244 



Me. Huxley, 



The Royal Medal for Physiology has been awarded to you for 

 your papers * On the Anatomy and Affinities of the Medusae.' 



In those papers you have for the first time fully developed their 

 structure, and laid the foundation of a rational theory for their classi- 

 fication, demonstrating with the greatest success the mutual relations 

 of their different groups, and their affinities to other animals. 



In following out these investigations, you have availed yourself 

 with extraordinary perseverance and intelligence, and with corre- 

 sponding success, of the opportunities afforded you for the examina- 

 tion of these animals whilst living, by your position as surgeon to 

 H.M.S. Rattlesnake during her surveying voyage, conducted by the 

 late Capt. Stanley on the Coasts of Australia and New Guinea. 



The results of these researches have been in part made known in 

 the papers for which the present Medal has been awarded, and in 

 others communicated to the Royal and other Scientific Societies. It 

 would be difficult to give even an outline of the discoveries there 

 made without entering into unnecessary detail, but it may be well 

 to observe that in your second paper in the Philosophical Transac- 

 tions ' On the Anatomy of Salpa and Pyrosoma,' the phenomena 

 commonly embodied in the term " alternation of generations,' as re- 

 ferred to the former genus, which, from the first suggestion of Cha- 

 misso have excited so much attention, and produced so much un- 

 satisfactory discussion, have received the most ingenious and elabo- 

 rate elucidation, and have given rise to a process of reasoning, the 

 results of which can scarcely yet be anticipated, but must bear in a 

 very important degree upon some of the most abstruse points of what 

 may be called transcendental physiology. 



Among the list of Fellows whose death we have to deplore during 

 the present year is that of Mr. William Tierney Clark, also a 

 Fellow of the Society of Civil Engineers. He was the constructor 

 of many important works in this country, such as — 



1. The Thames and Medway Canal. 



2. The Cast-iron Town Pier at Gravesend. 



3. The Suspension Bridge at Hammersmith. 



4. The Suspension Bridge at Marlow. 



5. The Cast-iron Bridge over the Avon at Bath. Besides many 

 useful works of minor importance. 



He made a magnificent design for a Suspension Bridge of the 

 River Neva at St. Petersburgh, for which he received a large Golden 

 Medal from the late Emperor Alexander of Russia. But his last 

 and most splendid work was the great Suspension Bridge over the 

 Danube at Pesth, in Hungary. The many political circumstances 

 attached to the origin of that bridge through the Count Szechenyi, 

 the great reformer of Hungary, the subsequent dangers of destruction 

 which the bridge escaped during the wars which desolated Hungary, 

 and the great difficulties which attended the execution of the un- 

 dertaking, independently of its importance as a work of art, have 

 given a European celebrity to that bridge above all others of its kind. 



