from this chair, and it gives me great satisfaction to follow the steps of my predecessors, Sir Joseph Banks and Sir H. Davy, by again bestowing a medal on one who is an honour to the Royal Society and pre-eminently distinguished for his mathematical attainments. The labours of your life are too well known to the scientific world to require any eulogium from me, and I consider that in this tribute to your paper on astronomical refraction, we are rather doing an honour to ourselves than to you.
Mr. Brown—in conferring the Copley Medal on you for your valuable discoveries in vegetable impregnation[1], I am quite sure that the voice of scientific Europe will respond to the decision of the Council of the Royal Society. The Academic des Sciences has already pronounced on your merits, as also on those of Mr. Ivory, by electing you as well as that gentleman to a seat among their foreign members; and the University of Oxford has also, by an honorary degree, given you a similar testimonial. That you are one of our fellows is to myself a circumstance peculiarly agreeable, as it must be to the whole body over whom I have the honour to preside. Your discoveries in the particular botanical question, for which I have to give you the Copley Medal, are so important, not only in a botanical, but also in a general scientific point of view, by showing the close analogies of animal and vegetable life, that the Committee of Zoology have felt it as much their province as that of the Committee of Botany, to recommend that the Copley Medal should be bestowed upon you; and the Council have come to an unanimous resolution to give it, though at the same time other gentlemen were recommended by other scientific committees, with whom even an unsuccessful rivalry would be no mean praise.
I hope, Mr. Brown, that you may long enjoy life and leisure to pursue researches so valuable to science and so honourable to the country of which you are a native.
In drawing up the following notice of the losses which the Royal Society has sustained during the last year, in conformity with the practice of my predecessors, I have availed myself of the assistance of one of the Fellows, whose acquaintance with the labours of men of science peculiarly qualified him for the execution of a task which I could not myself have ventured to undertake. I therefore will not longer occupy your time by any further remarks of my own, but will conclude by the expression of my present wishes for the prosperity of the Royal Society, and for its success in furthering the noble ends for which it was instituted.
The Rev. Martin Davy was originally a member of the medical profession, which he followed, during a great part of his life, with no inconsiderable reputation. He became a medical student of
- ↑ The following are the discoveries referred to; viz., the organization of the vegetable ovule, immediately before fecundation, (published in 1826); and the direct action of the pollen, manifested by the contact established between it and that point of the ovulum where the embryo subsequently first becomes visible, and published in papers, in the years 1832 and 1833, and communicated to the Linnean Society.
