After we get in about 300 or 400 fathoms, which is reached by quite a rapid falling off at the end of the plateau or gently inclined plane, we find the fine sand or mud composed of Foraminifera which has so great an extension in deep water. This we make the end of our lines at present. The dredge brings up little from that bottom, but that little often of great interest. Thus I have from it a very fine Isis from 517 fathoms, and yesterday on the same bottom but less depth I obtained several specimens of a small crinoid which I have no means to determine, but which I believe to be neither a Pentacrinus nor a young Comatula. I hope to be able to dredge more over that kind of bottom on our passage home.

I have thus dwelt on the results of the last two weeks' work, because I believe them to be more important than what I did during the four ,preceding months, during which time I have gathered a good deal of information more or less new or useful, but which did not admit of a very connected report. I hope to make use of it in proper time.

At the suggestion of Professor Agassiz we have laid a wire strung with large conch shells from the reef at the Samboes to 10 fathoms," and are going to extend it to 20 fathoms, with the intention of examining it in a year or two and noting the corals which may have grown on the shells, and their increase of size in a given time. I had ordered tiles for the purpose before leaving Washington, but they were never sent, and at Mr. Mitchell's suggestion we took shells. I wish we had a greater variety of materials at our command, on account of what I mentioned before as the capriciousness of corals.

Five hundred and ninety-sixth Meeting.

June 9, 1868.

ADJOURNED ANNUAL MEETING.

The PRESIDENT in the chair.

The Corresponding Secretary read letters relative to exchanges, and a letter from Mr. Theodore Lyman, declining the office of Treasurer to which he was elected at the previous meeting.

Professor Lovering called up the recommendation of the Rumford Committee which had been referred to this meeting, and, in accordance with the recommendation, $1,000 were ap

propriated from the Rumford Fund for beginning the publication of Count Rumford's works.

Mr. Charles J. Sprague was elected Treasurer.

The Treasurer's report was received from the Auditing Committee and ordered to be entered on the Records.

On the motion of Professor Rogers it was voted, "That the thanks of the Academy be presented to Mr. John C. Lee, for the care and fidelity with which he has discharged the duties of Treasurer of the Academy."

The President called the attention of the Academy to the recent decease of Hon. Levi Lincoln and Dr. George R. Noyes of the Resident Fellows.

Nominations for election into the Academy were read.

The Corresponding Secretary read a portion of the following Report of the Council upon the changes which had occurred in the Academy during the past year, and the reading of the remainder was postponed to an adjourned meeting to be held on the fourth Tuesday in June.

During the year just elapsed, death has removed from the ranks of the Academy seventeen members, of whom four were Resident Fellows, six Associate Fellows, and seven Foreign Honorary Members. This loss, great as it is numerically, is even more memorable from the number of distinguished names which it embraces.

Besides the Home and Associate Members whose services to science, letters, and public affairs we shall have occasion to commemorate, our obituary list includes the names of Faraday, Bopp, Brewster, Mittermaier, Boeckh, Lawrence, and Rayer of our foreign academicians, names which in various degrees have been familiar to the world of science and letters for nearly half a century, and of which more than one has been illustrated by researches of transcendent importance, marking eras in progress and laying the foundations of new sciences.

Of the entire list of members deceased within the year, it is perhaps worthy of note that all except three, Professor Jewett, Dr. Warren, and Francis Peabody, had reached quite an advanced age. Two of the number, Dr. James Jackson and President Day, had attained respectively to ninety and ninety-four years; five, viz. Brewster, Mittermaier, Boeckh, Lawrence, and Dewey, had reached or passed beyond

their eightieth anniversary; and the remaining six, Loring, Smyth, Lord, Bopp, and Faraday, had each transcended the limit of threescore and ten years.

Of the home members whose services we desire to commemorate, we may appropriately begin our record with a notice of the venerable associate and friend whose professional skill and wisdom we have so long ranked among our social blessings, and whose gentle benignity wins us even now as if he were still among us.

DR. JAMES JACKSON, for many years an eminent physician and the acknowledged head of the medical profession in Boston, has died during the last year at the advanced age of nearly ninety years. He was born in Newburyport in 1777, and was graduated at Harvard College in 1796. He was one of the chief founders of the Massachusetts General Hospital, and was the first and for a number of years the only physician of this institution. His clinical lectures in the hospital were continued for many years in connection with his other duties in the medical school as Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine in Harvard University. He was for seven years President of the Massachusetts Medical Society, and on the decease of Dr. Bowditch he was elected President of the Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1838, which office he accepted with the condition that he should retire from it on the following year.

The intellect of Dr. Jackson was capacious, logical, exact, and unwavering in its loyalty to honesty and truth. His social traits were genial, impulsive, and sanguine. Coming in his early life from the schools of European erudition, he brought with him a deep respect for the labor and learning, the authority and conventional prestige, of the then accepted luminaries of medical science. His methods of practice were in a high degree energetic and decisive. He believed, in common with many others of that day, that most diseases were susceptible of control, if not of removal, by the modes of artificial interference then generally in use. These opinions and habits were greatly modified, if not subdued, in the latter half of his long and observing life, so that although he never lost his professional fondness for the forms and implements of his art, and sometimes carried their use to a scrupulous degree of exactness, yet he became more tolerant of nature, more humble in his expectations from art, and more distrustful of reckless interference, whenever certain harm was to be balanced against doubtful good.

Dr. Jackson continued the active practice of his profession, especially as a consulting physician, and also attended annual meetings of societies to which he had been attached, for some time after he had attained the age of fourscore years. In the few last years of his life, under the joint influence of physical and mental decadence, he retired from public view. Yet he died remembered, honored, and regretted, leaving among his numerous acquaintance an appreciative freshness of memory which time had not been able to change or obscure.

CHARLES GREELY LORING, son of Caleb and Ann (Greely) Loring, was born in Boston on the 2d of May, 1794. His ancestors on his father's side were among the earliest settlers of the colony of Plymouth. Some of the prominent traits of his character indicated his Puritan origin. From his mother, the daughter of a naval hero of the Revolution, he inherited an ardent spirit of patriotism and love of liberty.

His school-days were passed in Boston. Having completed his preparation for college at the Public Latin School, where he received a Franklin medal for industry and good scholarship, he entered the University in advanced standing in the year 1809, and was graduated with high honors in 1812. Immediately after leaving college, he became a member of the Law School at Litchfield, Connecticut, which, under the charge of Judges Reeve and Gould, was then the leading institution for legal instruction in the United States. He finished his preparatory studies for the bar in the office of the Hon. Samuel Hubbard in Boston, and was admitted a member of the Suffolk bar in the autumn of 1815. From that time, for nearly forty years, Mr. Loring continued in the active and successful practice of his profession as a lawyer and advocate, rising to be one of the acknowledged leaders of the bar, until in the year 1854, becoming somewhat weary of the conflicts of the forum and of the constant and pressing cares and labors necessarily attendant on faithful service and devotion to the interests of his clients, which had in some degree impaired a constitution never very robust, he accepted the office of Actuary of the "Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company." He continued in the discharge of the duties of this important trust until his death, which took place at his summer residence in Beverly on the 8th of October, 1867.

By his first wife, Miss Ann Pierce Brace, of Litchfield, to whom he was married in 1818, Mr. Loring had four children, two sons and two daughters, who survive him.

This short and simple narrative comprises all the leading events in the life of our deceased associate,—so true is it, that a faithful and exclusive devotion of time and talent to practice at the bar in this country, while it is pretty sure to win great professional success, is quite consistent with a quiet and uneventful life. It does not necessarily lead, as in England, to wide-spread distinction. A lawyer, who resolutely eschews active participation in politics and refuses to hold official stations, rarely reaches an extended public fame. Nevertheless, the qualities of mind and character which are requisite to forensic skill, and to the attainment of a high position as a lawyer and advocate, are in many respects the same as, and in none inferior to, those which distinguish the successful politician and statesman, although they are exercised and displayed on a more narrow and less public arena. Intellectual capacity, trained and disciplined, so that it may at all times be ready for vigorous and efficient action, legal learning and wide general culture, courage, good temper and knowledge of mankind, are essential characteristics, without which the conflicts of the forum cannot be successfully carried on, or its triumphs surely won. All these qualities Mr. Loring possessed in an eminent degree. Endowed with good natural powers, he had cultivated them by long and assiduous study. His learning in all branches of the profession was affluent. He was especially distinguished for his thorough knowledge of the rules and principles of the commercial code. These he illustrated and applied to new cases with singular force, felicity, and success. The reports of cases argued and adjudged in the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts and in the Circuit Court of the United States, for the first circuit during the thirty years from 1825 to 1855, furnish ample evidence of the fulness and extent of his learning, and of the important part he bore in laying the foundations and giving shape and symmetry to that branch of American jurisprudence which embraces the rights and duties of parties under mercantile and maritime contracts and transactions.

It was not solely as a sound and learned lawyer that Mr. Loring was distinguished at the bar. He was also an eloquent and persuasive advocate. His eloquence and power of persuasion did not consist merely in a strict observance of the rules of rhetoric, or in wellrounded periods, or special beauty of diction. He was master of a higher and more effective order of advocacy. Strictly conscientious, and governed in the performance of his professional duty by a rigid