which he filled for several years with great advantage to that colony. On his return from the East, he was made Auditor of the Exchequer, and also received from his uncle Lord Ellenborough the appointment of Master of the Crown Office. He was an intimate friend of WoUaston and Tennant; and though withdrawn by his pursuits from the active cultivation of science, he continued throughout his life to feel a deep interest in its progress. His acquaintance with classical and general literature was unusually extensive and varied, and he had the happiness of witnessing in his sons the successful cultivation of those studies which other and more absorbing duties had compelled him to abandon. Mr. Lushington was a man of a cheerful temper, of very courteous and pleasing manners, temperate and tolerant in all his opinions, and exemplary in the discharge both of his public and private duties: few persons have ever been more sincerely beloved either by their friends or by the members of their families.
Mr. George Saunders was formerly architect to the British Museum, where he built the Townley Gallery: he was also a diligent and learned antiquary, and the author of a very interesting and valuable paper in the twenty-sixth volume of the Archaeologia, containing the results of an inquiry concerning the condition and extent of the city of Westminster at various periods of our history.
The only foreign members whom the Royal Society has lost during the last year are the Baron de Prony, one of the most distinguished engineers and mathematicians of the age; and the venerable Pierre Prevost, formerly Professor of Natural Philosophy in the University of Geneva.
Gaspard Clair Francois Marie Riche de Prony was born in the department of the Rhone in 1755, and became a pupil, at an early age, of the Ecole des Ponts et Chaussées, where he pursued his mathematical and other studies with great application, and with more than common success. He was subsequently employed, as an adjunct of M. Perronet, the chief of that school, in many important works, and particularly in the restoration of the Port of Dunkirk; and in 1786, he drew up the engineering plan for the erection of the Pont Louis XVI., and was employed in superintending its execution. M. de Prony had already appeared before the public, first as the translator of General Roy's "Account of the Methods employed for the Measurement of the Base on Hounslow Heath," which was the basis of the most considerable geodesical operation which had at that time been undertaken; and subsequently, as the author of an essay of considerable merit, "On the Construction of Indeterminate Equations of the Second Degree." In 1790 and 1797, appeared his great work, in two large volumes, entitled Nouvelle Architecture Hydraulique^ which is a very complete and systematic treatise on Mechanics, Hydrostatics and Hydraulics, and more particularly on the principles of the steam-engine and hydraulical engineering. In 1 792 he was appointed to superintend the execution of the Cadastre, or great territorial and numerical survey of France,—a gigantic undertaking, the subsequent execution of which, during
