16 Proceedings of Royal Society of Edinburgh. [sess. 
take to the boats, and some hours afterwards they saw the vessel 
which had been their home for three years disappear beneath the 
waves. In 1845 he became Professor of Geology and Natural 
History at Yale College. Dana was a very hard worker and a 
prolific writer. Among his most important publications are the 
Reports of the Wilkes Expedition on Geology, Corals, and 
Crustaceans ; his “ System of Mineralogy,” his “ Manual of 
Geology,” “ Corals and Coral Islands,” and “ Characteristics of 
Volcanoes.” He is the author of other manuals and of upwards 
of 200 separate papers. Dana was distinguished as an observer, 
but he also possessed in a high degree the power of generalising. 
His manuals of Mineralogy and Geology are probably as much 
used in Europe as they are in America. He died on 15th April 
1895. 
Sven Loven was born at Stockholm in 1809, graduated as 
D. Phil, at the University of Lund in 1829, and after a year in 
Berlin (1830-31) devoted himself to the study of Zoology. He 
particularly investigated the marine fauna round the coasts of 
Scandinavia, and conducted the first scientific expedition to 
Spitzbergen. In 1841 he became Keeper of the Department of 
Lower Evertebrates in the State Museum of Natural History at 
Stockholm. He is the author of many scientific memoirs, the 
most important of which are published by the Swedish Royal 
Academy of Sciences. He was elected a Eellow of our Society in 
1881, and died on 3rd September last. 
Louis Pasteur, who died on 28th September last, was elected 
an Honorary Fellow of this Society in 1874. His whole career, 
as you are aware, has been characterised by a series of brilliant 
researches, to only a few of which can reference be made here. 
Some of his earliest work was successfully devoted to the structure 
of crystals. Subsequently he discovered the true nature of 
fermentation. Disproving the theory of Liebig, that fermentation 
was simply the chemical decomposition of bodies arising from the 
unstable equilibrium of their molecules, he showed that all types 
of fermentation are produced by microscopic organisms — bacteria 
being the chief agents by which the complex constituents of plants 
and animals are brought back to simple forms capable of serving 
again as food for plants. The nature of fermentation being known, 
