442 



these Gentlemen was ordered to be read to the Society and printed 

 in its proceedings ; and a Committee has been appointed to consider 

 or the best means of carrying into effect the measures recommended in 

 that Report. 



A paper, delivered to the Secretary at one of the ordinary meetings 

 of the Society, entitled " Requisition for a Special General Meeting 

 of the Royal Society," and signed by six of the Fellows, stating the 

 purposes of such special meeting to be *' to consider and determine 

 the necessity of expunging from the Journal Book of the Society" 

 certain minutes of its proceedings, and also " to consider the princi- 

 ple of a resolution, passed at an ordinary meeting of the Society, by 

 which their thanks were withheld from the author of a work presented 

 by him to the Society," having been laid before H. R. H. the Presi- 

 dent and Council, they were unanimously of opinion that no spe- 

 cial meeting has the power of expunging minutes of past proceedings 

 of the Society. The Council accordingly ordered a Special General 

 Meeting of the Society to be called, for the purpose of taking into con- 

 sideration only the latter of the two objects stated in the requisition. 



Mr. Monk Mason having, in a letter addressed to H. R. H. the 

 President, offered the Great Vauxhall Balloon for the use of the So- 

 ciety, a Committee was appointed to take this proposition into con- 

 sideration and to report thereupon to the Council. 



The Council have awarded a Copley Medal to Baron Berzelius for 

 his application of the Doctrine of Definite Proportions in Deter- 

 mining the Constitution of Minerals. To the labours of this distin- 

 guished chemist,, science is indebted for many of the facts by which the 

 Laws of Definite Union were established. As early as 1807, soon after 

 Dalton and Gay-Lussac had made known their views on this vital 

 branch of modern chemistry, Berzelius commenced an elaborate ex- 

 amination on the proportions in which the elements of compound 

 bodies are united, beginning with the salts, and subsequently extend- 

 ing his researches to all other departments of his science, as well to 

 the products of organized existences as to those of the mineral 

 world. The first part of the inquiry appeared in a series of essays in 

 the Afhandlingar i Fysik, Kemi, och Mineralogie, t. iii. iv. v. and 

 vi., as also in the Memoirs of the Academy of Sciences of Stock- 

 holm, for the year 1813. Since that period he has almost constantly 

 been more or less occupied with researches bearing, or illustrative 

 of, the same subject. His numerous analyses of minerals enabled 

 him at once to elucidate their nature through the light derived from 

 the laws of definite combination, and at the same time to supply in 

 the composition of minerals a splendid confirmation of the universa- 

 lity of those laws. It is for this branch of his inquiry that the Copley 

 Medal has been awarded. 



A Copley Medal is also awarded to Francis Kiernan, Esq., for his 

 discoveries relative to the Structure of the Liver, as detailed in his 

 paper communicated to the Royal Society, and published in the Phi- 

 losophical Transactions for 1833. 



Before the researches of Mr. Kiernan, the liver was supposed to 

 consist of two dissimilar substances, composed of brown parenchy- 



