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to the establishment of the true principles of surgical or medical 

 practice in those cases which require that minute criticism of the 

 symptoms of disease, upon the proper knowledge and study of which 

 the perfection of medical art must mainly depend. As a lecturer he 

 was not less distinguished than as an author; and he appears to 

 have possessed the art of fixing strongly the attention of his hearers, 

 not less by the just authority of his opinions, than by his ready com- 

 mand of apt and forcible illustrations. He enjoyed during many 

 years of his life a more than ordinary share of public favour in the 

 practice of his profession; and though not a little remarkable for 

 the eccentricities of his manners and an affected roughness in his 

 intercourse with his ordinary patients, he was generally kind and 

 courteous in those cases which required the full exercise of his skill 

 and knowledge, and also liberal in the extreme when the infliction 

 of poverty and privation was superadded to those of disease. 



Captain Henry Foster was a member of the profession which, under 

 all circumstances, is so justly celebrated for activity and enterprise, 

 and which, when wanting the stimulus of war, has on many occasions 

 lately distinguished itself by the zealous and successful cultivation 

 of those studies and the practice of those observations which are so 

 essentially connected with the improvement of navigation. He ac- 

 companied Captain Basil Hall, in the Conway, in his well-known 

 voyage to South America, and assisted him materially in his pendu- 

 lum and other observations. He afterwards joined Captain Parry 

 in the second of his celebrated voyages ; and at Port Bowen and 

 other stations within the Arctic Circle, he made, with the assistance 

 of Captain Parry and others, a most valuable and extensive series 

 of observations upon the diurnal variation, diurnal intensity and dip 

 of the magnetic needle, and upon other subjects connected with ter- 

 restrial magnetism and astronomical refractions, which formed an 

 entire fourth part of our Transactions for 1826, and was printed 

 at the especial expense of the Board of Longitude. For these papers 

 he received the Copley Medal; and the Lords of the Admiralty ac- 

 knowledged their sense of the honour which was thus conferred upon 

 the profession to which he belonged, by immediately raising him to 

 the rank of Commander, and by appointing him to the command of 

 the Chanticleer upon a voyage of discovery and observation in the 

 South Seas. It was during the latter part of this voyage that he 

 perished by an unfortunate accident; but I am happy to say that 

 the public is not likely to lose altogether the benefit of his labours, 

 and that he has left behind him an immense mass of observations of 

 various kinds, which the Lords of the Admiralty have confided partly 

 to this Society, and partly to the Astronomical Society, with a view 

 to their publication in such a form as may best serve the interests 

 of science, and may most tend iq establish the character and fame 

 of their lamented author. 



The Reverend Fearon Fallows was a distinguished cotemporary 

 of Sir John Herschel at Cambridge, and throughout his life an 

 ardent cultivator of astronomical science. In the year 1821 he was 



