Address of Thomas Bell, Esq., V.P.R.S., etc., the President, read at the anniversary meeting of the Linnean Society on Wednesday, May 24, 1854 : together with obituary notices of deceased members.

  • Thomas Bell
Date:
1854
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Address of Thomas Bell, Esq., V.P.R.S., etc., the President, read at the anniversary meeting of the Linnean Society on Wednesday, May 24, 1854 : together with obituary notices of deceased members. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    loss, as a profound and ardent investigator of nature, I sincerely deplore. Of Mr. Charles Stokes, as a man of the most varied and exten- sive information, of fine and highly cultivated taste, of the most sincere, and warm, and kindly feelings, of unflinching integrity, —as the universal favourite of all who knew him, from the philo- sopher to the child,—I can tell you nothing that would not be far better told by Mr. Bennett. I cannot wholly pass over without a few words, the loss of our estimable Vice-President Dr. Wallich. Here too I shall leave the history of his life and labours to better hands. As a thoroughly true-hearted man, as a warm and sincere friend, as a man of great intelligence and learning, he was well known to you all; and I feel that, as a Society, we have sustained a severe loss by the death of a Vice-President, who was always ready, as long as his health enabled him to act for us, to afford us the ad- vantage of his great experience, his counsel and support. But, Gentlemen, if we have to grieve at the inroads which death has made amongst the most distinguished of our Fellows, there is another side of the picture for our contemplation, to which we may turn for some degree at least of compensating satisfaction. The accession of Fellows during the past year has been more than usually numerous, and amongst those who have recently joined us, are several rising naturalists whom we may expect to follow worthily in the steps of those whose labours are now over. I am sure I may be permitted to congratulate the Society on the accession to our list of one honoured name, of whom we may well be proud; and it is no disparagement to others, if I particularize Mr. Charles Darwin, the philosophic traveller, the acute observer, the accomplished and learned naturalist, and the author, amongst other inestimable works, of one of the most complete Monographies that has ever appeared on any group in the animal kingdom. It was principally on account of Mr. Darwin’s Monograph of the Cirripedes that the Royal Society awarded to him the Royal Medal of last year, and I trust that we may hope for contributions to our Transactions from the same pen. On'the Foreign list we have lost a large number, six out of fifty, and some of these are venerable names. In selecting their successors the Society has been able to choose men in no wise, I trust, their inferiors. The name of the veteran DumMl stands at the head of the list of Zoologists who have been chosen by us on the recent occasion. This venerable naturalist has now been prominently before the sci- entific world, as an accurate and learned systematic zoologist and anatomist, for more than half a century. His numerous reports
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