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of Edinburgh, Session 1877-78. 
“ The Geology and other Natural Phenomena of Arran,” which has 
reached a fourth edition, and constitutes the most complete and 
satisfactory account of that interesting island. 
Latterly he had devoted himself chiefly to the geology of the 
North-West Highlands — first to that of Skye and Raasay, after- 
wards to the determination of the age of those rocks in Ross and 
Sutherland which have excited so much discussion among our 
leading geologists. In several expeditions he had visited and 
examined the sandstones of Loch Torridon and the remarkable 
limestones of Assynt and Durness. It was while on his way north- 
ward to complete these investigations that he met, at Inverfarigaig, 
on the shores of Loch Ness, with the accident which closed his life, 
by the fall of a pile of loose rocks which he was trying with his 
hammer. 
He was then (July 11, 1877) seventy-one years of age, but still 
in full strength of body and mind, with his interests in science 
unabated. He had come in 1874, on resigning his post at Glasgow, 
to live among us in Edinburgh, had been elected to this Society, and 
seemed likely to prove one of its most zealous and useful members, 
when he fell by a heroic death in the service of the science to 
which his energies and talents had been so long consecrated. 
As an observer Dr Bryce was unwearied and careful, as a 
describer and lecturer eminently lucid and graphic. He had also 
the gift of being able to communicate to others his own enthusiasm, 
and it was in great measure this, joined to a warm and genial 
manner, that made him so successful as a teacher. His love for 
nature and her beauties rose to a passion rare even among men of 
science ; a ramble among woods and mountains was always to him a 
pleasure far more intense than any which ambition could promise or 
wealth purchase. His intellect was indeed an imaginative one, as 
appeared both in the vivid descriptions of scenery which occur here 
and there in his scientific papers, and in liis own love for poetry and 
the dramatic aspects of history, branches of literature to which he 
had been devoted from boyhood. 
Although it is as a man of science that he was chiefly known, Dr 
Bryce took an active part in current questions, especially those 
relating to education. He was one of the first — perhaps the very 
first — in Scotland to insist on the necessity for a reform in the con- 
