and philology, and the remaining twelve or fourten by separate individuals. Thus, in the last fifteen years, out of about 370 Ordinary Fellows of the Society, only about twenty have come forward to contribute 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 archæology 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 meantime 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 thermodynamic 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." The following statement, in regard to the number of the present Fellows of the Society, has been drawn up by the Secretary : 1. Honorary Fellows: Royal Personage His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales, British Subjects John Couch Adams, Esq., Cambridge; Sir George Foreign Claude Bernard, Paris; Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, VOL. IX. 1 19 20 Carry forward, 3 T Brought forward, Rome; Karl Theodor von Siebold, Munich; Bernard Studer, Berne; Otto Torell, Lund; Rudolph Virchow, Berlin; Wilhelm Eduard Weber, Göttingen; Friedrich Wohler, Göttingen, 2. Non-Resident Fellow under the Old Statutes :Sir Richard Griffiths, : Total number of Honorary and Non-Resident Fel- The following are the Honorary Fellows deceased during the year :— Foreign-Urbain Jean Joseph Leverrier, John British-William Henry Fox Talbot, 3. Ordinary Fellows: 34 1 55 2 1 3 Ordinary Fellows at November 1876, New Fellows, 1876-77.-Dr Isaac Bayley Balfour; George Deduct Deceased.-Dr James Bryce; Andrew Coventry, 7 363 21 384 Carry forward, 9 384 Brought forward, Total number of Ordinary Fellows at November 1877, . 9 384 2 11 373 55 Total Ordinary and Honorary Fellows at commencement 428 The following Obituary Address was read by Professor PIAZZI SMYTH, Astronomer-Royal for Scotland: LE VERRIER URBAIN, JEAN, JOSEPH-one of our most respected Honorary Members for thirty years, died on the 23d of last September, aged sixty-six. On the 23d of that same month, but in the year 1846, an astronomical discovery was made on the Continent, which almost took men's breath away for the moment in astonishment and admiration; and which in bringing the name of Le Verrier for the first time prominently before the general public, taught them that the age of intellectual giants after the manner of Newton and La Place, was not yet closed. And thirty-one years afterwards, or on that very identical day of September in the present year 1877, the electric telegraph flashed this other mournful news over an attentive world, that the same Le Verrier (without compare the greatest gravitational astronomer of our time) had ceased to exist! Death has been indeed too complete, for within a few days of Le Verrier's own demise, his adored Wife followed him to the tomb, where one of his sons was already laid; and we thus have the whole life-lesson of this most eminent scientist ready for impartial historical treatment, if at all. But who shall prove equal to the task of writing the life of such a man. Biographical notices of him innumerable have been published, but not the one, full, history which posterity will require ; nor is this the place to attempt anything of the kind. But what has appeared in print already, sur-abundantly relieves your Council of the necessity of any attempt on their part at formally justifying their advice of thirty years ago, to the Society, to enrol the name of Le Verrier amongst its Honorary Members; and they cannot perhaps do better in the few minutes now accorded to them, than simply to describe something of the general character of, as well as progress of alteration with time in, the public career of the departed. The first period of Le Verrier's virile existence may be considered to extend from his leaving the Polytechnic School in 1831, to receiving the appointment of Director of the Observatory of Paris in 1853; a joyous, a rising and expanding existence to him the whole of the time. Born in 1811 at St Lo, in the Department of Manche, (which courts the west wind of the Atlantic along the whole extent of its coast), and son of a Government official there, the young Le Verrier had received his education first in provincial, then in Parisian, schools, always manifesting a taste for, and superior power in, pure mathematics; but with a further determination also to hold his own course, and to prosecute his own excelsior ideals therein. Hence, on ceasing to be a college student in 1831, and beginning his career as a man, as the architect too of his own fortunes to be, he seems to have chosen, not a poorly paid, over worked, hard scientific post, but the more easily executed, and better paid employment of the ordinary civil service of his country; selecting such a branch therein as should leave him most spare time for the prosecution of his private reading; and only when, after some years, the further continuation of that official employment, the Administration des Tabacs, would have obliged him to leave the neighbourhood of metropolitan libraries, did he seek to support himself by teaching mathematics, of which he then became one of the assistant professors in his old Polytechnic School. But those pedagogic labours by day, the still youthful Le Verrier never allowed to interfere with his own private studies at night. He had already comprehended and fervently accepted his destiny; viz., to succeed La Place in those applications of the higher mathematical analysis to celestial mechanics, which demand as much of continued labour, and power of abstraction, as of penetration, genius, and analytical resources. Hence his earliest paper presented to the Academy of Sciences in 1839, attacked no less than the secular inequalities in the movements of the principal planets. His second paper took up the orbit of Mercury, and the most exact calculation |