Abstract
AT the commencement of the session 1883–84, the Royal Society of Edinburgh entered upon the second century of its existence. Since its foundation it has had among its members men whose fame is national and often world-wide—Joseph Black, Henry Dundas, James Hutton, John Playfair, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, Adam Fergusson, James Gregory, Henry Mackenzie, John Leslie, William Wallace, Walter Scott, Maclaurin, Brewster, Forbes, and more recently Clerk Maxwell; and at present it has members whose names will rank as high as these. In the year 1886 the membership of the Society was 507, and was rapidly increasing. The number of papers communicated to it in the period 1883–87 was 317. We shall therefore select for special notice a few of these, which may be taken as typical of the work done by the Society; arid it will be seen that its work, if large in quantity, is also high in quality. We agree with the opinion expressed to the Society by the Chairman in his opening address in December 1886, that, “if we include the extra volumes on the Ben Nevis observations, and on the botany of Socotra,... the Proceedings and Transactions of the Society during the past three years probably surpass in bulk and importance those of any other Society in the United Kingdom for the same period.”
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References
Proceedings, Sessions 1883–87. Transactions, Vol. xxx. Part 4; Vol. xxxii. Parts 2, 3, 4; Vol. xxxiii. Parts 1, 2.
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The Royal Society of Edinburgh 1 . Nature 39, 369–372 (1889). https://doi.org/10.1038/039369a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/039369a0