7 



which this decision has been founded to the more detailed reports of 

 the Council, which will be read to you by your Secretary Dr. Roget; 

 but I gladly avail myself of this opportunity of expressing my respect 

 for the great talents and varied attainments of the distinguished phi- 

 losopher upon whom this mark of honour has been conferred. If I 

 regard him as occupied with the highest and most important prac- 

 tical duties connected with our system of academical education, and 

 in providing and arranging the materials by which it is conducted, 

 or the principles upon which it should be based, he will be found in 

 the foremost rank of those whose labours do not deserve the less 

 honour because they commonly absorb the entire time and attention 

 of those who are engaged in them, and thus close up the avenue to 

 those distinctions which are almost exclusively confined to great 

 discoveries in science, or to important productions in literature. 

 When I read his essays on the architecture of the middle ages, on 

 subjects of general literature, or on moral and metaphysical philo- 

 sophy, exhibiting powers of mind so various in their application 

 and so refined and cultivated in their character, I feel inclined to 

 forget the profound historian of science in the accomplished man of 

 letters, or the learned amateur of art ; but it is in his last and highest 

 vocation, whilst tracing the causes which have advanced or checked 

 the progress of the inductive sciences from the first dawn of philoso- 

 phy in Greece to their mature development in the nineteenth cen- 

 tury, or in pointing out the marks of design of an all-wise and all- 

 powerful Providence in the greatest of those works and operations of 

 nature which our senses or our knowledge can comprehend or ex- 

 plain, that I recognise the productions of one of those superior minds 

 which are accustomed to exercise a powerful and lasting influence 

 upon the intellectual character and speculations of the age in which 

 they flourish. 



It is now three years since the Royal Medal was adjudged to Mr. 

 Lubbock for his Researches on the Tides ; and the Council have 

 availed themselves of the first opportunity which was presented by the 

 recurrence of the cycle of the subjects, which are successively enti- 

 tled to the Royal Medals, to make a similar award to his colleague 

 and fellow-labourer in this very interesting and important series of 

 investigations. It is not for me to attempt to balance the relative 

 claims and merits, in connection with this subject, of these two 

 very eminent philosophers ; it is quite sufficient to remark that the 

 first who ventured to approach this difficult and long-neglected in- 

 quiry was the first also who was selected for honour : but I have long 

 noticed with equal pride and satisfaction the perfect harmony with 

 which they have carried on their co-ordinate labours, apparently in- 

 different to every object but the attainment of truth, and altogether 

 superior to those jealousies which too frequently present themselves 

 amongst rival and cotemporaneous labourers in the same depart- 

 ments of science. • 



I regret to observe that the second Royal Medal for the present 

 year has not been awarded, and that it has consequently lapsed to 

 the Executors of his late Majesty. It was proposed that it should be 



