454 Proceedings of the Royal Society 
temperature than through one which is cold. He also showed how 
the absolute conductivity of a metal for heat might be measured. 
But it is probably in connection with his researches on glaciers 
that Forbes’s name is best known to the general public. His first 
Memoir on the veined or ribboned structure of Ice was published 
in our Transactions in December 1841. Reading that memoir 
with the light of recent researches, we rise profoundly impressed 
with the accurate observations and clearness of judgment of their 
author. As he himself observes in that paper, it is astonishing 
how little we see until we are taught how to observe. This veined 
structure of glaciers is intimately connected with their mode of 
formation, and with the remarkable phenomena which render them 
so interesting to all investigators ; and yet no one observed with 
the eyes of science this important veined structure until Forbes 
described it. Even with the new experiments of James Thomson 
on the lowering of the freezing point of ice under pressure, and 
of those of his brother, Sir William Thomson, on the rupture pro- 
duced in a viscous solid by continued shearing, we could scarcely 
at the present day observe the phenomena more accurately than 
was done by Forbes twenty-nine years ago, or connect them more 
lucidly with the occurrence and position of the cracks and crevasses 
of the glacier. 
But this and all his subsequent researches on the motions of 
glaciers as a viscous mass exhibit the peculiar characteristic of 
Forbes’s mind — scrupulous conscientiousness in his scientific 
labours, scrupulous conscientiousness in his life as a man. 
It is not my duty to say more than I have done ; but at the first 
meeting of the Society which has occurred after his death, I thought 
it right to allude to our own loss ; and I now move that the Society 
instruct the Council to express to Mrs Forbes and her family our 
sympathies for their bereavement, and our sense of the loss which 
science has sustained by the death of this distinguished philo- 
sopher. 
Professor Jenkin, at the request of the Council, delivered 
an Address on Cable Testing. 
