Be assured, Sir, that however unequal I may be to the task of expressing it, I feel as I ought the high honour which the Royal Society has been pleased to do me. My greatest pleasure now remaining is in my sons, who, I hope, will ever strive to copy after so good an example, and, animated by the honours bestowed on their Father's memory, be ambitious of attaining by their own merits your notice and approbation. Let me entreat you to add to the many acts of friendship which I have already received at your hands, that of expressing my gratitude and thanks to that learned body in such a manner as may be acceptable to them. I am, Sir, etc., etc., Elizabeth Cook. The medal actually presented to Mrs. Cook is now in the British Museum. DEATHS OF THE SONS. It is greatly to be regretted that so little can be ascertained about Cook's private life that would be of service in forming an intimate knowledge of his character, but this is accounted for by the fact that after he had joined the Navy his time was so fully occupied by that service that he had but little opportunity to form private friendships such as fall to the lot of most men. The intimacies that he did form were mostly connected very closely with his naval duties, and his opportunities of correspondence were necessarily limited by absence from all ordinary means of communication. For a man of his marked celebrity it is very curious that there should be such a dearth of anecdote that it is difficult to find anything that is unconnected with his profession. Of his own family relations there is also little known, as Mrs. Cook, probably esteeming the few letters she had from him as too sacred to be seen by any other eye than her own, as the late Canon Bennett suggests, destroyed them before her death. Still some idea of their life together, short as it really was, notwithstanding it lasted, in name, for over sixteen years, may be gained from the manner in which his widow always spoke of him after his death. She always wore a ring containing a lock of his hair, and measured everything by his standard of morality and honour. The greatest disapprobation she could express was "Mr. Cook would never have done so." He was always Mr. Cook to her. She kept four days each year as solemn fasts, remaining in her own room. The days were those on which she lost her husband and three sons, passing them in reading her husband's Bible, prayer and meditation, and during bad weather she could not sleep for thinking of those at sea. For her husband's sake she befriended her nephews and nieces whom she never saw. Of her three sons, two entered the Navy. One, Nathaniel, was lost with his ship, the Thunderer, in a hurricane off Jamaica in 1780. The eldest, James, rose to the rank of Commander, and in January 1794 was appointed to H.M. sloop Spitfire. He was at Poole when he received his orders to join his ship at Portsmouth without delay. Finding an open boat with sailors returning