1846. He received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws from Union College in 1829, and from Harvard University in 1851. He was President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1849; was chosen President of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1868 : President of the Philosophical Society of Washington in 1871 ; and Chairman of the Lighthouse Board of the United States in the same year; the last three positions he continued to fill until his death. Prof. Henry made contributions to science in electricity, electro-magnetism, meteorology, capillarity, acoustics, and in other branches of physics: he published valuable memoirs in the Transactions of various learned societies of which he was a member ; and devoted thirty-two years of his life to making the Smithsonian Institution what its founder intended it to be, an efficient instrument for the "increase and diffusion of knowledge among men." He is succeeded in the post of Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution by Professor Spencer Baird.
PROCEEDINGS OF SCIENTIFIC SOCIETIES.
Linnean Society of London.
Annual General Meeting, May 24, 1878. — Professor Allman, F.R.S., President, in the chair.
The President, in his Anniversary Address, in accordance with the plan he had adopted on previous occasions, selected for exposition a group of organisms — the Polyzoa — on which recent investigations had thrown more than usual light, and gave a resume of the principal discoveries by which our present knowledge of the group has been brought about. Commencing with their anatomy and development, and certain important features in their systematic grouping, he pointed out the advance made in our acquaintance with their primary groups by the labours chiefly of Busk and Nitsch. Discussing certain disputed points which receut investigations have tended to clear up, such as the nature of the "Brown Bodies," and the so-called "Colonial Nervous System," he maintained that the evidence of such investigations was mainly in favour of the "Brown Bodies" being merely the residuum of degraded and withered polypides, and that they have no real morphological or physiological importance ; and further, with Nitsch, Joliet, and Busk, that the so-called "Colonial Nervous System" was merely an irregular plexus of cellular and protoplasmic cords and filaments derived from the walls of the zoœcium, or polypide-cell, and that it has nothing to do with a true nervous system. Joliet has proposed for it the convenient name of "Endosarc," and refers to it the origin of the reproductive elements of the new polypide buds, and of certain minute corpuscles which are found floating free in the liquid which tills the cavity
