230 Proceedings of the Royal Society 
geology, and it may be regarded as a work of standard authority 
on vegetable palaeontology. 
M. Brongniart was elected professor of botany and vegetable 
physiology in the Museum of Natural History at Paris in 1833; 
and from 1852 he was inspector-general of the University for the 
sciences. He was a Member of the Academie des Sciences and 
an officer of the Legion of Honour. He was elected an Honorary 
Fellow of this Society in 1872. He died in February last. 
Christian Gottfried Ehrenberg was born at Delitsch, in Prussia, 
on the 19th of April 1795. He studied chiefly at Leipsic, where 
he took his doctor’s degree in medicine. At Berlin, in 1815, he 
devoted himself to microscopic researches in physiology, and through 
these became known to the scientific world. In 1820 he was sent 
by the Academy of Sciences, along with Hemprich, on a scientific 
expedition to Egypt, in the course of which he traversed Egypt, 
Abyssinia, and a considerable part of Africa. His companion 
having succumbed under the fatigues of the journey, Ehrenberg 
prosecuted it alone, and returned bringing with him a large collec- 
tion of animals and plants until then unknown. He was named 
professor extraordinary in the Faculty of Medicine at Berlin; but 
he preferred going with Humboldt to explore Central Asia, and 
more particularly the plateau of the Altai. On his return he settled 
at Berlin, where he was in 1842 made principal secretary to the 
Academy of Science. Here he devoted himself chiefly to micro- 
scopic researches on the Infusoria, and in this field made many 
discoveries, which added materially to the knowledge of these minute 
forms of animal life, and suggested the explanation of many pre- 
viously unexplained phenomena, such as phosphorescence on the 
sea, blood-rain, red snow on the Alps, and the blood-red spots which, 
to the terror of the ignorant and superstitious, sometimes appear on 
bread. To the heaps of infusoria, also, he attributed “the exist- 
ence of vegetable soil, and according to his observations these 
infinitely small creatures have formed entire mountain-chains, and 
played an important part in the formation of the crust of the 
earth.”* His great work, entitled “ Die Infusiorsthierchen als 
vollkommen Organismen ” (Leipz. 1838), contains his classification 
* Men of the Time, p. 328, 8th edit. 
