HONOURS AWARDED TO LIVINGSTONE. 161 



Society, Lord Ellesmere, after handing the medal to Dr. Tidman, who repre- 

 sented the London Missionary Society, said : — 



"After the observations which have been addressed to this Meeting, on 

 the subject of Dr. Livingstone's merits, by a Eight Reverend Prelate, the 

 Bishop of Oxford, a Fellow of this Society, it has become scarcely necessary 

 for me to say anything in justification of an award, which I know will meet 

 with an assent as unanimous in this assembly as it did in our Council-room. 

 If its further vindication were necessary, I should appeal rather to the eye 

 than the ear. I should point to the pregnant sketches of the routes of 

 recent South African discoverers on our walls ; and borrowing from the 

 epitaph of Wren the simple word ' Circumspice,' request you to search for 

 yourselves, where Dr. Livingstone entered on the terra incognita of South 

 Africa, and where, at Loanda, he emerged. The satisfaction with which I 

 pronounce the award of our Society, unanimous as I am sure it is, is only 

 alloyed by the circumstance that Dr. Livingstone is not here in person to 

 receive it, as he might have been, but for that noble spirit of perseverance 

 and fidelity to his engagements with a native chief, which has launched him 

 again on his adventurous career. It is some consolation to feel that, in his 

 absence, I could not more appropriately confide this Medal than to the hands 

 of Dr. Tidman, the distinguished Secretary of the London Missionary 

 Society, which has found and sent forth an instrument for their sacred pur- 

 poses, so illustrious as Dr. Livingstone. Your character, Sir, and your 

 functions remind me, that if Dr. Livingstone has incidentally done that for 

 science which has deserved from us, as a scientific Society, our highest reward, 

 he has gone forth with even higher objects than those which we specially 

 pursue. Your presence here reminds me that his object has been the intro- 

 duction of Christian truth into benighted regions, and that the means and 

 method of his action have been strictly appropriate to his ends. Within these 

 two days a volume in the Portuguese language has been placed in my hands, 

 the record of a Portuguese expedition of African exploration from the East 

 Coast. I advert to it to point out the contrast between the two. Colonel 

 Monteiro was the leader of a small army — some 20 Portuguese soldiers and 

 120 Kaffres. I find in the volume no reason to believe that this armed and 

 disciplined force was abused to any purpose of outrage or oppression ; but 

 still the contrast is as striking between such military array and the solitary 

 grandeur of the missionary's progress, as it is between the actual achieve- 

 ments of the two ; between the rough knowledge obtained by the Portuguese 

 of some 300 leagues of new country, and the scientific precision with which 

 the unarmed and unassisted Englishman has left his mark on so many impor- 

 tant stations of regions hitherto a blank, over which our associate Mr. 

 Arrowsmith* has sighed in vain. To you then, Sir, I gladly confide this mark 



* Mr. Arrowsmith, a great Geographer and Constructor of Maps. 

 W 



