ANNIVERSARY ADDRESS OF THE PRESIDENT. 



39 



of the Palaeontographical Society for 1870 relinquished the further 

 prosecution of the ' Eocene Bivalvia/ although he subsequently 

 added a small contribution (both to Mr. Edwards's and his own 

 portion) on special groups of Eocene Mollusca, which he was able 

 to do from resources afforded by his own collection and the collec- 

 tions of some friends. 



He maintained his activity both of mind and body up to the 

 day of hi& seizure with fatal illness, which took place on the 21st 

 and terminated with his death on the 26th of October last. He 

 was buried in the churchyard of Melton, near Woodbridge, in 

 view of the Crag of which the study had occupied so much of his 

 life. 



John Jeremiah Bigsby, M.D., F.R.S., one of the oldest of our 

 Fellows, and a man endeared to all who knew him by many amiable 

 qualities, died at his residence in Gloucester Place on the 10th 

 February in the present year. He was the son of Dr. John Bigsby, 

 and was born at Nottingham on the 14th August, 1792 ; so that at 

 his death he was in his 89th year. 



Deciding to follow his father's profession, he took his degree 

 of Doctor of Medicine at Edinburgh; and soon afterwards he 

 must have entered the military service, as, from a chance note 

 in one of his books, it appears that he was at the Cape in 1817. 

 In 1818 or 1819 he went to Canada as the Medical Officer to a 

 large detachment of a Grerman Rifle Regiment in the British 

 Service ; and in Canada he remained for several years performing 

 a variety of commissions intrusted to him by the Government. 

 Thus in the summer folio wiug his arrival in the Colony he was 

 sent to the Hawkesbury Settlement, where a severe epidemic of 

 typhus fever had broken out among the miserable Irish immigrants ; 

 and in the next year his marked taste for G-eological studies led 

 to his being commissioned to travel through Upper Canada and 

 make a general report upon its Geology. In 1822 he was ap- 

 pointed British Secretary and Medical Officer to the Boundary 

 Commission, wmich had already been in existence for three or four 

 years. In the journeyings to and fro necessitated by these em- 

 ployments Dr. Bigsby had many opportunities of making himself 

 acquainted with the geological phenomena of regions then very 

 little known ; and it is chiefly to these that his published papers 

 relate. In 1823 he was elected a Fellow of this Society. 



He appears to have returned to England about the year 1827, 

 and then proceeded to practice his profession at Newark in Not- 

 tinghamshire, remaining there until 1846, when he came to London, 

 where he afterwards resided until the end of his life. 



Dr. Bigsby was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1869, 

 and received the Murchison Medal from this Society in 1874. 



His published papers are about twenty-seven in number ; the 

 earliest, entitled, " Remarks on the Environs of Carthage Bridge, 

 near the mouth of the Genesee river/' appeared in Silliman's 

 American Journal in the year 1820. It was followed bv several 



e2" 



