74 Proceedings of the Boyal Society 
and his principles, had for a time debarred him. In the only letter 
from him of at all recent date which I possess, — it was written in 
1859, and was evidently the result of considerable physical exer- 
tion, — there is pleasing evidence that neither advancing age, nor 
expatriation, nor twenty years of solitude and of struggle with con- 
stitutional depression, had quenched his sympathy with his friends, 
or his interest in the cause of science. In it I find a touching 
enumeration of the losses which he had suffered in the rapidly 
narrowing circle of his G-enevese contemporaries and relatives ; — 
I find also expressions of lively sympathy with the younger gene- 
ration, and their family connections ; — ample proofs that during 
years of silence and seeming forgetfulness, both his earlier and his 
later friends in Edinburgh, and elsewhere in Scotland, had never 
long been absent from his thoughts ; — and inquiries, made with an 
almost tremulous anxiety, as to some of those of whom he had had 
no recent tidings. Especially did his recollection then turn towards 
the families of Gumming and of Mackenzie, amongst whom there 
still survived a few of those friends of 1806, with whom he had 
shared the intellectual and social enjoyments of his first and 
happiest Scottish sojourn. I venture to give these details, because 
his friends were not all aware of the warmth and unalterable 
sincerity of his attachment, to which, unless an opportunity was 
directly offered through a letter or a visit, he rarely if ever sought 
to give expression. 
At this period, 1859, he was suffering severely from attacks of 
rheumatism, which confined him almest entirely to the house. 
Though enjoying tolerable general health, he became more and 
more of an invalid. I ought here to record, that throughout the 
whole of his twenty years’ residence at Portree, he was lodged in 
the house of Mr John Cameron, whose attention and kindness he 
very highly valued. The knowledge of this circumstance relieved 
materially the anxiety of M. Necker’s friends. Nothing in his 
last illness requires special notice. He sunk gradually through in- 
creasing debility, and without pain, and quietly expired at 7 p.m., 
on the 20th November 1861, in the seventy-sixth year of his age. 
