The medal of the Royal Astronomical Society is this year awarded to M. Henri Poincaré, member of the Academy of Sciences of Paris. As your President, the agreeable duty of presenting the medal to him devolves upon me, but before I do so I must endeavour to lay before you the grounds upon which the Council has made this award.

M. Poincaré's researches have been so diverse in character, and have been carried out with such a wealth of knowledge, that I feel but little confidence in my fitness to perform this arduous task; yet I cannot but rejoice that my tenure of this chair should have furnished me with the opportunity of paying the homage which is due to him for his great achievements in the field of mathematics.

A large part of his work is concerned with the development of the science of pure mathematics, and of this side of his activity I am quite incompetent to speak. But in awarding our medal we naturally think of the value of the contributions by the proposed medallist to our science. Now, although many of M. Poincaré's investigations have perhaps already found, or will at some future time find, their application in the problems of dynamical astronomy, yet it is not necessary to search for cases of possible applicability to astronomy to justify our award.