13 
1891 - 92 .] Chairman’s Opening Address. 
ill England. No foreign representative was ever more respected 
and admired. 
It is not permissible to me to say anything critical as to the 
writings of one who has been the subject of a full article in the 
Edinburgh Eeview. Many there are who will read that article, and 
the more serious writings to which it refers, but Lowell will be 
better known to thousands who, after mastering the Yankee dialect, 
have laughed till their sides were sore, over the poetical effusions of 
Mr Hosea Biglow, the recommendatory epistles of the Bev. Homer 
Wilbur, M.A., and the experience of Mr Bird-of-Freedom Sawin, 
translated from Bird-of-Freedom’s prose into Mr Biglow’s verse. 
America has reason to be proud of her literature in Lowell, and 
this Society in having enrolled him in the list of Honorary Fellows. 
Lowell died on 12th A.ugust 1891. 
Wilhelm Eduard Weber, another of our Honorary Fellows, was 
born at Wittenberg in 1804. He studied at the University of Halle, 
where he became Professor-Extraordinary of Physics in 1828. In 
1831 he was called to Gottingen to succeed Mayer in the Chair of 
Physics, and remained there till 1837. In that year the British 
Sovereign King William IV. died, and Queen. Victoria being 
excluded from the throne of Hanover by the Salic Law, her uncle 
Ernest Augustus Duke of Cumberland became King of Hanover. 
This prince considered the narrow liberties then enjoyed by his 
subjects to be excessive, suspended the constitution, and thereby 
called forth vigorous protests from Weber and other Professors. 
As a punishment, seven of them, including Weber, were ejected from 
their Chairs. Weber was, however, in 1843 appointed Professor of 
Physics at Leipzig, and in 1849 he returned to his former position 
in Gottingen. 
His first contribution to Science, published in conjunction with 
his brother Ernest, was Die WellenlelireC which is regarded as a 
classical work. After writing various papers on acoustics, he 
published in 1833, in conjunction with his brother Edward 
Frederick, an investigation into the mechanism of walking. But 
his most memorable researches were in the departments of magnetism 
and electricity. These are contained in the Beobaclitungen des 
Macjnetisehen Vereins^^ and in his Elehtrodynamische Maashestim- 
mungen^^ published in 1864. In this series of papers he showed 
