1863.] 



Presidenfs Address, 



35 



difficulty of what may be called " mountain geometry" — that geometry by 

 which we unite in imagination hues and surfaces observed in one part of 

 a complicated mountain or district with those in another, so as to form a 

 distinct geometrical conception of the arrangement of the intervening 

 masses. This is not an ordinary power; but Mr. Sedgwick's early mathe- 

 matical education was favourable to the cultivation of it. We think it ex- 

 tremely doubtful whether any other British geologist forty years ago could 

 have undertaken, with a fair chance of success, the great and difficult work 

 which he accomplished. 



Such are the direct and legitimate claims of Professor Sedgwick to the 

 honour conferred upon him by the award of the Copley Medal. But there 

 are also other claims, less direct, but which it would be wrong to pass 

 altogether unnoticed. It is not only by written documents that know- 

 ledge and a taste for its acquirement are disseminated ; and those who 

 have had the good fortune to attend Professor Sedgwick's lectures, or may 

 have enjoyed social intercourse with him, will testify to the charm and 

 interest he frequently gives to geology by the happy mixture of playful 

 elucidation of the subject with the graver and eloquent exposition of its 

 higher principles and objects. 



Professor Sedgwick, 

 Accept this Medal, the highest honour which it is in the power of the 

 Royal Society to confer, in testimony of our appreciation of the importance 

 of the researches which have occupied so large a portion of your life, and 

 which have placed you in the foremost rank of those eminent men by 

 whose genius and labours Geology has attained its present high position in 

 our country. 



The Council has awarded a Royal Medal to the Reverend Miles Joseph 

 Berkeley for his researches in Cryptogamic Botany, especially in INIycology. 



Mr. Berkeley's labours as a cryptogamic botanist for upwards of thirty- 

 five years, during which they have been more especially devoted to that 

 extensive and most difficult order of plants the Fungi, have rendered him, 

 in the opmion of the botanical members of the Council, by far the most 

 eminent living author in that department. These labours have consisted 

 in large measure of the most arduous and delicate microscopic investiga- 

 tion. Besides papers in various journals on Fungi from all parts of the 

 globe, and in particular an early and admirable memoir on British Fungi, 

 the volume entitled ' Introduction to Cryptogamic Botany,' published in 

 1857, is one which especially deserves to be noticed here. It is a 

 work which he alone was qualified to write. It is full of sagacious 

 remarks and reasoning ; and particular praise is due to the special and con- 

 scientious care bestowed on the verification of every part, however minute 

 and difficult, upon which its broad generalizations are founded. Mr. 

 Berkeley's merits are not confined to description or classification ; there 



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