session 1903-1904. 
XXVll 
Report of the Council for the Year 1903. 
The Council of the Hertfordshire Natural History Society, in 
presenting the 29th Annual Report, regrets again to announce a 
decrease in the number of members. During the year one ordinary 
member, Mr. Alan F. Crossman, F.L.S., has been elected a corre¬ 
sponding member; three ordinary members have been elected; 
seven members have resigned; one member has been struck off the 
list on account of non-payment of subscription for three years; 
and the Council regrets to have to record the loss by death of two 
honorary members, Mr. Robert Etheridge, F.R.S., and Mr. James 
Glaisher, F.R.S. ; two life members, the Most Honourable the 
Marquis of Salisbury, K.G., F.R S., and the Rev. John Wardale, 
M.A. ; and two ordinary members, Sir Charles Nicholson, Bart., 
M.D., and Mr. T. Vaughan Roberts. 
Mr. Etheridge was born on the 3rd of December, 1819, at Ross, 
in Herefordshire. In 1850 he was appointed Curator to the 
Museum of the Bristol Philosophical Society; in 1857 Assistant 
Palaeontologist to the Geological Survey; and in 1881 he was 
transferred from the Museum of Practical Geology in Jermyn 
Street to the British Museum at South Kensington, where he 
acted as Assistant Keeper of Geology until the end of 1891. For 
more than 38 years until his death he was one of the Assistant 
Editors of the ‘Geological Magazine,’ and for 23 years up to that 
time he was Treasurer of the Pakeontographical Society. He was 
elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1871. Well known as 
a geologist, chiefly from his investigation of rocks concealed 
beneath those which come to the surface, such as the underground 
Silurian ridge of Hertfordshire, and the Dover coalfields, his 
special study was palaeontology, and he contributed lists of fossils, 
the species all carefully determined by himself, to 19 Geological 
Survey Memoirs, his other works and memoirs numbering 32. 
Amongst these may be specially mentioned his Catalogue of the 
‘Fossils of the British Islands,’ of which only the first volume 
(Palaeozoic) has been published, and his ‘ Stratigraphical Geology 
and Palaeontology,’ which though ostensibly merely his edition of 
Phillips’ ‘Manual of Geology,’ is in reality a new work written 
by him. He was elected an Honorary Member of our Society in 
1879. He died on 18th December, aged 84. 
Mr. Glaisher is perhaps most widely known from his balloon 
ascents in the years 1862 to 1869, in one of which an altitude of 
seven miles was reached. These ascents were made by him for the 
purpose of ascertaining the temperature and humidity of the air at 
various altitudes, and he was essentially a meteorologist. Born at 
Rotherhithe on 7th April, 1809, at the age of 20 he was engaged 
upon the Trigonometrical Survej^ of Ireland, at 24 he was appointed 
Assistant at the Cambridge Observatory, at 26 Assistant at the 
Royal Observatory, Greenwich, and at 31 Superintendent of the 
Magnetic and Meteorological Department, from which he retired 
