1897 - 98 .] 
Chairman’s Opening Address. 
5 
Professor Henry Drummond was born in 1851 in Stirling. He 
was educated there and in Crieff. Thence he proceeded to Edin- 
burgh University, and was medallist in the Geological Class under 
Professor Archibald Geikie. He afterwards went to the New 
College, Edinburgh, where he qualified for the ministry of the 
Pree Church, and he also studied at Tubingen, in Germany. He 
left College in 1876, and in the following year was appointed to 
the Lectureship on Natural Science in Glasgow Eree Church 
College. In 1879 he accompanied Professor Geikie upon a scien- 
tific expedition to the Rocky Mountains and Colorado. Three 
years later he was sent out to East Central Africa, for the purpose 
of reporting upon the natural resources of Nyassaland. Just before 
going upon this journey he published his Natural Law in the 
Spiritual World. This book had a large sale. In 1884, the 
Lectureship in the Free Church College, Glasgow, having been 
endowed, he became its first occupant. Some time after he pub- 
lished his Tropical Africa , a record of his travels in the dark 
continent. During the spring of 1890 he went out to Australia, 
and from there he crossed to the South Sea Islands, and visited 
Java, the Malay Peninsula, and Japan, returning to Scotland 
through North America. Among the works he published were, 
The Greatest Thing in the World, The Programme of Christianity, 
Pax Vobiscum. In 1893 he went to Boston, U.S.A., to deliver 
the Lowell Institute Lectures, and in the following summer he 
lectured at several American universities. These lectures were 
published in the spring of 1894 under the title of The Descent of 
Alan. In the autumn of 1894 he was seized with persistent 
rheumatic pains and catarrh of the stomach. He repaired, on 
medical advice, to the South of France ; but after residing there 
for several months, he returned to England, taking up his residence 
at Tunbridge Wells, where he died on 11th March 1897. He was 
elected a Fellow of this Society in 1880, and contributed a paper 
to its Proceedings on “ The Termite as the Tropical Analogue of 
the Earthworm.” 
Mr George Elder was born at Kirkcaldy in November 1816, 
and was educated at the High School there. As a very young man 
he was attracted by the enterprising life of a colonist, and in the 
early days of the Australian colonies he had serious thoughts of 
