Notes

Abstract

THE following awards will be made at the anniversary meeting of the Royal Geographical Society on the 28th inst.:—Founder's Medal to Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, F. R.S., for his eminent services to scientific geography, extending through a long series of years and over a large portion of the globe, while engaged in voyages in the Antarctic and Australian Sea, and journeys in India and the Himalaya, in Morocco, and in the United States of America; and more especially for his long-continued researches in botanical geography, which have thrown light on the form of the land in prehistoric times, and on the causes of the present distribution of the various forms of vegetable life on the earth. Patron's Medal to E. Colborne Baber, Chinese Secretary of Legation, Peking, in recognition of the great value of his scientific work, chiefly geographical, during many exploratory journeys in the interior of China; and for his reports of these journeys, drawn up with admirable skill, accuracy, and completeness, which he presented to the Society, and which have been published, together with route maps engraved from his own finished drawings, in the first part of the “Supplementary Papers.” The Murchison Grant for 1883 to Wm. Deans Cowan for his extensive surveys in the Tanala, Betsileo, and Bara provinces of Central Madagascar, an account of which was read by him to the Society in June, 1882, and published in the September number of the Proceedings of the same year; also as an encouragement to him in the new journey of exploration he is about to undertake in Western Madagascar. The Back Grant for 1883 to the Abbé Petitot for his geographical and ethnographical researches in the region of the great lakes of the Arctic basin, between Great Slave Lake and the Polar Sea, and his map of the basin of the Mackenzie. The Cuthbert Peek Grant for 1883 to F. C. Selous in acknowledgment of the value of his geographical researches in South Central Africa, including a journey in 1877 through the Manica country, north of the Zambesi, an examination of the hydrographical system of the Chobe, and two journeys by previously untrodden routes through Mashonaland, carefully prepared maps of which he communicated to the Society; also as an encouragement to him in the further researches in geography and natural history he has undertaken in the same region. The following will be elected as honorary corresponding members: Duca di Sermoneta (Prince Teano), president of the Italian Geographical Society, and of the International Geographical Congress at Venice, 1881; Dr. Schweinfurth, the eminent African traveller, now resident at Cairo; Edwin R. Heath, M.D., the explorer of the Beni River, South America, now residing at Wyandotte, Kansas, United States.