions, he may also claim by the elegance of his style to be the 

 direct successor of Buff on, while in precision and lucidity he ranks 

 with the great Cuvier. 



In the death of Dr. Eriedrich Schmidt of St. Petersburg, which 

 took place on November 21st, 1908, our Society laments the loss, 

 not only of one of its most eminent "Wbllaston Medallists, but of one 

 of the last survivors of the heroic age of Geology. For the last 

 half-century the name of Schmidt has been a 'household word' 

 among the workers in the Lower Palaeozoic rocks and fossils all 

 the world over. His first work on the ' Silurische Formation von 

 Esthland, jNord Li viand & CEsel,' which was published in 1856, 

 made him the chief authority on the Lower Palaeozoic rocks of the 

 Baltic Provinces of liussia ; and all his subsequent career has been 

 practically devoted to the working-out of the detailed stratigraphy 

 and palaeontology of those rocks, and to the description and illus- 

 tration of their characteristic fossils. 



Schmidt was the contemporary and occasional colleague of Eich- 

 wald, Pander, Keyserling, De Verneuil, Murchison, and Barrande. 

 But in the matter of our present knowledge of the Lower Palaeozoic 

 rocks and fossils of the Prussian Baltic Provinces, we might almost 

 assert that we owe it to Schmidt's personal researches and publica- 

 tions alone. 



la his first paper (already mentioned), published in 1856, he 

 established the general succession ; and in his paper on the 

 ' Silurian Strata of the Baltic Provinces,' published in our own 

 Journal in 1882, he proved that the three faunal divisions of the 

 Lower Palaeozoic rocks (Cambrian, Ordovician, and Silurian) are all 

 present, and are collectively separable into some fifteen separate 

 zones. 



The Trilobites of the whole succession have been admirably 

 described and illustrated by him in his great work, the < Revision 

 der Baltisch-Silurischen Trilobiten,' commenced in 1877, and com- 

 pleted two years ago. In addition, he has published monographs 

 on the Eurypteridae and Leperditice, and other works ; and at the 

 time of his death he had commenced a work on the Brachiopoda of 

 the Baltic Provinces, of which he published a preliminary Note ass 

 late as May of last year. 



To the last, Schmidt not only retained that youthful delight in 



