231 
of Edinburgh, Session 1876 - 77 . 
of these minute organisms, a classification, however, which natural- 
ists have not universally adopted. 
Herr Ehrenberg was a member of most of the learned Societies 
of Europe. He was elected an Honorary Fellow of this Society in 
1845. He died in April of this year. 
In the course of the past session the number of “ papers ” read 
at the meetings of the Society was forty-five, besides the address 
delivered at the opening of the session by the senior Vice-Presi- 
dent, Mr Milne-Home. Of the papers read, twenty-three were in 
the department of mathematics and physics, three in chemistry, 
four in meteorology, one in anatomy, five in geology, two in geo- 
graphy, five in botany and natural history, and two on literary 
subjects. Some of these papers were of considerable length, and 
most were of importance and permanent interest. 
The Keith Prize for the biennial period 1873-75 was awarded 
to Professor Crum Brown for his “ Researches on the Sense of 
Rotation and on the Anatomical Relations of the Semi-Circular 
Canals of the Internal Ear;” and was presented to him by the 
President at the meeting on the 15th of May. 
The Society is to be congratulated on the evidence which the 
number and variety of the papers read last session afford of the 
continued zeal and activity of its members in various spheres of 
scientific inquiry and literary research. At the same time, I ven- 
ture to express a wish that the range of the Society’s activity were 
widened, so that incursions were made into fields of inquiry and 
research which, so far as our Proceedings show, are wholly ne- 
glected by the members of the Society. With the exception of 
the two literary papers, all the papers read last session have to 
do either with the exact sciences or the sciences of observation. 
Besides these, however, there are the moral sciences, the science 
of experience or consciousness, and the history of science, in all 
of which there are questions of high interest and importance which 
yet remain unsettled, and which await and invite the investigation 
of members of a learned body such as this. How little, for in- 
stance, is known of the history of philosophic thought and scientific 
speculation among the Arabians and the Jews in the Middle Ages, 
or among the theosophists, mystics, and speculatists of the East ! 
