Annual Report of the Council. 217 



Manchester has lost one of its most distinguished members. 

 A touching indication of his affection for the Society was 

 the bequest of his bust, which now occupies an honoured 

 place amongst the similar memorials of famous members 

 in its possession. He was elected a member in 1839, under 

 the presidency of Dalton ; his latest communication to its 

 publications, a paper on " The Rapidity of the Growth of 

 Plants," was made in 1889, when he had nearly completed 

 his eighty-eighth year ; and at the time of his death he had 

 all but attained the advanced age of ninety-two, his birth 

 having taken place on December 27, 1 801, at Bredbury, near 

 Stockport. He has himself recorded in the Proceedings of 

 the Society how, about the year 18 16, he was "apprenticed" 

 to Mr. Kinder Wood, surgeon, of 51, King Street, Man- 

 chester, about the time when the Marsden Street School of 

 Medicine began its operations, the Midwifery Class being 

 conducted jointly by Mr. Wood and Mr. Partington ; how 

 at the same time he studied chemistry as a pupil of 

 Dalton's ; and how he descended a coal-pit near Oldham, 

 celebrated for serious explosions, in order to procure some 

 fire-damp for Dalton. It is possibly to this early experience 

 that his subsequent interest in geology may be traced ; in 

 1839 he published a volume entitled "Geological Sketches 

 and Observations on Vegetable Fossil Remains, &c, Col- 

 lected in the Parish of Ashton-under-Lyne, from the Great 

 South Lancashire Coal Field," which included an "Attempt 

 to explain the Original Formation of the Earth on the 

 Theory of Combination." Dr. Clay was at that time 

 practising as a surgeon at Ashton-under-Lyne, having 

 become a licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons, Edin- 

 burgh, in 1823. In 1842 he became extra licentiate of the 

 Royal College of Physicians of London, and in that year 

 removed to Manchester, performed his first operation in 

 ovariotomy, which was successful, and thus obtained the 

 distinction of being the first to introduce the operation 



