44 



Anniversary Meeting. 



[Nov. 30., 



the exception of our former President, the venerable Sir E. Sabine, of that 

 celebrated band of Arctic voyagers, which during the early part of the 

 century added so much to our renown as navigators and discoverers. Sir 

 George was further the companion of Franklin and Richardson in that 

 overland journey to the American Polar Sea, in which human endur- 

 ance was tried to the uttermost compatible with human existence, as 

 is related by two of the party in that modest but thrilling narrative 

 which will ever hold a unique place in the annals of geographical dis- 

 covery. Of our Indian explorers four have been taken away, namely, 

 Major- General Sir Andrew Waugh, for many years Director of the 

 Great Trigonometrical Survey of India ; and shortly afterwards his 

 friend, Col. Montgomerie ; Dr. Oldham, for a quarter of a century 

 the Director of the Geological Society of India ; and Dr. Thomas 

 Thomson, my fellow-traveller in the Himalaya, whose report of ex- 

 plorations in Western Tibet contains the first connected account of 

 the physical and natural features of that remote and difficult country. 

 Lieut. -General Cameron survived but for one year our late Fellow, 

 Sir Henry James, his predecessor in the Direction of the Ordnance 

 Survey of Great Britain. In the Rev. James Booth we have lost 

 a mathematician of high attainments. The Rev. W. B. Clarke, of 

 New South Wales, was the author of many papers on the Meteorology 

 and Geology of the Cape of Good Hope, Australia, and the Pacific. 

 The Rev. R. Main, Director of the Radcliffe Observatory, was for 

 nearly half a century an indefatigable observer. Lastly, Earl Russell, 

 the distinguished statesman, and the earnest advocate, whether in the 

 Government or in Parliament, of every measure for the promotion of 

 scientific inquiry. He it was who, when Prime Minister in 1849, wrote 

 to the then Earl of Rosse, President of the Society, offering to place 

 £1,000 (now known as the Government Grant) on the annual votes of 

 Parliament, if the Council would undertake to apportion that sum 

 among scientific workers requiring aid in their researches. 



Of Foreign Fellows our losses are a great Chemist in Becqnerel, of 

 Paris, whose election took place upwards of forty years ago ; a great 

 Physiologist in Claude Bernard, also of Paris ; the father of Mycology, 

 and for long the patriarch of Scandinavian Botanists, Elias Fries ; 

 a most distinguished Physicist and the recipient of both a Rumford 

 and Copley medal in Regnault ; a veteran Anatomist in Weber ; and 

 in Secchi, of Rome, an Astronomer of astonishing activity, the author 

 of more than three hundred separate contributions to the science of 

 which he was so great an ornament. 



In matters of Finance I may with satisfaction refer you to our 

 Treasurer's Balance Sheets. 



It will be in your recollection that Mr. T. J. Phillips Jodrell placed 

 in 1874 a sum of £6,000 at the disposal of the Society, with the view 



