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Proceedings of the Boyal Society 
and philology, and the remaining twelve or fourten by separate 
individuals. Thus, in the last fifteen years, out of about 37 0 Ordinary 
Fellows of the Society, only about twenty have come forward to con- 
tribute papers other than physical or mathematical. During the last 
session not a single paper on any literary subject was read before us. 
No doubt, there is much excuse for this, in the fact that the time of 
literary men is often much occupied, and that they can obtain a high 
remuneration elsewhere for the produce of their labour. It was 
doubtless owing to this that Sir Walter Scott, who was for twelve 
years President of this Society, never appears to have contributed a 
single paper to it, though he was so full of history and archaeology 
and lore of all sorts. 
The day may even come when the general public is sufficiently 
instructed to receive with interest, in ordinary periodicals, the 
physico-mathematical papers, which form the staple commodity of 
this Society, and then we shall have done our work. In the mean- 
time I would venture, like Principal Forbes, to advocate “ intellectual 
clubability. ,, All tentative essays, which are not yet ripe to form a 
book or an article, may fitly be contributed to this Society and 
embodied in its Transactions, and I should have thought that 
not a single professor of any department in the University could go 
through the teaching of a session, without coming across at least 
some one novel point, which it would be worth while to bring 
forward. 
In the course of last session, one of the three prizes in the gift of 
this Society — the Macdougall-Brisbane prize, consisting of a Gold 
Medal and £15, 14s. 7d., was awarded to Mr Buchan, for his paper, 
“ On the Diurnal Oscillation of the Barometer.” This important 
contribution to meteorological science has been published in the 
Transactions of the Society, and I note here with pleasure the 
words used in regard to it by our President, on presenting the prize : 
— “ That it paves the way for discovering the complete thermo- 
dynamic theory of its subject, and that Mr Buchan has well 
followed up his laborious and most useful investigations of the 
meteorology of Scotland by so valuable a discussion of barometric 
observations from all parts of the world, collected and arranged 
in the very best manner for the immediate application of the 
harmonic analysis.” 
