Science owes not a little to natives of Colchester. One of the most distinguished of them was Dr. William Gilbert, born in 1540. The house in Colchester where he received Queen Elizabeth as a guest remains to this day, and a very attractive old house it is. He was chief physician to the Queen, who valued him highly, and wonderful to say, allowed him an annual sum to encourage him in his studies. He was also chief physician to James I. In 1600 he published his famous book, “De Magnete,” the first work ever written on electricity. It indicates great sagacity on the part of the writer. The word electric was first given to the world in it. He also wrote a learned work about the world, which was published at Amsterdam after his death. In all English-American and Continental Pharmacopœias we have Dr. Griffiths’ mixture reproduced under the title of _Mixtura ferri composita_. It was in a work published at Colchester by Dr. Moses Griffiths that that prescription originally appeared. It is still frequently used. Only the other day, as it were, a celebrated, fashionable and wealthy surgeon died at the West end of London. I refer to Sir William Gull, the son of a Colchester mariner, who ultimately moved to Thorpe, near Clacton, where the son was brought up at a village school. He chose to be a schoolmaster, and assisted for a time at a Colchester seminary. He then went to be usher in a school at Lewes, where he developed great scientific tastes, which gained for him a post at Guy’s Hospital in connection with cataloguing the Museum. This led him to devote his attention to medicine, and having commenced practice, he soon rose to distinction. He attended the Prince of Wales, in conjunction with Sir William Jenner, throughout a dangerous attack of typhus fever, and was rewarded with a baronetcy. He died in 1890, and was buried at Thorpe, where there is a handsome monument to his memory. Nor in this catalogue of Colchester natives would we fail to omit the ladies. Let us give the first place to the far-famed Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, daughter of Charles Lucas, and born at Colchester. There were highly educated and gifted women then as now, and the fair Margaret early exhibited a taste for literature. She became the second wife of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, to whom she was married in 1645. Two years previously she visited the Court of Charles I., then at Oxford. She was appointed one of the Maids of Honour to the Queen Henrietta Maria, and accompanied her Majesty to France. She published ten volumes of letters—plays, poems, philosophical discourse, and the life of her husband the Duke. Her town residence was in Clerkenwell, a more fashionable locality at that time than it is to-day. The lady was certainly eccentric, but she is said to have been distinguished by pious and charitable works, and for them, perhaps as much as for her literary talent, deserves her tomb in Westminster Abbey, where she was buried in 1673.