Page:Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Vol 60.djvu/327

300 course of his address, observed: “ The Kew Observatory, the petted child of the British Association, may possibly become an important national establishment; and, if so, while it will not, I trust, lose its character of a home of untrammelled physical research, it will have superadded some of the functions of the Meteorological Department of x-he Board of Trade, with a staff of skilful and experienced observers.” * Although the British Association long ago handed over the care of its “ petted child” to a Committee appointed by the Royal Society, the Society and the Association have lately appointed a joint Committee to urge the Government to supply the funds for converting the Kew Observatory into a “ national establishment similar to the Reichsaustalt at Charlottenburg. We are thus striving to realise to-day the suggestion thrown out, thirty years ago, by Grove.

In Sir Joseph Prestwich we have lost almost the last link that remained which connected geologists of the present day with the founders of the science in the first half of this century. To him we are indebted, not only for the first comprehensive classification of the tertiary beds of this country—to several of which he assigned the names by which they will henceforth be universally known—but, also, for their correlation with the strata of the Paris Basin. To him, also, is due the credit of having been the first to establish the authenticity of the remains of human workmanship found in the drift-deposits of the valley of the Somme, and of thus having laid secure foundations on which arguments as to the extreme antiquity of man upon the earth may be based. In France his name was known and respected as much as in Fmgland, and it would be hard to say howr much of the advance in geological knowledge during the last sixty years was not due to his unintermitted labours, which extended over the wrhole of that period.

The earliest scientific investigation of Armand Hippolyte Louis Fizeau was on the use of bromine in photography, and was published in 1841. He will always be remembered as the first who carried out experiments designed to measure the velocity of light produced by a terrestrial source, and travelling through a comparatively small distance near the surface of the earth. These observations, made in 1849, were very difficult; but the value of the method employed is attested by the fact that a quarter of a century afterwards it was adopted by M. Cornu, and that with the improved apparatus employed by him it gave results of the highest accuracy.

A few years afterwards Fizeau performed another classical experiment by which he measured the change in the velocity of light produced by the motion of the medium in which it travels.


 * ‘Correlation and Continuity.’ Fifth Edition, 1867, p