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Proceedings of the Royal Society 
may be added the valuable system of meteorological observations 
he gradually organised for Germany, and the many full discussions 
of these which he published from year to year. 
It is no ordinary praise to pass on his work to say that those 
views he propounded, which subsequent researches are likely to 
modify materially, are those he arrived at by methods of investiga- 
tions, necessarily defective, at the time. Thus, for instance, in 
inquiring into the law of storms, it was not in his power to work 
from isobaric charts, seeing that the errors of the barometers and 
their heights above the sea were only known in a very few cases. 
When we consider the condition in which he found man’s know- 
ledge of weather and the large accessions and developments it 
received from his hand, the breadth of his views on all matters con- 
nected with the science, and the well-directed patience, rising into 
high genius, with which his meteorological researches were pursued, 
there can be but one opinion, that these give Dove claims which no 
other meteorologist can compete with, to be styled “ the father of 
meteorology.” 
Johann yon Lamont. By Alexander Buchan, M.A. 
Johann von Lamont was a Scotsman by birth, having been 
born in Deeside on the Balmoral estate in 1805, of one of the oldest 
of our Scottish families. At the age of seventeen he left Scotland, 
to which he never returned, in the prosecution of his studies in con- 
nection with the Boman Catholic Church. Whilst a faithful and 
zealous member of the clergy of that communion, it was to the Exact 
Sciences he devoted the full powers of his singularly energetic and 
penetrating intellect. His first contribution to science was published 
in 1829, in the twenty-fourth year of his age, the subject being the 
Motions of Encke’s Comet, and from that date to 1870 the Boyal 
Society’s Catalogue of Scientific Papers enumerates no fewer than 
107, ranging widely over the domain of physics, and several of which 
take their places as classics in the departments of science with which 
they deal. 
His most extended work is his “ Hand-book of Magnetism,” pub- 
lished at Leipsic in 1867 as one of a series of works forming 
a general Encyclopedia of Physics, under the editorship of Karsten, 
