Astronomical Observations made by the Rev. Thomas Catton, B.D. of St. John's College, Cambridge. Reduced and printed under the superintendence of George Biddell Airy, Esq. Astronomer Royal. London, 1853. 8vo.-From the Royal Society.

Proceedings of the Geological and Polytechnic Society of the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1852. Leeds, 1853. 8vo.-From the Society.

Thirty-third Report of the Council of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, at the close of the Session 1852-3. Leeds. 8vo.-From the Society.

Almanaque Nautico para el año 1855, calculado de orden de S. M. en el Observatorio de Marina de la ciudad de San Fernando. San Fernando, 1853. 8vo.-From the Observatory.

Journal of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. New Series. Vol. II. Part 4. Philadelphia, 1854. 4to.-From the Academy.

Proceedings of the New Jersey Historical Society. Vol. VII. No. 2. 1854. From the Society.

Journal of the Franklin Institute. Third Series. Vol. XXVII. No. 4. April, 1854. Philadelphia. 8vo.-From the Institute.

The African Repository. Vol. XXX. Nos. 3, 4. March, April, 1854. Washington. 8vo.-From the American Colonization Society. Das Arabische Hohe Lied der Liebe, in text und übersetzung zum ersten male herausgegeben, von Hammer Purgstall. Wien. 1854. 8vo.-From Baron Von Hammer Purgstall.

Records of the Governor and Company of Massachusetts Bay in New England. Printed by order of the Legislature. Edited by N. B. Shurtleff, M.D.-From N. B. Shurtleff, M.D.

Eleventh Report to the Legislature of Massachusetts, relating to the Registry and Returns of Births, Marriages and Deaths in the Commonwealth, for the year ending Dec. 31, 1853. By E. M. Wright, Secretary of the Commonwealth. Boston, 1853. 8vo.-From the same.

Rules and Regulations of the Public Library of the City of Boston. Adopted Nov. 8, 1853. Boston. 8vo.-From the same. Archimedes and Franklin: A Lecture introductory to a Course on the Application of Science to Art, delivered before the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics' Association, Nov. 29, 1853. By Robert C. Winthrop. Boston. 8vo.-From the same.

Electric Science: its History, Phenomena and Applications. By F. C. Bakewell. London, 1853. 8vo.-From Dr. L. Turnbull.

VOL. VI.-D

On motion of Mr. Fraley, the Librarian was authorized and directed to return to the Rev. Eleazar Williams, the manuscript copy of a Grammar of the Iroquois language, referred to in his letter read this evening, which manuscript was received by the Society, as stated in the letter, and was ordered to be published in the Transactions of the Historical and Literary Committee; but as the publications of that Committee have been suspended, the order has not yet been carried out.

Mr. Fraley announced the death of William Strickland, a member of this Society, who died at Nashville, Tennessee, on the sixth of the present month:

And, on motion, Judge Kane was requested to prepare an obituary notice of the deceased member.

The Society then proceeded to the stated business of the meeting, the balloting for candidates for membership.

The Committee on the preparation of enlarged accommodations for the library repórted progress.

At the request of Professor Reed, he was excused from the preparation of an obituary notice of the late Professor James G. Thomson.

All other business having been concluded, the ballot boxes were opened, and the following named gentlemen were declared by the presiding officer to be duly elected members of the Society:

BENJAMIN GERHARD, of Philadelphia.

Stated Meeting, May 5.

Present, seventeen members.

Dr. FRANKLIN BACHE, President, in the Chair.

Dr. William V. Keating and Mr. Elias Durand, recently elected members, were introduced and took their seats.

Letters were read:

From James Lenox, dated New York, April 24, 1854; from Joshua I. Cohen, dated Baltimore, April 24, 1854; from Eli K. Price, dated Senate, April 24, 1854; from Elias Durand, dated Philadelphia, April 26, 1854; severally acknowledging the receipt of notice of their election as members of the Society.

The following donations were announced:

FOR THE LIBRARY.

Information concerning the History, Condition and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States: Collected and prepared under the direction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, per Act of Congress of March 3, 1847; by Henry R. Schoolcraft, L.L.D. Published by authority of Congress. Part IV. Philadelphia, 1854. 4to.From the Commissioner of Indian Affairs.

Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Vol. II. from p. 233 to end: Vol. III. p. 1 to 40. Boston. 8vo.From the Academy.

Proceedings of the Boston Society of Natural History. Nos. 23, 24. March, April, 1854. Boston. 8vo.-From the Society.

Annals of the Lyceum of Natural History of New York. Vol. VI. Nos. 2-4. April, 1854. New York. 8vo.-From the Lyceum. The American Journal of Science and Arts. Vol. XVII. No. 51. May, 1854. New Haven. Svo.-From the Editors.

The Medical News and Library. Vol. XII. No. 137. May, 1854. Philadelphia. 8vo.-From Blanchard & Lea.

Seventh Annual Report of the Regents of the University of the State of New York, on the Condition of the State Cabinet of Natural History, and the Historical and Antiquarian Collection annexed thereto. Made to the Senate, Jan. 18, 1854. Albany. 8vo.From the Regents.

Report on the Utility of a uniform System in Measures, Weights, Fineness and Decimal Accounts, for the Standard Coinage of Commercial Nations. By J. H. Gibbon, M.D. of the U. S. Branch Mint, North Carolina. Charleston, 1854. 8vo.-From the Author.

The Duty of Columbia College to the Community, and its right to exclude Unitarians from its Professorships of Physical Science, considered by one of its Trustees. New York, 1854. 8vo.-Donor unknown.

The Plough, the Loom and the Anvil. Vol. VI. No. 10. April, 1854. New York. 8vo.-From the Editors.

Judge Kane, pursuant to appointment, read an obituary notice of the late William Strickland, a member of the Society.

William Strickland. It is at best a melancholy office, that which I have undertaken, to trace the obituary memorial of an old and intimate friend. It calls back passages in my own life, that might willingly if not wisely be forgotten, hopes and apprehensions that we shared or sympathised in together, hopes, some of them realized happily in later years; some of them, hopes as well as apprehensions, realized to our sorrow. It brings round me the genial names we both used to delight in, Biddle, and Chapman, and Dewees, and Hopkinson, and I had almost added Patterson; of the whole group I am the only survivor. It is fitting that I should indite the.

farewell notice of Strickland; he would have done as much for me.

My association with him dates back to the year 1819. It began the very day he laid the foundation stone of the Bank of the United States; he came up from the work to welcome me after my marriage.

Before that time his life had been one of checkered fortunes. His father was a carpenter, a skilful artisan, for Latrobe the great architect of his day confided to him the execution of many of his plans, an honest man withal, for he never speculated, and yet died poor. His son William, a boy in the draughting room, attracted Latrobe's favour by the quickness of his eye and the facility of his pencil, as as well as by his joyous and grateful temperament. Latrobe took the charge of his education as an engineer and architect; disciplining his taste to the severe harmonies of Grecian art, that exquisite art, which he himself commemorated so perfectly in the Minerva Polias outline of the Bank of Pennsylvania, and his pupil afterwards in the portico of the Parthenon.

I scarcely know how Strickland began his early professional career. He drew the plans for the first Masonic hall that stood in Chesnut street, before he was of age; and some years afterwards devised a cunning little specimen of bijou architecture for the Swedenborgian Church. But there was very little for an architect or an engineer to do in Philadelphia, or indeed anywhere else about the country, when he left his master's studio. His father had died; and he was fairly adrift upon the world.

He set himself to work as a sort of artist in general; drew patterns for plasterers and carpenters, and models for machinists and patentees, aquatinted fanciful likenesses of victorious commodores and other notorieties for the shop windows, painted scenes for the theatres, (excellent ones they were,) now and then tried his hand at a street view in oil, (I have one of these, a noble perspective of old Christ Church and Second street: he sold it for two hams, ten dollars, and a box of segars, and bought it back ten years afterwards for three hundred dollars,) levelled a house plot, or computed a water power, or surveyed a field or a farm when the lines were too complex for the every day workers in mensuration; and then or in the mean while, artist like, married a wife, giving his only five dollar bill to the clergyman.

He was trying on his uniform jacket as a volunteer, the night before he was to set out for camp: it was in the fall of 1814, and all who had nothing else to do, and a good many besides, were marching off to keep away the British; when an accident brought him into more public view.

The older part of the town had turned out to make fortifications, those strange looking earth-works that many of us remember at all the road crossings, and some of which promise to remain there like Indian mounds to puzzle the coming generation of antiquaries. Dr. Patterson had been elected one of our virtuoso engineers, and he bethought him of Strickland as another. Of course there was no difficulty in getting his commission from the committee of safety: old general Bloomfield added a furlough to relieve him from camp duty: and before six o'clock the next morning Strickland had mounted the blue cockade, and was teaching all sorts of patriotic people to toss sods to the music of a fife.

I have heard him refer much of his professional success to this trivial incident. It happened that some of our influential citizens were struck by the efficiency he manifested in his extempore office. He thought they over-valued it; though he complained for a while that,