f> 1 0 Proceedings of the Royal Society 
duction of these subjects into a school course can hardly be over- 
estimated. While inspiring others with his own tastes, he had also 
begun to do valuable scientific work on his own account, partly in 
botany and mineralogy, but chiefly in geology. He investigated 
and described certain interesting fossil plant beds (similar to the 
leaf beds of Mull) occurring on the shores of Lough Neagh, and con- 
tributed to the ‘‘Philosophical Magazine ” an account of the important 
discovery which he had made of the remains of the Plesiosaurus in 
the lias of Antrim, which conclusively established its identity with 
the lias series of England. Pursuing his researches into the geology 
of the northern counties of Ireland, he was the first accurately to 
examine and describe the structure of the remarkable basaltic 
formations on the coasts, and particularly of the Giant’s Causeway. 
A series of papers contributed to the Journals of the Geological 
Societies of London and Dublin, of which he had become a Eellow 
in 1834, attest his activity in observation; while in Belfast itself he 
was one of the most active members of a local scientific society, 
which numbered many men of eminence among its members, and 
exerted a powerful influence on the culture of the town, now the 
most prosperous in Ireland. 
He removed in 1846 to Glasgow, on being appointed head of the 
mathematical and geographical department in the High School of 
that city. Here, in a larger field, he continued the same enlightened 
system of science teaching which he had started in Belfast. He 
joined the Philosophical Society, was soon placed on its Council, 
and was for three years its president, delivering in that capacity 
addresses in which he reviewed the progress of scientific inquiry, and 
discussed some of the main problems now lying before it with a 
completeness and accuracy which supplies remarkable evidence of 
the width of his cultivation, as well as the keenness of his observing 
and reflective powers. There was scarcely a department of science 
of whose leading principles and method he did not show himself 
master, a remarkable achievement in an age when every study has 
become so much sub-divided. His geological work during this 
period lay chiefly but not exclusively in the Clyde basin and its 
surrounding mountain groups. Papers on the “ Parallel Roads of 
Lochaber ” and the “ Glacial Phenomena of the Lake District of 
the North of England ” were followed by a systematic treatise on 
