ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS. 3 
(such as it is) of a bronze medal to accompany the money-prize 
and it is hoped that the results may be more encouraging. 
The Clarke medal for this year has been awarded to Mr. Selwyn, 
Director of the Geological Survey of Canada, and who formerly 
held a similar position in Victoria. This is now the seventh 
medal that has been awarded since its institution. 
The vacancy in our limited list of honorary members caused by 
the death of Charles Darwin has been filled by the election of M. 
Pasteur, the well-known French chemist. Pasteur, in the course 
of a long life, has made many valuable contributions to chemical 
science, but he is best known to us by his successful researches 
into the nature of fermentation and the propagation of zymotic 
diseases. It was he that proved that the only effective agency in 
fermentation is a living organism, and that if this is hindered from 
~ access to a fermentable liquid, or destroyed in the liquid, the 
fermenting process cannot go on. His valuable discoveries have 
brought him many honours in his own country. For example, in 
1878 he was made Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour, and 
in 1882 he was appointed a member of the French Academy. He 
is also one of the fifty foreign members of the Royal Society of 
London. Towards the end of last year a Bill was introduced into 
the Chamber of Deputies to increase the pension allowed him by 
the Government. On that occasion M. Paul Bert gave a brief 
sketch of the great chemist’s labours, from which I extract the 
following, as published in an American paper :— 
“He was the first to prove that fermentation is simply the result 
of the development and nutrition of an infinite number of infi- 
 nitely small organisms. He studied successively alcoholic, acetic, 
lactic fermentations, and the putrefaction of azotised matter, and 
arrived at the result that each is produced by a special organism. 
The question then arose as to the source of the germs producing 
fermentation, and among other theories was that of spontaneous 
generation. But this theory Pasteur disproved by showing that 
liquids most subject to change, like blood and milk, can be kept 
