4-6 The Late Ramsay Heatley Traquair. [Sess. 



cloudy envelope we observe : there may be a solid interior 

 part, but the very fact that they have cloudy envelopes, when 

 their enormous distance from the sun precludes any notion 

 that they can be caused by heat received from him, proves 

 that in each case the nucleus of the planet possesses a con- 

 siderable store of heat, enough at least to maintain an immense 

 atmosphere of vapour against the intense cold of space. 



In a short paper of this kind it is of course impossible to 

 do justice to such an inquiry from the scientific point of view. 

 On this subject, indeed, there is no end to the making of 

 books, and we may well say in connection with such specula- 

 tions, " Quot homines tot sentential" I have tried to set 

 forth shortly the two problems under discussion, as they 

 present themselves to me from a fairly reasonable stand- 

 point. 



[A large number of slides were shown in illustration of this 

 paper.] 



THE LATE RAMSAY HEATLEY TRAQUALR, 

 F.R.S., M.D., LED. 



By The Pkesident. 



The Society has this year suffered a great loss by the death of 

 Dr Traquair, who has been one of its members for many years. 

 Although the lifework of this eminent ichthyologist has been 

 already published, it behoves us to say a word about his con- 

 nection with this Society and of his work as a field naturalist. 

 Dr Traquair was a geologist and botanist as well as a zoologist, 

 and acquired his world-wide fame as an interpreter of fossil- 

 fish remains. He has received the highest honours for his 

 works on this subject. Like Darwin, he began his career as a 

 field naturalist. When only ten years of age he was collecting 

 butterflies, moths, and shells. While a schoolboy at the 

 Edinburgh Institution he was a frequent visitor to " Luckie " 

 Somerville's, an old woman who kept a small shop in Eegister 



