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JANUARY, 1867. I. SIR CHARLES LYELL AND MODERN GEOLOGY. Or late years the attention of a large number of geologists has been directed to an examination of the nature and potency of the causes of change now operating on the surface of the earth. This course of observation was first firmly trodden by Sir Charles Lyell ; and now that we are reposing for a time after a series of contro- versies on subaerial forces, it may be useful to give a sketch of the services which have been rendered to science by the philosopher who, thirty-six years ago, founded the now dominant school of Geology. In 1830 Sir Charles Lyell published the first volume of the first edition of the ‘ Principles of Geology.’ As stated on the title-page, it was ‘‘an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth’s surface by reference to causes now in action.” This great work at once established Sir Charles Lyell’s reputation as a philosophical _ geologist of the highest order; more than that, it produced the ‘Uniformitarian’ school of geology, to which belong nearly the whole of the distinguished geologists of the present day, who at that time were but students of the science. Mr. Darwin expects that the younger zoologists will hereafter confirm his theory of Natural Selection ; but Sir Charles Lyell can say that the younger geologists of thirty years ago have done this for the doctrine of Uniformity. In fact, soon after its publication, Lyell’s ‘ Principles’ became a household book; and although much that it contained met with opposition from some of the leading geologists of the day, that did not prevent the great body of their successors from accepting it as their guide and text-book in geological reasoning. The Royal Society also “ crowned” the work by awarding a Royal Medal to its author the year after its completion (1834). To future generations of geologists, Sir Charles Lyell’s reputa- tion will chiefly depend upon their estimate of the effect produced on the scientific world by the publication of the first edition of the ‘Principles.’ Even at this distance of time it is difficult to VOL. IV. B 2 Str Charles Lyell and Modern Geology. [Jan., form a correct and impartial estimate of what geology would have been had the ‘ Principles’ never been published. ‘The chief design of the work was to uphold and strengthen the Huttonian doctrine of uniformity in the causes which have operated, and the pheno- mena which have been produced, throughout all geological time. The antagonistic doctrine of cataclysms was dominant, if not universally received, at the time of its publication, and is even now not quite extinct amongst some of the older geologists; although it is altogether ignored by those to whom in early days the ‘ Principles’ has been a geological catechism. Still, the chief geologists of that day united in bearing testimony to the great value of the book, and it may be useful to quote a few of the opinions then expressed by men whose writings are still referred to with respect. | Dr. Whewell, in his ‘History of the Inductive Sciences,’ fre- quently discusses the ‘ Principles,’ and im reference to causes of change he remarks that it may “be looked upon as the beginning of Geological Dynamics, at least among us. Such generalizations and applications as it contains give the most lively interest to a thousand observations respecting rivers and floods, mountains and morasses, which otherwise appear without alm or meaning.”* The Rev. W. D. Conybeare, in his report on Geology to the second meeting of the British Association, says that it 1s “in itself suffi- ciently important to mark almost a new era in the progress of our science;’} and Dr. Fitton considered it one of the most popular books, “and certainly one of the most valuable that has appeared since Mr. Playfair’s well-known ‘ Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory.’ ” Perhaps the most graceful allusion to the merits of the ‘ Prin- ciples’ is contamed in Mr. Poullett Scrope’s dedication to Sir Charles Lyell of the second edition of his work on Volcanoes, published in 1862. This distinguished geologist then wrote, “When the first edition of this work [ Volcanoes] saw the light, now seven-and thirty years ago,...... you expressed a warmer interest in, and more agreement with, the views it contained than they met with from the bulk of our associates. It was an attempt to investigate one important class of the agencies of change now in operation on the earth’s surface, and to trace their analogy, or rather identity, with those which have apparently prevailed through earlier geological periods—a portion, in fact, of the great task at which you have so long laboured, as respects the entire range of terrestrial phenomena, with an originality, persistence, and success that have placed you by common consent at the head of the followers of the science.” This dedication was written only four years ago, and is on that account more valuable, as showing the estimation in * Op. cit., vol. iii., p. 552. : +‘ Rep. Brit. Assoc.,’ 1832, p. 406. { «Edinburgh Review, vol. lxix., No, 140, p. 406. 1839. 1867. ] Sir Charles Lyell and Modern Geology. 3 which so eminent a geologist, who has seen the full effects of the ‘Principles,’ holds that work and its author. Although Dr. Whewell, Mr. Conybeare, and others united in recognizing the importance and merit of the ‘Principles’ in a general way, most of the geologists of five-and-thirty years ago also joined with them in declaring that Sir Charles Lyell went too far; that the doctrine of uniformity does not hold good when applied to remote epochs; but that, for instance, the metamorphic rocks were altered by agencies of far greater intensity than any that prevail at the present day. They contended that although the forces which formerly produced changes on the surface of the globe were in bygone times the same in kind as they are now, they were different in degree. Sir Charles Lyell, on the other hand, has persistently maintained that we have no evidence to warrant us in assuming those forces to have possessed greater intensity than at present during any geological period, and that until such evidence is discovered we have no right to attempt to explain past events by reference to causes of greater intensity than now operate at and beneath the surface of the earth. In the first chapter of the ‘ Prin- ciples,’ Sir Charles Lyell quotes Hutton for the purpose of showing that geology is not concerned “with questions as to the origin of things,” and is entirely distinct from cosmogony and cosmogonic speculations. The science of Geology is, indeed, like every other science, a knowledge of phenomena and their causes; and no period can therefore be considered geologic that is not represented by rock- masses on some part of the present surface of the globe. No doubt there were pre-Laurentian periods ; but at present we know nothing of them, and they cannot yet be considered to come within the scope of geological inquiry. ‘The objection which has frequently been made to the doctrine of uniformity, that 1t assumes the eternity of the globe, is therefore of no value, for geologists do not attempt to speculate on the causes of phenomena of which they have no kind of knowledge. It is unnecessary to enter into any argument respecting the doctrine of uniformity, as it is now practically acknowledged on all hands; but we would observe, that an examination of geological literature will show that while the terms “convulsion,” “ cata- strophe,” and the like were in common use previous to the year 1830, since that time they have been used with a gradually decreas- ing frequency; and a careful study of the progress of geological thought will likewise show that this result is almost entirely attri- butable to the publication of Sir Charles Lyell’s ‘Principles of Geology.’ It has, however, been assumed by some geologists of the present day, that the only claim on our respect which it could be pretended B2 4 Sir Charles Lyell and Modern Geology. | Jan., that the ‘ Principles’ possesses is founded on the supposition that the Idea of Uniformity originated with Sir Charles Lyell, and that as this supposition is incorrect, no special degree of merit should be attributed to Sir Charles for that particular work. Our own opimion is diametrically opposed to this, for according to our conception of the case the value of the ‘ Principles’ hes chiefly in the proof it contains of Hutton’s ‘Theory of the Earth’ being supported by positive evidence, instead of being a mere unsupported effort of the imagination. Sir Charles Lyell brought together in the ‘ Principles’ a great mass of facts bearing on every phase of the theory, and this not ina mere superficial manner. Before the publication of this work, Hutton’s Theory was to the great body of geologists nothing but the dream of an enthusiast; for ever afterwards it became a reality, and the theory of a philosopher. The vexed questions of originality and priority are frequently the stumbling-blocks to a correct estimate of the services of great men. It has often happened that a great discovery has been made by one man, the importance and value of which have not been re- cognized until made manifest by another. The familiar case of the accidental discovery of Voltaic Electricity by Galvani, and the recognition of its importance by Volta, is an extreme instance; and the one-under discussion, though differing from it in some essential respects (especially as regards accident), falls into the same category in others. Hutton, no doubt, was too far in advance of his age for his theory to be accepted by men of his generation, and it was characterized as premature by Dr. Whewell, even in 1837. How much longer it would have remained neglected had not Sir Charles Lyell written the ‘ Principles,’ may to some extent be inferred by a reference to dates. Hutton’s theory was first made public in 1788 ; from that time to the publication of the ‘ Principles of Geology’ in 1830, a period of forty-two years, the progress made in Geological Dynamics is insignificant compared with the advance made during the thirty-six years which have since elapsed. We therefore endorse the opinion expressed by eminent men long ago, that Sir Charles Lyeil’s work was the beginning of a new era of progress in our science—the commencement, in fact, of a Rational Geology. After scrutinizing the effects of existing causes of known in- tensity, as exhibited at the present day, Sir Charles Lyell was naturally led to examine the Tertiary deposits of different parts of Kurope; and it was in tracing backwards the more and more com- plete disappearance of recent forms from Tertiary faunas that he conceived the idea of determining the relative age of these strata by the ratio which the recent species of Mollusca in their respective faunas bore to the extinct. Hence he proposed the now world- renowned classification of Tertiary deposits into Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene; and enunciated the scheme for their determination Or 1867. | Sir Charles Lyell and Modern Geology. commonly known as the “percentage test.” The Eocene strata were defined as having only about one-thirtieth part of their Mol- lusea identical with living species, the Miocene as having about one-fifth, the Older Pliocene from one-third to one-half, and the Newer Pliocine nine-tenths. The terms Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene were at once adopted, together with the principle of classifying the Tertiary strata by means of the percentage of recent shells which they contain. But of late years several geologists and paleontologists have raised objections to the percentage test, as did Mr. Charlesworth when it was first proposed. It may not be out of place, therefore, to dis- cuss the advantages that have accrued from its adoption during the last thirty years, and the probability of its eventually becoming superseded by some other mode of classification. Sir Charles Lyell’s classification depends on two principles ; first, that the Mollusca are typical of the rest of the animal kingdom, and are, at the same time, the most convenient for the purpose ; and secondly, that the percentage of recent species in a fauna varies in- versely with its age. In the first place, 1t is certain that the fossils which are most generally and completely preserved belong to the class Mollusca. The shells of these animals are so durable, so easily recognized, and, generally speaking, so characteristic of the species to which they belong, that they form a much better medium of comparison than the remains of land-animals or of plants, which generally occur in a fragmentary condition, and the preservation of which is usually the result of some fortuitous circumstance. Again, other classes of marine organisms are either not so abundant in species and individuals, or they are not likely to be preserved in the fossil state. It is difficult to say whether the Mollusca are, or are not, typical, in their duration, of the rest of the animal kingdom. They are not so prone to change as higher organisms; but, on the other hand, species of shells do not, as a rule, exist through several geological periods, like species of Foraminifera. We should imagine, however, that while the scale furnished by each class of animals is true, each scale has a value of its own, which has a certain ratio to that of each of the rest. The scale furnished by the Mollusca being neither too large nor too small, is on this account preferable to several others ; therefore, from every point of view the Mollusca seem more convenient for the purpose than any other group of organisms. ; The proposition that the greater the age of a Tertiary fauna the smaller is the proportion of recent species that it contains, is ex- tremely difficult either to prove or to disprove; but even if it can now be shown to be untrue, it was at the time the percentage test was proposed a most convenient fiction. Sir Charles Lyell urged that the recent faunas formed a common point of departure in all 6 Sir Charles Lyell and Modern Geology. | [Jan., countries, and that in the event of Tertiary deposits being discovered in any region they could be referred, by means of the percentage of recent forms amongst their fossils, ‘to their place in the Tertiary series. For many years this test has been applied with useful, even if but temporary, results; but it must also be admitted that in several cases the application has not been successful. We have Eocene and Miocene deposits in India, for instance; but the deter- mination of the former depends almost entirely upon the fact of their containing a large number of species of Nummulites, and not upon any percentage calculation ; while the reference of the latter to the Miocene division is wholly based on its Mammalian fauna. In Australia a very varied series of Tertiary deposits has been known for many years; but even the percentage test has not yet enabled Australian geologists to come to any agreement as to their Kocene, Miocene, or Pliocene date. One amateur geologist, indeed, appears to have been for years in a state of perpetual oscillation between the three. In a series of papers Mr. Charlesworth stated thirty years ago* some of the objections which he then saw to the use of the per- centage test; but although he alluded to other sources of error, he more especially dwelt on the disagreement existing between naturalists as to the amount of divergence necessary to constitute a ‘species. ‘To render this nugatory, he suggested an attempt to classify Tertiary strata by means of “ the totality of the characters which each series exhibits,” on the principle that there is a “uniform approximation to existing species, shown by the fossils of different deposits, corresponding to their respective antiquity.” t But it is to be regretted that he did not himself construct the “table of degrees” which he proposed, nor illustrate his suggestion by making the attempt to classify Tertiary strata by means of it. The principle is no doubt correct, and has been used with signal success in the classification of plants into Natural Orders; it is also the one commonly used in classifying the older rocks, and ought not to be difficult of application to the Tertiary. The misfortune is that while many men possess a “‘ destructive” faculty in an eminent degree, there are so few who, like Sir Charles Lyell, are gifted with a “constructive” genius. The former class of men do not benefit science, although they show that a scheme which works well is nevertheless faulty; but the latter are entitled to our gratitude for a system which, faulty though it may be, is infinitely better than none.t * «Mag. Nat. Hist.,’ vol. ix., p. 537. ‘Phil. Mag.,’ 3rd ser., vol. vil., P. 81; vol. viil., p. 529 ; vol. rr oe f ‘Phil, Mag.; 3rd ser., vol. x., p. 8. j ‘A maxim which it may be nsefal to recollect is this,—that hypotheses may often be of service to science, when they involve a certain portion of incompleteness, and even of error. —WHEWELL's Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, vol. ii., p. 225. 1867. | Sir Charles Lyell and Modern Geology. 7 After all, changes in physical geography and in climate, in any given region, are the chief causes of uncertainty in the application of the percentage test. The climate of Europe, for instance, was much warmer during the Eocene and Miocene periods than it is now. As the climate became colder no doubt the animals and plants which inhabited Europe migrated to warmer regions. In Europe there are many deposits of the age of these warmer periods, and it does not seem unreasonable to believe that formations in more southern latitudes, containing fossilized members of the same fauna, would be more recent in date than the apparently contemporaneous strata in Europe. Indeed, if some members of a species become modified during such a struggle for existence, as takes place in a country whose climate is becoming unsuitable for its inhabitants, while stronger individuals retain their specific characters; and if the modified form does not survive, as a species, the one from which it descended, it is easy to see that a formation containing a larger proportion of extinct species may be more recent than one containing a smaller proportion, in a different latitude, or possessing in past times a different climate. When the percentage test was proposed, the scientific world was not ripe for the consideration of matters so calculated to disturb the principles fof geolugical chronology, and therefore Sir Charles Lyell’s scheme passed almost unchallenged. That its adoption has been attended with beneficial results is quite certain, and until some better and equally simple scheme is proposed, it will no doubt continue to be the one most generally adopted. But it behoves every philosophical geologist to remember that increase of knowledge has rendered faulty that which at one time appeared to be perfect, “imasmuch as it had the appearance of possessing arithmetical accuracy.” * As science advances we are rather apt to forget that what to us are mere elementary, and apparently self-evident truths, were at one time original and great discoveries. So the services of our predecessors are not unfrequently too much underrated, and the truth of the old maxim that “familiarity breeds contempt” is proved ina new way. It seems, therefore, a good thing now and then to consider how large a debt we really do owe to those who have gone before us; often men who with imperfect aids have indicated the clue to some of nature’s mysteries, which a more perfect knowledge of natural laws now enables us firmly to grasp. And if it should, as no doubt it frequently does, eventually become manifest that old ideas, interpretations, and theories are erroneous, there is not the less credit due to their authors; for have not their readings of nature for years answered ‘all the requirements of a more perfect interpretation, and materially assisted science thereby ? * “Quart. Journ. Geol. Soe , vol. xxii., p. 230. 8 Sir Charles Lyell and Modern Geology [Jan., For instance, the Ptolemaic and Copernican systems of Astronomy were each supplanted in its turn; but does any astronomer pretend that their authors are therefore less worthy of a place in the very front rank of the great discoverers in his science? Therefore, although we admit that the percentage test is logically not faultless, we consider that Sir Charles Lyell is not the less entitled to great credit, and exalted rank as a geologist, for its promulgation more than thirty years ago. As we have already stated, Sir Charles Lyell gave the names Kocene, Miocene, and Pliocene to his three great divisions of the Tertiary series; and he again subdivided the Pliocene into Older and Newer. As typical formations, he referred to the Eocene division the strata of the London and Paris Basins; to the Miocene, the Faluns of the Loire and the beds of the Superga, - near Turin; to the Older Pliocene, the Crag of England and the Subapennine strata of Italy; and to the Newer Pliocene, the Sicilian beds and more recent deposits. He anticipated the future discovery of beds which would lessen the gaps that then existed between the members of these various subdivisions; and, it is almost needless to say, his anticipation has been amply realized. The question for us now to consider is how far these divisions are natural, and how far they are arbitrary. Many geologists would affirm that all divisions of strata are arbitrary, while others would contend for their being mostly natural. If the whole surface of the earth be considered, and if we are supposed to possess a complete knowledge of its geological history, then no doubt all divisions are arbitrary— for there must have been a continuous sequence of deposits. But in the present state of our knowledge—some deposits being unknown (either not explored or submerged) and others destroyed,—it is no doubt true that, for particular areas, while some divisions of strata are quite natural, others are more or less artificial. Now, into which category do these divisions of Kocene, Miocene, and Plocene fall? Sir Charles Lyell himself would say that they are artificial, as all divisions neceszarily must be. But for ourselves we should say that while these divisions are artificial, others may be, as far as Europe or any other region separately is concerned, as purely natural as any in the Geological scale. A study of the literature of the Tertiary system will reveal the fact that in North Germany and in Austria, where certain portions of the series are extensively developed, geologists have been obliged to invent new terms to designate groups of beds which they have been unable to refer with confidence to any one of Sir Charles Lyell’s divisions. In North Germany, Professor Beyrich has grouped together, under his new term Oligocene, a long succession of beds older than the typical Miocene Faluns, and newer than the Nummulitic 1867.) Str Charles Lyell and Modern Geology. 9 (Middle Eocene) strata of the Paris Basin and other districts. Suir Charles Lyell, however, refers to his Lower Miocene all the beds as far down as the Hempstead series, including that deposit. The remaining strata in question he calls Upper Kocene. Sir Charles has confessed repeatedly that his line is purely arbitrary; but he contends that the other 1s equally so, and that there is consequently no need of a new term. Few Tertiary paleontologists will, we imagine, agree with him in this, and it certainly seems preferable to curtail the Eocene and Miocene, and interpolate a new group, than to be confessedly reduced to the necessity of drawing a line where there is no physical or paleontological break. In the Vienna Basin there exists a very complete series of Miocene (Upper Miocene of Lyell) deposits, passing gradually upwards into newer strata. From the difficulty the Austrian geologists have experienced in defining the upper limit of the Miocene deposits, they have at last been led to abandon the terms Miocene and Pliocene, and to group the whole of the strata embraced within their definitions under the single term Neogene. In endeavours to assign to their place in the series the Tertiary deposits of other regions, questions have been raised as to the value of the distinction between Miocene and Pliocene strata, and some paleontologists have gone so far as to assert that the significance of the terms is far more climatal than chronological ; in fact, that in tropical regions it is impossible to say that certain deposits are Miocene and not Phocene, or vice versd. Under these circumstances it certainly does seem advisable to unite the two divisions, especially for the purpose of assigning to their proper horizon the fossils of low latitudes. The revised classifica- tion would then exhibit to the old one of Sir Charles Lyell the relation shown in the following table :— Lyell’s Classification. German Classification. Pliocene : Upper Miocene } Neogene. Lower Miocene ‘ Upper Eocene \ Oligocene. Middle Eocene Lower Eocene } Kocene. Even this revised classification cannot claim the merit of being entirely natural; but it is certainly nearer that Ultima Thule of systematists than the original one of Sir Charles Lyell. It would indeed be strange if geology had made no progress in this direction for more than thirty years; and the only marvel is that, in a science which makes such gigantic strides, the original classification has not by this time been entirely swept away. The fact that it has not, is, however, conclusive testimony of the reality and 10 Str Charles Lyell and Modern Geology. [ Jan., great value of the service to science which Sir Charles Lyell per- formed when he proposed it. Closely connected with the general subject of existing causes, and forming a very important branch of the imquiry, are the phenomena connected with voleanic eruptions and the formation of cones and craters. Sir Charles Lyell has always taken a prominent part im the discussions which have from time to time arisen re- specting certain of these phenomena, and more especially in the controversy between the partisans of the “crater of elevation” and “crater of eruption” theories. ‘The old theory of the formation of volcanic cones was that a vent having been produced by the fracture of the earth’s crust (which may have been attended with some degree of upheaval and dislocation), the volcanic materials sub- sequently ejected gradually formed a conical mound, having a depression in the centre. This mound, or “volcanic cone,” is supposed to be composed chiefly of ashes and scorie, which have been ejected into the air, and on falling have naturally arranged themselves in the manner stated. The eruption of dykes and streams of solid lava from the newly formed crater assists In giving solidity to the cone, although it frequently destroys its symmetry by breaking down the walls of one side of the crater. This ex- planation has been termed the “crater of eruption” theory, and is the one which was most generally received until the celebrated Leopold von Buch propounded the opposing theory of “craters of elevation,” an idea which was adopted by Humboldt, and therefore became generally received. Sir Charles Lyell and Mr. Poullett Scrope have always been consistent in their opposition to it; and it is, perhaps, entirely owing to their united exertions that it has now fallen so much into disrepute. The “crater of elevation” theory may be thus stated :—A vent having been formed in the earth’s crust, volcanic materials—lava, ashes, and scorise—are ejected and spread horizontally over the surface, the cone being subsequently formed by sudden inflation and upheaval from beneath. Sir Charles Lyell devotes several pages in the ‘ Principles’ to the refutation of this theory, and it may be as well to enumerate the chief points of his argument. In the first place, although upheaved strata of various ages occur all over the world, no single instance can be pointed out in which the upheaval has produced a form comparable to that of a truncated volcanic cone. Sir Charles Lyell therefore asks, “Are we then called upon to believe that whenever elastic fluids generated in the subterranean regions burst through horizontal strata, so as to upheave them in the peculiar manner before adverted to, they always select, as if from choice, those spots of comparatively insignificant area where a certain quantity of volcanic matter happens to lie, while they carefully 1867. | Sir Charles Lyell and Modern Geology. 11 avoid purely lacustrine and marine strata, although they often lie immediately contiguous?”* Secondly, it is in accordance with all analogy to expect that if these great volcanic cones were upheaved after the ejection of the matter composing them, their sides would be fractured and the volcanic strata shattered and disturbed in a considerable degree. But the reverse is the case, for of all isolated hills volcanic cones are the most symmetrical in form, and regular in the arrangement of their constituent materials. Of late years it has been asserted that volcanoes could not have been formed by “eruption,” because solid lava could not consolidate on a slope greater than three degrees, nor vesicular lava on a greater inclination than five degrees. But Sir Charles Lyell provedy that this is an error as to a matter of fact. He showed that several of the lavas of Etna of known date have formed continuous beds of compact stone on slopes of 15, 36, and 38 degrees, and in one instance (the lava of 1852) of 40 degrees. Other volcanic cones, such as the island of Palma, yielded similar evidence, so that this objection to the “eruption” theory has been fully answered. The objections to the “elevation” theory have not; they rest on a wider basis, so they probably never will. The form of a volcanic cone is, moreover, precisely that which would be produced by the falling of materials thrown vertically into the air from a central vent. Sir Charles Lyell has naturally watched with great interest the recent discussions on subaerial phenomena, more especially those on the mode of formation of lake basins and on the origin of valleys and the denudation of the Weald. His latest published examination of these questions is contained in the sixth edition of his ‘ Elements of Geology, but they will probably be more fully discussed in the forthcoming tenth edition of the ‘ Principles.’ In the first edition of the latter work Sir Charles Lyell taught that the Wealden area had been denuded by the sea, to which agent he also ascribed the formation of the chalk escarpments ; but he referred the formation of the transverse valleys to the action of rivers running along lines of fracture. Professor Ramsay and others have recently contended that “rain and rivers” and other subaerial agents have produced all the surface-features, not only of the Wealden region, but also of the whole terrestrial surface of the globe, excepting of course volcanic cones and craters. In the opinion of the advocates of this theory the sea has planed off the surface of the land as it emerged, and this form has been termed by Professor Ramsay the “plane of marine denudation.” All the existing physical features have been since produced by subaerial erosion. This theory appears to go as much too far in one direction * Principles,’ first edit., vol. i., p. 387. + ‘ Philosophical Transactions,’ 1858, i. Sir Charles Lyell and Modern Geology. [Jan., as its ultra-antagonist, the theory of marine denudation, pur et semple, does in the other ; and it is not surprising that Sir Charles Lyell should refuse to give his support to either. It is perfectly possible that atmospheric causes may have produced a greater effect in particular regions than even Sir Charles himself was able to prove in the ‘ Principles ;’ but that is quite a different issue, and merely a further proof of the doctrine of uniformity which he has advocated for so many years. It would occupy too much space to recount the arguments that may be urged in support of the different theories of erosion and denudation ; but it may be remarked generally, that phenomena of so varied a character are not, as a rule, referable to the same cause. Certain valleys generally considered to, have been scooped out by the sea may have been excavated by rain and rivers, or vice versa ; but a multitude of such instances, unless they embrace every possible character of valley and circumstance of occurrence, is not sufficient to warrant the general conclusion that all valleys have been formed by one agent, or by the other. Mens Another phase of the question is that respecting the meaning to be attached to the expression “form of the ground,’ this having been very recently the subject of discussion. If the very latest and smallest modifications of the surface are taken into account, of course the present “form of the ground” is due entirely to atmo- spheric agencies, not excepting volcanic cones and craters; but if this interpretation be insisted on,—why scientific discussion has degenerated into quibbling. | The theory of the formation of lake-basins by glacial erosion is fundamentally new, and has received from Sir Charles Lyell, in the last edition of the ‘ Elements,’ and in a work to which we have not yet referred,* a fuller examination than the “ subaerial denuda- tion” hypothesis, which is merely an old notion revived in an overgrown shape. Sir Charles Lyell is no advocate of the theory that lake-basins have been scooped out by huge glaciers ; and in the works we have mentioned he has fully stated the objections which appear to him to render it improbable. He admits, of course, that “heavy masses of ice creeping for ages over a surface of dry land must often, by their grinding action, produce depressions in consequence of the different degrees of resistance offered by rocks of unequal hardness;”’ but the objections to any long continuance of this scooping action on any particular spot are the greater the larger and deeper the lake-basin to be accounted for, because to excavate such a depression a power is required “capable of acting with a considerable degree of uniformity on masses of varying powers of resistance.” In opposition to the view that the great Swiss and Italian lake-basins were scooped out by glaciers Sir = * « Antiquity of Man,’ p. 309. 1867. | Sir Charles Lyell and Modern Geology. 13 Charles Lyell has brought forward several arguments, especially, (1) that “several of the great lakes are by no means in the position which they ought to have taken had they been scooped out by the pressure and onward motion of the extinct glaciers ;” (2) that lakes of the first magnitude do not occur “in several areas where they ought to exist if the enormous glaciers which once occupied those spaces had possessed the deep excavating power ascribed to them; ” ~ (3) that the presence of patches of preglacial freshwater formations in some Alpine valleys, e.g. on the: borders of the Lake of Zurich, prove that some of the lakes must have existed before the glacial eriod. : Sir Charles Lyell seems, however, in this instance, more fortunate in opposition than in proposition. He has shown that the “erosive power of ice was not required to produce lake-basins on a large scale,” by means of the preglacial lacustrine formations of the Lake of Zurich. Some other cause must then have produced them if glaciers did not excavate them, and Sir Charles Lyell suggests “unequal movements of upheaval and subsidence.” This theory ought to be capable of proof or refutation by geological surveyors, and no doubt it will sooner or later be submitted to the test; but until that is done little more can be said about it, than that it does not enlist im its favour the sympathies of those who have been trained by Sir Charles Lyell himself to the application of the doctrme of Uniformity. The ‘ Antiquity of Man’ was published as a résumé of the evidence which has recently been accumulated in favour of the contemporaneity of Man with certain extinct Mammalia. It was avowedly a compilation ; but it contains a large mass of matter drawn from a variety of sources, and tending to strengthen the evidence in favour of Man having existed on the earth in Post- pliocene times. Perhaps not even the ‘Principles’ exhibits more clearly the author’s wonderful faculty of “assimilation,” as Dr. Fitton called it, of turning anything and everything into good geology. But it is unnecessary for us to discuss this subject at greater length, except incidentally, as being one of the last dis- coveries bearing on a view of the succession of life in time which Sir Charles Lyell has persistently maintained ever since the com- mencement of his distinguished career. Negative evidence has always been a battle-ground for geologists holding opposite views, and it is only of late years that its use has fallen considerably in estimation. The experience of the last half- century has taught geologists that it is highly unphilosophical, and positively unsafe, to assume that any class of organisms has not existed at any particular period, or that there is a total break in the succession of life on the earth at any horizon in the geological scale, merely because we have no positive evidence in proof of the 14 Sir Charles Lyell and Modern Geology. [Jan., contrary. But Sir Charles Lyell can claim the merit of having foreseen the unstable nature of conclusions based on ignorance, for in the first edition of the ‘Principles’ he contended that the apparent breaks in the continuity of geological periods are due to our imperfect information, and do not really exist in nature; and also that the organic remains imbedded in known deposits do not represent the whole of the earth’s inhabitants during those periods _ or in those regions ; and he devoted some considerable space to the illustration of these views, in contrast with the then prevalent doctrine of catastrophes.* In those days Lamarck’s hypothesis of progressive development by transmutation of species excited a great deal of discussion ; as also did the theory of the successive appearance on the earth’s surface of more and more highly organized animals and plants. In support of the latter view, geologists appealed with alacrity to the fossils discovered in different deposits as affording a positive proof of its truth; and they thus endeavoured to define the order of nature, and to assign to each class of organisms the period of its birth. But Sir Charles Lyell contended} that at that time there was “no foundation in geological facts, for the popular theory of the successive development of the animal and vegetable world, from the simplest to the most perfect forms.” And although subsequent discoveries have abundantly justified Sir Charles Lyell’s protest against invoking negative evidence, to prove that this or that period witnessed the creation of such or such a class of organisms, he has at last admitted that the successive development theory is not much affected by successive discoveries, and is probably necessary in the present state of science.t It appears to us, however, not a little mischievous, in so far as it encourages an appeal to negative evidence, aS was amusingly illustrated in 1851 by the late Professor Edward Forbes, in reference to the discovery of Pul- monifera in the Purbeck beds, “the (supposed) non-existence of which durmg the Secondary epoch has called forth not a few prematurely wise comments in geological works.” ** Agassiz just had given his bail, "T'was adverse to creation, That there should live pulmoniferous snail, Before the chalk formation.”§ Since then Pulmonifera have been discovered in Carboniferous deposits, and the history of nearly every group of animals contains a record of similar premature conclusions and their subsequent refutation. | * See also his Presidental Address to the Geological Society in 1851, passim. + ‘Principles,’ 1st edit., vol i., p. 153. t ‘ Antiquity of Man,’ p. 405. § Wilson and Geikie’s ‘Memoir of Edward Forbes,’ p. 461. 1867. | Str Charles Lyell and Modern Geology. 15 Now to what conclusion does the sum of the evidence at present in our possession point? It cannot be denied that, as regards animals, the Protozoa are those of which we have the earliest evi- dence, in the Hozoon Canadense of the Laurentian rocks, if that primeval fossil be of organic origin. Whether the Coelenterata, Echinodermata, Mollusca, or Crustacea first appeared we have no evidence to show, as it 1s extremely improbable that the Hozoon was the solitary inhabitant of the seas during the Laurentian period. Known facts are in favour of the Annulosa appearing before either of the other great groups; whereas, according to the successive development theory, they ought to have appeared in the order in which they have been mentioned. But this evidence is purely negative, and therefore of little or no value. As regards the Ver- tebrata it is certain that we are cognizant of Fishes older than any Amphibia, and these again are older than any known Reptiles. The oldest true Reptile is probably Triassic, and thus older than either Birds or Mammals; but with regard to the order of appearance of these two classes, we meet with the same difficulty as before. Now the Vertebrata asa whole form a group of equal value with the Mollusca, Annulosa, &c., and should consequently be compared as a whole with the latter, not, as is usual, in four or five separate groups. From this point of view we should find that the present state of our knowledge lends very little countenance to the theory of uniform progression of animal life in time; and if we base our comparison on groups of smaller value the general result is much the same; for, as was shown by Professor Huxley, “if the known geological record is to be regarded as even any considerable fragment of the whole, it is inconceivable that any theory of a necessarily progressive development can stand, for the numerous families and orders cited afford no trace of such a process.”* Nevertheless Sir Charles Lyell remarks, “It would be an easy task to multiply objections to the theory now under consideration ; but from this I refrain, as I regard it not only as a useful, but rather, in the present state of science, as an indispensable hypothesis, and one which, though destined here- after to undergo many and great modifications, will never be overthrown.” t This conviction was probably produced by the necessity which Sir Charles Lyell felt of abandoning his old opposition to the theory of the transmutation of species after carefully weighing Mr. Darwin's theory of Natural Selection. Sir Charles Lyell appears to think that there is a necessary and direct connection between these theories ; but, on our part, we canuot see why a naturalist may not be an advocate for “descent with modification,” and still refuse to accept the theory of progressive development. It is therefore rather sur- prising to read in the concluding sentences of Chapter XX. of the * «Ann, Address Geol. Soc.,’ 1862. } ‘Antiquity of Man,’ p. 405. 16 Sir Charles Lyell and Modern Geology. | Jan., ‘ Antiquity of Man,’ an attempt to account for the apparent paradox, “that writers who are most in favour of transmutation are neyer- theless among those who are most cautious, and one would say timid, in their mode of espousing the doctrine of progression ; while, on the other hand, the most zealous advocates of progression are oftener than not very vehement opponents of transmutation.” Sir Charles endeavours to explain it by the belief of the former in the incompleteness of the geological record, and of the latter in its completeness; but it appears to us that there is a great deal more in the caution of the Darwinian than is dreamt of even in Sir Charles Lyell’s philosophy. : So long as the doctrine of “ transmutation of species ” possessed only the old and crude form given to it by Lamarck, and so clearly illustrated by the author of the ‘ Vestiges,’ Sir Charles Lyell at- tacked it with considerable vehemence. But a careful consideration of the theory of Natural Selection, and frequent conversations with Mr. Darwin on the subject, have had the effect we should have an- ticipated on the opinions of so thorough a master of the mode in which the causes of change operate. The principle involved in Mr. Darwin’s hypothesis is one congenial to the mind of the author of the ‘ Principles.’ A cause producing a small effect, which becomes greater and greater in the course of ages by successive repetitions, is one of all others most calculated to enlist the sympathies and charm the mind of the man who has for thirty-six years been endeavouring to establish the self-same idea in its application to inorganic nature. So we were not surprised to find Sir Charles Lyell, in the ‘Antiquity of Man, bringing to bear the vast and varied mass of information at his command in favour of the pro- bability of the new doctrine. We were disappointed at not finding more light thrown on it from a geological point of view; but this defect will no doubt be remedied in the forthcoming edition of the ‘Principles,’ and is to a great extent compensated by some beauti- fully conceived arguments drawn from the analogy supplied by other fields of inquiry. It is not now our intention to discuss the theory of descent with modification, that has very recently been done in this Journal ;* but we shall examine two or three of Sir Charles Lyell’s arguments in its favour, not so much on account of their illustrating the theory itself, as because they throw light on the nature of the predomi- nating feature in the mental constitution of Sir Charles Lyell | himself,—an object which we have had in view throughout this review of his labours. Perhaps the most remarkable of these arguments is that drawn from the very clever comparison of a natural history species to a language, and consequently of Mr. Darwin’s theory to the Aryan * No. 10, April, 1866, pp. 151-176. 1867. ] Sir Charles Lyell and Modern Geology. 17 hypothesis. Considering that the ‘ Antiquity of Man’ was written for the educated public, not specially for naturalists, it scarcely seems possible to conceive of a comparison better calculated to bring home to the understanding a proper appreciation of the aim and scope of the theory of “descent with modification.” Professor Max Miller has observed, “That if we knew nothing of the. existence of Latin, if all historical documents previous to the fifteenth century had been lost, if tradition even was silent as to the former existence of a Roman empire, a mere comparison of the Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Wallachian, and Rhcetian dialects would enable us to say that at some time there must have been a language from which these six modern dialects derive their origin in common.” Further, “ Latin itself, as well as Greek, Sanskrit, Zend (or Bactrian), Lithuanian, old Sclavonic, Gothic, and Ar- menian are also eight varieties of one common and more ancient type,and . . . . have all such an amount of mutual resem-. blance, as to point to a more ancient language, the Aryan, which was to them what Latin was to the six Romance languages.”* ~ Now if we substitute for the names of these various languages the designations of allied species of animals or plants, having similar chronological relations, and if for the words “dialect” and “lan- guage” we substitute “species” and “variety,” and so on, we have in these sentences a correct exposition of the doctrine of transmutation as applied to certain particular cases. The analogy is complete. But this is not all: Sir Charles Lyell shows that the objections which would naturally be made by an illiterate person to the Aryan hypothesis are precisely parallel to those often made to Mr. Darwin’s theory; e. g. “ We all speak as our parents and grand- parents spoke before us,’ &. Then there is the same difficulty about the definitions of terms as in Natural History ; for instance, “Tf this theory of indefinite modifiability be sound, what meaning can be attached to the term language, and what definition can be given of it so as to distinguish a language from a dialect?” We need not follow the comparison further ; sufficient has been quoted to show the parallelism of the two cases,and the skill with which Sir Charles Lyell has brought into relief those points of the Aryan hypothesis which bear the most striking similarity to the theory of Mr. Darwin. In conclusion, we must refer to Sir Charles Lyell’s treatment of the charge of Darwinism being inconsistent with the existence of a Creator and the immortality of the soul. A reviewer asks, if there was a transition from the instinct of the brute to the noble mind of man, “at what point of his progressive improvement did Man acquire the spiritual part of his body, and become endowed with the awful attribute of immortality?”+ Sir Charles Lyell appeals * * Antiquity of Man,’ pp. 454, 455. } ‘Antiquity of Man,’ p. 502. VOL. IV. 0 18 Sir Charles Lyell and Modern Geology. [ Jan., to “analogous enigmas in the constitution of the world around us;” for instance, the transitions between those “ who are doomed to helpless imbecility ” and the half-witted, “and from these again to individuals of perfect understanding.” Again, “ one-fourth of the human race die in early infancy, nearly one-tenth before they are a month old; so that we may safely affirm that millions perish on the earth in every century in the first few hours of their existence. To assign to such individuals their appropriate psychological place in the creation is one of the unprofitable themes on which theologians and metaphysicians have expended much ingenious speculation.” — Nothing can be more illogical than to reject a theory which explains much that was never explained before, because it creates a difficulty similar to that experienced in every department of human knowledge where the method of gradation can be applied. If Darwinism were to fall by such a blow, what scientific or theological system could stand? Sir Charles Lyell, therefore, accepts the philosophic dictum that “whatever is, is right,” and he agrees with Dr. Asa Gray, as most assuredly do we, that ‘‘ to do any work by an instrument must require, and therefore pre- suppose, the exertion rather of more than of less power, than to do it directly.”* In this review of Sir Charles Lyell’s services to Geology we have omitted all notice of his numerous mmor publications. We have endeavoured to select those of his works which exhibit his — difference from the great mass of geologists ; and we have neglected entirely those original essays which with him, as with everyone else, are simply the result of hard work and careful observation. Per- haps no geologist who has addressed himself so exclusively to the inorganic portion of the science has so much faith in the present value of paleontology, or so high an anticipation of its future destiny. His love of speculation is apparent im all his works, and was noticed by Dr. Fitton thirty years ago ; but to whatever extent and in whatever direction Sir Charles Lyell may speculate in searching for the causes of phenomena, he never allows his specula- tive faculty to carry him beyond the bounds prescribed by analogy. Thus, all the hypothetical views which he has either propounded or advocated are based upon, or supported by, the analogy of similar phenomena in other departments of human knowledge, if nothing comparable with them is known in geology. Another test of the truth of any view, to which he frequently resorts, is what logicians call “ antecedent probability,” as is especially seen in his opposition to the theory of “ craters of elevation.” | Sir Charles Lyell, as we have sketched him, we consider to be the Founder of Modern Geology ; not in the sense of usurping the * «Natural Selection not inconsistent with Natural Theology,’ p. 55. 1867. | The Ignigenous Rocks near Montbrison. 19 laurels of Hutton, though much that Hutton believed was unsound, and what was philosophical was not generally received until Sir Charles Lyell proved its merit. Nor do we compare him with the great field-geologists ; his mind is too restless in its hankering after the interpretation of ancient hieroglyphics to be satisfied with hoarding a mass of unread inscriptions. But we look upon him as .the Founder of Modern Geology in the sense of his being the man who first clearly defined the principles of geological investigation, and who has lent additional lustre to his system by himself leading the way in the application of his precepts. The ‘Principles of Geology’ are now to his followers “familiar in their mouths as household words,” and: they look forward into the future for the ‘Principles of Paleontology,’ trusting that it may produce as great a revolution in the development of the offspring, as Sir Charles Lyell caused so long ago in that of the parent. Il. ON THE IGNIGENOUS ROCKS NEAR MONTBRISON. (With reference to the Antiquity of the Voleanos of Central France.) By Cartes Davuseny, M.D., F.R.S., Professor of Botany at the University of Oxford. In the April number of the ‘Quarterly Journal of Science’ for 1866 will be found a memoir of mine, “On the Antiquity of the Volcanos of Auvergne,” in which, in opposition to the late Sir Francis Palgrave and to certain divines who had followed in his footsteps and adopted his views, it was attempted to show, that even the latest of the eruptions proceeding from these mountains must date from a period antecedent both to history and tradition. But as it must at the same time be conceded, on the testimony of two bishops whose writings have come down to us, namely Sidonius Apollinaris and Alcimus Avitus, that durmeg the fourth century after Christ, certain physical commotions took place in the neighbourhood of Vienne m France, which were of a nature sufficiently formidable to suggest the offering up of public prayers, and even the institution of the Rogation-days, set apart ever since m the Church for divine worship, those who denied the recent date of the volcanic eruptions in that neighbourhood were called upon to show, that there are no vestiges of the kind round about the city of Vienne, which might by possibility be referred to a period comparatively so modern as the one alluded to. I therefore pointed out in the above memoir, not only that, so far as is known, volcanos are entirely absent from the immediate 02 ‘ gis aa ope 20 The Ignigenous Rocks near Montbrison. [ Jan. vicinity of the city of Vienne, but also that the nearest indications of igneous action to be met with occur about Issoire, in the neigh- bouring department of the Puy-de-Dome, a town situated in a straight line at a distance from Vienne of about eighty English miles, or else near Puy-en-Velay, which is not less than sixty from the same locality. It has, however, since been suggested to me, that I had over- looked a little group of volcanos situated round about Montbrison, the capital of the department of the Loire, a town which lies con- siderably nearer to Vienne than either of the places to which my attention had been directed, being in fact not more in a straight line than about thirty-five miles distant from the city of Vienne, and that it was possible, therefore, that the convulsions of nature to which Sidonius and Alcimus refer might find their explanation in certain eruptions of which this neighbourhood had still retamed the impress. 3 I was, therefore, glad to avail myself of the opportunity of visiting, in company with my friend, Mr. Corfield, a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, the above locality on our way to Switzerland this autumn, and i am now prepared to say that, without pretending to have surveyed the entire district, I saw enough to convince me, that no volcanic disturbance which had occurred within this area at so late a period as that alluded to could have escaped our notice, and that every indication of igneous action which presents itself throughout the country bears marks of a much greater antiquity. Thus much at least I can venture to affirm, namely, that neither craters, streams of lava, scorize, nor even cellular trap, are to be met with anywhere within the limits of this district. On the contrary, the only igneous rocks which came under our observation consisted of a compact basalt, containing nests of olivine, a material which could only have been elaborated by the aid of great pressure, and under a different configuration of the surface from that now existing. To descend to particulars—the granitic formation, which occupies a large portion of central France, may be seen extending to the west of Montbrison, but the valley of the Loire, im which this town is itself situated, consists of tertiary fresh-water beds, covered over in many places by thick deposits of alluvial matter. On the right bank of the Loire, however, the granite is again seen, and stretches as far as the Rhone valley, in which Lyons is situated. Farther to the south, however, occurs the Coal formation of St. Etienne, which consequently intervenes between the valley of the Loire, in which Montbrison stands, and the city of Vienne, situated on the banks of the Rhone, which also is built upon a granitic rock. Oot a 1867. | The Ignigenous Rocks near Montbrison. 21 Now both to the north and south of Montbrison, is descried, elevated above the general level of the granitic formation, a number of isolated knolls rising abruptly fo a height of 500 feet or upwards, and in general capped by the ruins either of a church, a convent, or a castle, for which these summits would have been especially well adapted, both as being conspicuous objects from a distance, and also irom their steepness being secure from assault. We visited several of these httle detached hills, as for instance, St. Romain-le-Puy to the south, and Marcilly-le-Pavé and Mont- verdun to the north of Montbrison, and found each of them com- posed up to its summit of basalt, which also extended nearly down to the level of the surrounding country. At St. Romain-le-Puy, and Marcilly-le-Pavé, the trap rock rested upon granite, but that of Montverdun was incumbent directly upon the tertiary formation, which, as before stated, is superposed upon the granitic rocks on the lower levels. Moreover, to the east of the road leading from Montverdun to Montbrison is a ridge, the longer axis of which lies nearly from north to south, wholly made up of the same material. About half an English mile from Montbrison itself, at a place called “ Le Roche,” occurs the most instructive section which came under our notice; for here about halfway up the hill the basalt may be distinctly seen intruding itself into, and thrust through the midst of the granite, which is in consequence uplifted, and manifests itself both above and below the igneous rock, in the quarry, where the latter for road purposes is extensively worked. Indeed the granite occupies a much more elevated position than this on the hills to the west of the spot where the basalt is seen, for the latter is found only at a certain elevation, being bounded both above and below by the granite of the country. Judging from these facts, which are thoroughly borne out by the negative evidence, stated in the former part of this commu- nication, I should conclude, that a vast antiquity must be assigned to the basalts which occur about Montbrison, for one can only account for the isolated position in which they are found on the detached knolls scattered over the district, by supposing that they constituted a part of one great continuous sheet of volcanic materials, which once overspread the surface, and of which the intervening portions have been since removed by denudation. Of course such a supposition removes their origin to an immeasurable distance in pomt of time from any physical convul- sions of recent or historical date, and indeed from the whole modern class of volcanos which has been described in my former memoirs on this country. They remind one of the basaltic eminences met with in Saxony, which Werner referred to his imaginary floetz-trap formation, with reference to which we are also compelled to assume e 22 The Means of Transit in India. [Jan., that the detached knolls of basalt scattered over the country, and resting upon the sandstone rocks which there predominate, are remnants of some great overflow of molten materials which covered the country, when the now elevated peaks constituted its lowest level, and when in all probability the entire district lay submerged under the ocean. We are therefore only obliged to transfer to Vulcan the task which the renowned geologist of Freyburg attributed to Neptune, and to conceive that a flood of melted matter discharged from his subterranean workshop over- spread the district, instead of the deluge of water which, according to Werner, had risen to the summit of the highest hills, and which had left behind it on its retreat those floetz-trap rocks which he insisted upon referring to an aqueous origin. _ it would appear then, that the conclusion at which I arrived in my previous memoir is in no respect invalidated by anything observed at or about Montbrison, and that we are still at a loss for any facts tending to show, that the lively picture drawn by Sidonius “of the earthquakes which demolished the walls of Vienne, of the mountains opening and sending forth torrents of inflamed materials, and of the wild beasts driven from the woods by terror and hunger, retreating into and making great ravages withm the towns,” is to be regarded in any other light than as the offspring of a lively imagination, dwelling upon reports which had reached the author with respect to some fearful earthquake which may have occurred in the neighbourhood of Vienne. Ill. THE MEANS OF TRANSIT IN INDIA. 1. Steam Navigation in British India. By G. A. Prinsep, Esq., Calcutta, 1830. 2. First Report of the Public Works Commissioners, Madras, 1852. 3. Statement showing the Number of Miles of new Roads or Navwi- gable Canals opened for Traffic in each several Presidency of India, since the year 1848. Printed Parliamentary Paper, No. 92 of 1859. 4. Reports to the Secretary of State for India in Council on Rail- ways in India for the years 1859 to 1865-66, inclusive. By Juland Danvers, Esq. 5. Statement of the Moral and Material Progress of India, 1864-65. Printed Parliamentary Paper No. 374 of 1866. WueEn India first came into the possession of the East India Com- pany there was scarcely, throughout the whole empire, one complete Outcine Map oF INDIA WITH Ralitways, and the products: of the Districts through which thea (Pass. ‘ 9 SS W. Bratbanay, Cot "Q bo Ti sale iii 4 ASAIN ih, yall Md\\ < " + T -BHOTAN aha ah Meal SAN Debrooghaa: BOMBAY {3 < A ¥ LUUS UL PT OY ESS ee Ne gL Ch Lives uv contemplation —— Coal Mines —__- as Trove Mines WEAVE UEC Cohtce Districts Collow Districts ______ __ ginim Lemp and other Fibres __ + SOMOS SE /ndigo : z —. © Principal Wheat producing —_ Districts = sok GW AL & NV. Hankart, ith FC. Damvers, dev 1867. | The Means of Transit in India. 23 road of any length on which it would have answered to employ wheel-carriages. There existed, however, proof that attention had once been given to the construction of roads, in the fine avenues of trees, which in some districts measured several hundred miles in leneth ; but, as they had never been properly formed or drained, and bridges had not been built nor care taken to keep the path- ways practicable, they were roads no longer. For some time after the establishment of British rule very little was done towards pro- viding the country with roads, excepting where they were required for military purposes; the traffic of the country, however, profited in some degree by these military lines, and there can, even now, be traced in many of the great trunk roads the lines used for connecting the military arsenals and cantonments. With the year 1846 a new era commenced in the history of the roads of the country, and the operations and expenditure, being placed under the direction of a Road Department, began thenceforward to exhibit more satisfactory results; the introduction of the European form of wheel led, moreover, to the employment of cattle in draught where little or nothing had been done for the roads, and the im. proved condition of many hundred miles of road soon led to the extensive use of the common country-cart, or bullock-bandy, for the traffic between the inland districts and the coast. The principal trade throughout the peninsula has, for many years, been carried on through the agency of a class of people called Bunjaras, who date the first establishment of their business prior to the Macedonean invasion in the fourteenth century. These Bun- jaras are still extensively employed, but chiefly in the conveyance of coffee from the district of Wynaad to the Malabar coast, and in the conveyance of merchandize from the eastern coast into’ the interior. As the demand for improved means of transport through- out the country increased, the Government started a Banghy Dawk, for the conveyance of light articles, and a bullock-train for goods of a heavier nature, and passengers ; and those establishments have since been superseded by the carts and waggons of the ‘ Inland Transit Company,’ the ‘ Punjab and North-western Dawk Company,’ the ‘ Indian Carrying Company,’ and the ‘Commercial Transport Association, which undertake the conveyance of both passengers and goods. The most expeditious mode of travelling by land was formerly by Dawk, in which the passenger rode in a palanquin borne on the shoulders of four men; the speed attained, however, was but slow, being only from three-and-a-half to four miles per hour, and the usual charge was one shilling per mile. Any other mode of travel- ling—especially when it was necessary to convey much baggage, or furniture—was excessively tedicus; anything of a delicate nature, such as glass, china, &c., was carried in bundles on the heads of 24 The Means of Transit in India. | Jan., men, and furniture was tied upon a charpoy, or bedstead, and car- ried by four men. With few exceptions, little use was, i former times, made of the rivers of the country, and nothing seems ever to have been done to improve their navigation. In the heavy freshes, rafts of timber and circular boats of wicker-work covered with leather were floated down some of the larger streams, but on very few of the rivers was any attempt ever made to take laden vessels up the stream. Still less use was made of the canals of irrigation, though many of them were well adapted for water-carriage during six or eight months of the year. The backwaters of the eastern and western coasts were turned to somewhat more account, and a considerable traffic was carried on by means of coasting craft. In the districts of Bengal and the Punjab occurs the principal extent of river navigation-in India, where, through the most populous part of the country, an area extending over about forty square degrees, and embracing the courses of the Ganges and Jumna on the west and south, the Brah- mapootra and Megna on the east, was formerly almost entirely dependent upon water communication. Attention seems to have been, at an early date, paid by the British Government to the improvement of communication through the backwaters on the western coast of India; but the first attempt to introduce canal navigation was by the formation of a channel to connect Madras with the Ennore backwater, and which now forms part of the East Coast Canal. | ) Soon after the conquest of Assam the difficulties in the naviga- tion of the Brahmapootra, and the want of good communication by land. with the upper parts of the valley, first suggested the expe- diency of applying steam to secure the desired facilities ; and steam- vessels have ever since been successfully employed on many of the Indian rivers. In order the more effectually to organize the ser- vices of their river steamers the Bengal Government, in 1855, established an Inland Steam Department, their fleet at that time numbering five steamers, and five flats, which were employed on the rivers Ganges and Brahmapootra, between Calcutta and Alla- habad and Assam. On the other side of India the Bombay Govern- ment also possessed an Indus Steam Flotilla, whose vessels plied recularly between Kurrachee and Mooltan, and they had also one steamer on the Euphrates; and in Pegu, six river steamers, with flats or troop vessels attached, kept up regular communication between Rangoon and all the stations on the river Irrawaddy. In subsequent years the different Government flotillas were gradually broken up, and the duty of providing for the river navigation of India was left open to private enterprise. The steam companies at present existing, and by whose vessels the steam transport of India (both river and coasting traffic) is now 1867. | The Means of Transit in India. 25 earried on, are the following, wz. The Penimsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company, with eighteen steam-vessels, and ‘The Messageries Impériales, with fifteen vessels, afford communication with and between Calcutta, Madras, Pondicherry, Pomt de Galle, Bombay, Aden, the Straits settlements, and China. The British India Steam Navigation Company, with a fleet of twenty vessels, ranging from 350 to 1,500 tons burden, and 80 to 350 horse- power ; the Bombay and Bengal Steam Ship Company, with eight steamers of from 850 to 1,473 tons; and the Bombay Coast and River Steam Navigation Company, with eleven steamers of from 131 to 750 tons, and 40 to 140 horse-power, furnish the means of communication between all the parts along the coast between Calcutta and Kurrachee, and with British Burmah. The India General Steam Navigation Company, with a fleet of nine river steamers of from 80 to 150 horse-power, and twenty-one flats of from 80 to 500 tons burden, send steamers regularly throughout the year, every seven or ten days, from Calcutta to the North- western Provinces, calling at all intermediate stations on the river Ganges; they also despatch steamers and flats periodically, in the direction of Dacca and Sylhet, to Cachar; and to Assam up the river Brahmapootra, once in six weeks, calling at all the termediate places as far as Debrooghur. The Bengal River Steam Company, with four steamers of from 90 to 200 horse-power, and nine flats; and the River Steamer Company, with five steamers of 110 horse- power, and one of 130 horse-power, and eleven flats, navigate the Ganges as far as Allahabad, and the former company also despatches vessels up the Brahmapootra to Debrooghur. In addition to the foregoing there is Apcar and Company’s line of six steamers which also navigate the rivers of Bengal. On the western side of India there is the Indus Steam Flotilla Company, with eight steamers from 67 to 295 tons burden, and 90 to 200 horse-power, and two tugs of 67 tons and 40 horse-power, and two of 43 tons and 15 horse-power, navigating the river Indus between Kotree and Mooltan, the larger vessels beg employed on _ the portion of the river above the Sukkur Pass, and the smaller steamers between that place and Kotree. Lhe subject of railway communications in India was first laid before the Supreme Government by Sir Macdonald Stephenson, in 1843, and in 1849 a contract was concluded with the East India Railway Company for te construction of an experimental line from Howrah to Raneegunge; and in the same year the Great Indian Peninsular Railway Company was incorporated, and entered into a contract for the construction of an experimental line from Bomba to Callian. Both these associations were formed in the year 1845, but the projectors found it impossible to raise the necessary funds for their proposed schemes without the assistance of Government ; 26 The Means of Transit in India. —: [dan., it was therefore determined by the East India Company to guarantee, for a term of ninety-nine years, a certain rate of interest (five per cent. per annum) upon the capital subscribed for their respective undertakings, in addition to a free grant of all the land required for their railways and subsidiary works. As a rule all the Indian railroads are constructed, in the first instance, for a single line of railway, the bridges, tunnels, and cuttings being made suitable for a second line. The gauge in all cases is five feet six inches. The works on the East Indian Railway were commenced in January, 1851; and in February, 1855, the whole line to Ranee- eunge, a distance of 121 miles, was completed. In the meantime, however, a general system of trunk railways for India had been determined upon, and the construction of a line from Caleutta to Agra and Delhi was conceded to the East Indian Railway Company. Starting from Howrah, on the right bank of the Hooghly, opposite to Calcutta, this cclossal line proceeds in a north-westerly direction to Burdwan, whence a branch to Raneegunge strikes off © to the west through a district abounding in coal and other mineral resources, while the main line runs due north to Rajmahal, thus connecting Calcutta with the Ganges, and enabling traders to avoid the navigation of 250 miles of one of the most dangerous portions of the river. At Rajmahal the railway turns westward and follows the course of the Ganges, in some places touching its right bank, and in others running at a distance of seven or eight miles from it. Near Monghyr the line is driven through the only tunnel in its course, a length of 900 feet, through a hill of clay, slate, and hard quartz rock, and thence proceeds onwards to Patna, Benares, and Allahabad. Soon after leaving Patna, it is conveyed across the river Soane by a magnificent bridge, consisting of twenty-seven iron girders of 150 feet each, supported on brick foundations, and which, it is believed, is exceeded in magnitude by only one other in the world. -At Allahabad the railway crosses the river Jumna by another very fine bridge, which was opened for traffic on the 15th August, 1865; it has fourteen spans of 205 feet each, the rails being laid upon the top of the girders, and the space beneath made available for an ordinary carriage road 11 feet in width. The line then takes a north-westerly course through Cawnpore, into the heart of the Upper Provinces, and at a pomt 20 miles from Agra (with which it 1s connected by a branch) it strikes northward, past Allyghur, to Ghazeeabad, where it meets the Punjab Railway, and whence a short junction line of 12 miles unites it with the City of Delhi. The whole of this great undertaking has now been finished, and there is thus a continuous length of upwards of 1,000 miles opened for public traffic. In addition to the above, considerable progress has been made on a very important line of 225 miles, which, 1867. | The Means of Transit in India. 27 starting from Allahabad in a south-westerly direction, penetrates the cotton-growing districts of Jubbulpore, where it will join the Great Indian Peninsular Railway, and form the connecting link in the communication between Calcutta and Bombay. Moreover, the branch which was opened in 1855 to Raneegunge, and which has since been extended to Barrakur, is to be further carried over the Nargoonjoo Pass to Luckieserai, by which the distance between Calcutta and the north-west will be shortened by 71 miles; and a branch of 26 miles will at the same time be constructed to open up the Kurhurbalee coal-fields. The total length of the East Indian Railway with all its branches is about 1,500 miles, of which 1,127 have been opened. ‘The line of rail is at present single throughout its course, except for the first 67 miles from Calcutta; but the cord line to Luckieserai will be made double, as will also the portion from thence to Allahabad. The main object of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway is to establish means of communication between the three Presidency towns, and to connect the great cotton-growing districts of Central India with the seaport of Bombay. The line first commenced by this com- pany startinge from Bombay passed through the Island of Salsette and across the Tannah estuary to Callian, a distance of 33 miles, together with a short branch to Mahim, at the northern extremity of Bombay Island. The works were commenced in October, 1850, and finished in May, 1854. At the end of that year the company undertook the extension of their line into the interior, to unite with the East Indian and Madras Railways. At Callian, the line is divided into two great branches, the one going to the north-east, the other taking a south-easterly direction. The great physical difficulty in either case was to surmount the Ghauts, a lofty range which runs parallel to the sea along the whole west coast of the peninsula, and forms a barrier to the conveyance of the rich pro- duce of the Deccan to the port of Bombay. ‘The northern line is carried over the Thull Ghaut by an incline nine miles and a quarter in length, in the course of which it attains an elevation of 972 feet. It then proceeds by Nassick and Chalisgaum, to Bhosawul, at which point an important branch runs eastward through the great cotton district of Oomrawuttee to Nagpore. The main line, shortly after leaving Bhosawul, crosses the river ‘[aptee, and continues its course to the' north-east up the valley of the Nerbudda to Jubbulpore, where it meets the East Indian Railway. The southern of the two great branches is taken through the mountains at the Bhore Ghaut by an incline nearly sixteen miles in length, with a total elevation of 1831 feet, the difficulties of the course bemg overcome by such a series of cuttings, tunnels, viaducts, and embankments, as can hardly be rivalled in any other part of the world, except on the sister incline over the Thull Ghaut. The railroad is then continued 28 The Means of Transit in India. [Jan., to Poona, Sholapoor, and Kulburga, at which place it has been pro- posed that a line should branch off eastward to Hyderabad, the capital of the Nizam’s territories, while the main line proceeds across the river Kistna to Raichore, where it forms a junction with the railway from Madras. The distance from Bombay to Jubbulpore is 615 miles, that to Raichore, 441; and the operations of the company extend over a length, including branches, of 1,266 miles. It has been decided to construct the line double as far as Bhasawul, in the direction of Jubbulpore, and also to Lanowlie, at the top of the Bhore Ghaut incline. The Madras Railway Company was established in the year 1852, with the view of constructing a railway from the city of Madras to the western coast. Operations were commenced in June, 1853, and on the Ist July, 1856, the first section, as far as Arcot, a distance of 65 miles, was opened to the public. In 1858, a further contract was entered into for a line towards the north-west, to meet the south-western branch of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway, and thus form a direct communication between the Presidency towns of Madras and Bombay. The country through which the line to the western coast passes presented few obstacles to its progress, the only engineering diff- culties being to convey the line across the several rivers which traverse its path. Leaving Arcot and Yellore a short distance on the left, and throwing outa branch on the right to the important military station of Bangalore, it turns southward through the Shevaroy hills to Salem, beyond which point it resumes a westerly direction, and, passing through the cotton fields of Coimbatore, — finds its way by a break in the Ghauts, to the port of Beypoor on the coast of Malabar. The whole of this lme from Madras to Bey- poor, 406 miles in length, was opened for traffic nm May, 1562, and on the Ist August, 1864, passengers were conveyed on the Ban- galore branch, which is 86 miles long, and which attains a height of 3,000 feet on the Mysore table-land. The north-west line, leaving the other at Arconum, 42 miles from Madras, proceeds through Cuddapah and across the river Pennar to Gooty near which point a branch strikes off on the left to the town of Bellary, while the main lie crosses the Tonga- buddra, and at Raichore joms the main line from Bombay. This portion of the railway is 338 miles in length; and as its path is crossed by twelve rivers, requirmg upwards of three miles of bridging, and two ranges of hills, the works in some parts are very heavy. It has already been opened to Cuddapah, a distance of 119 miles, and it was expected that a further section of 32 miles would be ready by last Midsummer. The Bombay, Baroda, and Central India Railway Company 1867. | The Means of Transit in India. 29 was formed to connect Bombay with the cotton districts of Guzerat and Central India. It was incorporated in July, 1855, and the cutting of the first sod took place in May, 1856. Starting northwards from Bombay, through the Island of Salsette, and crossing the Bassem Channel and the Veturnee River, the railway follows the line of the coast, passing Damaun and Surat, at which latter place it is carried over the Taptee River by an iron bridge of 2,003 feet im length. A still more serious obstacle to its progress presented itself in the river Nerbudda, which the railway crosses by another iron bridge 3,800 feet long, Continuing in a northerly direction it proceeds through Broach to Baroda, at which point it turns to the north-west over the Mhye river, and termi- nates its course at Ahmedabad, 310 miles from Bombay. The whole line is open, except a section of four miles within Bombay Island, from Grant Road to Colaba, which is to be conducted over land now in course of being reclaimed from the sea at Back Bay. The Sind Railway Company was incorporated by an Act of Parliament passed on the 2nd July, 1855, and was reconstituted in August, 1857. Although its affairs are under a single board, the operations of the company in reality embrace four separate concerns; viz. the Sind Railway, the Indus Steam Flotilla (above deseribed), the Punjab Railway, and the Delhi Railway. The object of the combined undertakings 1s to establish communication between the port of Kurrachee and the Punjab, and to connect the chief cities of that province with the East Indian Railway at Delhi. The first portion, or Sind Railway proper, proceeds from the harbour of Kurrachee, across the rivers Bahrum and Mulleer, and through the Karatolla Hills, to Kotree on the Indus, opposite Hydrabad, and thereby enables traders to avoid the delay attendant on the navigation of the delta of the river. The length of the line is 109 miles; it was commenced in April, 1858, and was opened for traffic on the 11th May, 1861, with the immediate effect of developing a considerable trade in cotton, which had not been previously seen on the Indus, as well as in indigo, grain, wool, and other products. The Punjab Railway, starting from Sher Shah on the banks of the Chenaub, about 12 miles below Mooltan, passes through that city, and thence follows a nearly straight course up the left bank of the Ravee, as far as Lahore, at which place it turns directly to the east, until it reaches Umritsur. This line, which is 253 miles long, was commenced in February, 1859, and on the 24th April, 1865, the complete line was opened to the public. The Delhi Railway, running from Umritsur to Delhi, follows a south-easterly direction through the Punjab, and, crossing the Beas at Wuzeer Ghaut, proceeds by Jullunder to Phillour. at 30 The Means of Transit in India. [Jan., which place it is conveyed over the Sutlej. Continuing its course through Loodiana, Sirhind, and Umballa, it crosses the Jumna shortly before reaching Seharunpore, where it turns southward, and passing through Mozuffernugger and Meerut, arrives at Ghazeeabad, whence the trains will ran into Delhi over the branch constructed by the Hast Indian Railway Company. The length of the whole line is 320 miles; the contractors commenced work in 1864; and although no portion has yet been opened, it was anticipated that the section between Ghazeeabad and Meerut would have been ready for traffic by the end of last year. In 1857, the Eastern Bengal Railway Company was formed for the purpose of affording railway accommodation to the thickly populated districts lyimg north and east of Calcutta, which are richly cultivated with indigo, sugar, oilseeds, rice, and other grain. Starting from the Caleutta “side of the Hooghly, it proceeds up the right bank of the Matabanga to Kooshtee on the Ganges opposite Pubna, thus enabling merchants to send their goods direct to or from Calcutta without undergomg the delay and danger of the navigation of the Soonderbuns. The works were commenced in April, 1859, and the line was opened through its entire length of 114 miles in November, 1862. Arrangements have been made for conveying passengers and goods by steamboats from Kooshtee to Dacca, and also to Assam. In August, 1865, it was determined to extend the line a distance of 45 miles to Goalundo, at the con- fluence of the Brahmapootra and the Ganges, with the view of intercepting the traffic from the countries on the north-east; and the railway company have agreed to construct it as a part of their original undertaking. The necessity for increased accommodation for ships trading to Calcutta, and the dangers of navigating the Hooghly led to the formation, in 1857, of the Calcutta and South-eastern Railway Company, with the object of constructing a short line of 29 miles from Calcutta, in a south-easterly direction, to the harbour and town which it was contemplated to establish on the Mutlah estuary. The whole railway was opened for traffic in March, 1862, with the exception of the bridge over the Piallee, which was not finished till a later date; but it was not until the beginning of 1865 that a company was formed to build the necessary jetties and wharves required to make Canning Town a trading port. The Great Southern of India Railway Company was constituted in 1857, its object being to construct railways in the southern pro- vinces of India. The line at first sanctioned runs due west from Negapatam on the east coast, by Tanjore to Trichinopoly, through a country extensively cultivated with rice and cotton. _ Operations were commenced in May, 1859, and the whole line of 79 miles was thrown open for traffic in March, 1862. An extension of 87 miles 1867. | The Means of Transit in India. 31 was subsequently authorized to enable it to be taken through Caroor and up the right bank of the Cauvery, to join the Madras Railway at Errode. The length of rail in course of construction by the eight com- panies above mentioned is 4,944 miles, of which 3,332 miles were m working order on the 31st March last. ‘The capital estimated to be required for the completion of the several undertakings already sanctioned is 81,000,000/., of which 60,645,000/. has already been expended. ‘The traffic on the principal lines during the years 1865-66 exceeded the most sanguine expectations, and it is clear now that the traffic on them will be enormous, and that for some time to come it will increase in proportion to the means provided for carrying it. The passenger fares are low as compared with Kuropean rates, yet it appears that out of the total number of passengers carried, amounting to between thirteen and fourteen millions during the year, 94 per cent. travelled in the third, 4°78 in the second, and only 1:22 travelled in the first class. A sum of about eleven millions sterling has now been paid by the Govern- ment as guaranteed interest, over and above the amounts received _ from the earnings of the railways; and although it will be some time before so large an advance can be recouped, the condition of some of the railways gives reason to hope that, at any rate, a con- siderable portion will ultimately be repaid. Moreover, the free - conveyance of the mails, and the reduction in the expense of trans- porting troops and stores, will effect a considerable saving, and the indirect gain to the State, arising from the greater security afforded to the country and the impulse given to commerce and agriculture, is incalculable. 7 Adverting to the probable early completion of the main lines of communication connecting the port of Bombay with the Presidencies of Calcutta and Madras, the North-western Provinces, and the Punjab, it was recommended by the recent select committee of the House of Commons on the subject of Hast India communi- cations, that in future the mails for India should be conveyed to Bombay alone, and that the separate postal service between Ene- land and Madras and Calcutta should be discontinued. By this means a saving of several days would be effected in the communi- cations between those places and this country. In addition to the foregoing guaranteed railway companies, two companies, named respectively the Indian Branch Railway Com- pany, and the Indian Tramway Company, have been formed for the purpose of constructing light lines of railway without the assistance of a preliminary guarantee from Government. The Indian Branch Railway Company, in 18638, laid down a line, about 27 miles in length, with a gauge of 4 feet, from Nul- hatte, a station on the East Indian Railway, 144 miles from 32 ~ The Means of Transit in India. [Jan., Calcutta, to Azimgunge, opposite to Moorshedabad ; it was opened on the 21st December, and traffic carried on throughout the follow- ing year, though not to so great an extent as was anticipated. The same company has also obtained a concession of an important system of railway communication in Oude and Rohilcund, and con- siderable progress has been made on a section between Cawnpore and Lucknow, in which case the gauge of 5 feet 6 inches has been adopted, as on the main lines. In the south of India a branch line has been constructed by the Indian Tramway Company, from the Arconum junction on the Madras Railway, to Conjeveram. This line, which is 19 miles in length, was opened on the Ist August, 1865; light rails have been employed, with a gauge of 3 feet 6 inches, and the total cozt amounted to about 4,000/. a mile. A few words, en passant, concerning telegraphic communication in India. In the early part of 1852, the working of an experi- mental line of electric telegraph between Calcutta and Kedgeree haying proved entirely successiul, it was determined to construct a complete system of telegraphic lmes throughout India, and the ageresate extent of wire now in operation amounts to not less than about 14,000 miles. Atter an interruption of more than three years, British Burmah was, during 1864, once more connected with Calcutta by the construction of a land line through Arracan, in leu of the deep-sea cable, which, after a short trial, utterly failed. In 1858-59, schemes were proposed for establishing telegraphic communication between England and India, both by way of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. The line was laid, and messages were actually transmitted by the former route; but after a short period the signals failed, and all attempts to restore the communi- cation for any length of time proved fruitless. Greater success has, however, attended the construction of the alternative, or Indo- European line, which, proceeding from Kurrachee in a westerly direction, along the Mekran coast by Gwadur to Bunder Abbas, and thence up the Persian Gulf to Bushire and Fao, at the head of the Gulf, has a total submarine course of nearly 1,500 miles; a land line has also been constructed as farasGwadur. From Fao the line is conveyed overland to Bussora, and thence across Turkish Arabia to Bagdad, Mosu!, and Diarbekir, whence it proceeds through Asia Minor, by Siras, tili it joins the European system at Constantinople. The length of the whole line from Kurrachee to Constantinople is about 3,000 miles, one-half of which is submarine. From Bagdad another line has been taken through the heart of Persia to Teheran, and thence southwards to Ispahan, Shiraz, and Bushire. With regard to the future, whatever may be said in favour of canal navigation in India, the experiments hitherto made in that direction have not been of so decidedly successful a character as to 1867. ] Ice Marks in North Wales. 33 lead to the supposition that this means of transit will ever be very much extended. Where practicable, river navigation appears to be extensively used, and the success or otherwise of the works at present under construction with the view of opening up the navi- gation of the Godavyery, will probably determine whether or not similar operations shall be carried out on other rivers. There is also no doubt that by the introduction of an improved class of steamers many rivers might successfully be navigated, which contain too smalla depth of water for the majority of the vessels hitherto in use; three such steamers, calculated to draw only 12 inches of water, are now in course of construction for the river Godavery. Should they prove’ successful on that river, it ig not unlikely that they will be followed by others on the same plan for employment on various streams hitherto not navigated by steam, and on which only vessels of very shallow draught could be employed. With respect to railways, it is not probable that any very great extension of the present system of high-cost lines will be sanctioned, except where they may appear necessary for political or military purposes, and we look rather to a development of the principle of hght rail- ways, which may readily be laid down along existing lines of road, and ultimately perhaps, when the traffic has become sufficient to justity the expense in a commercial sense, they might be completed substantially so as to unite with the existing system of high-speed railways, just as it is customary to make a fair-weather road in the first place, and afterwards complete it, by bridging and metalling, as a first-class road. TV. ICK MARKS IN NORTH WALES. (With a Sketch of Glacial Theories and Controversies.) By Aurrep R. Wauacs, F.R.GS., F.ZS., &e. One of the most interesting branches of modern geology, and that on which recent researches have thrown most light, is the inquiry into the exact modes by which the present surface of the earth has been produced. When we see a vertical precipice, a deep chasm, or huge masses of shattered rock, our first impression is to impute these effects to some violent convulsions of nature, such as voleanic eruptions, earthquakes, or floods. It is, however, now generally admitted that such causes have had, for the most part, hittle if any effect in modifying the surface, except when many times repeated during long periods of time; and it is every day VOL. IV. D 34 Ice Marks in North Wales. (Jan., becoming more certain that even the grandest and most romantic scenery of mountainous countries has been produced by the slow but long-continued action of those natural causes which we see daily at work, but whose effects during the few years that we can observe them are almost imperceptible. These causes are, the ocean waves, running water, rain and frost; which, if acting for long periods during which subterranean forces are also at work slowly elevating and depressing large tracts of country and to some extent fracturing and loosening the rocky strata, seem capable of producing all the chief features which the surface of the earth now presents in non-voleanic regions. There are, however, a considerable number of very remarkable phenomena which none of these causes will account for, and which appear to have been overlooked or thought unimportant till about twenty-five years ago, when the celebrated naturalist Agassiz visited this country after having carefully studied the effects of modern glaciers in the Alps. He it was who first showed that they could be all explained to the minutest detail by the hypothesis of a recent “ olacial period,” during the continuance of which the mountains of Wales, Cumberland, and Scotland were covered with perpetual . snow, and sent down glaciers into most of the valleys, and some- times even into the sea. At first this hypothesis was received with incredulity and derision, since it completely contradicted the almost universal belief of scientific men that the earth had been for ages cooling, and that all preceding epochs had been warmer than the present one ; but it very soon worked its way even among the most sceptical inquirers, till at the present day there cannot be found a geologist who denies the reality of the “glacial epoch,” or the correctness of that interpretation which explains many peculiar features of our own mountain scenery by the agency of ice. A great deal has since been written by geologists and physicists on the effects of ice-work, but comparatively little has been given to the general public; and as the subject is at this time again attracting much attention, owing to new applications of the theory which have given rise to much discussion and are greatly stimu- lating inquiry, and as it requires little or no previous knowledge of geology to understand either its facts or its theory, I have thought that a popular account of such prominent glacial phenomena as are observable in all our chief mountain districts would be acceptable to many readers of this periodical. We may conveniently consider the chief evidences of a glacial period under the following heads: Ist, The drift ; 2nd, Moraines ; 3rd, ‘ Roches moutonnées’; 4th, Grooved and striated rocks; 5th, Boulders and perched blocks; 6th, Alpine lakes ;—and in this order I propose to record the few observations I have made during a month spent near Snowdon and Cader Idris last autumn, incorpo- 1867.| Ice Marks in North Wales. a0 rating briefly what has been observed elsewhere, and adding some account of the more interesting problems and discussions to which they have given rise. Ist. Tue Guactat on Nortuern Drirt.—trhis is a layer of loose materials—egravel, clay, mud, pebbles, and angular stones— which is found spread at intervals all over Northern Europe, and is very common in the valleys and upland slopes of North Wales. It is very abundant all round the town of Dolgelly, where it forms undulating slopes, mounds, and hummocks in most of the valleys, filling up the space between the flat alluvial meadows on the river side, and the steep rocky slopes of the adjacent mountains. Wher- ever this is cut through in making roads or railways, it is seen to be full of blecks of stone, pebbles, and large masses of rock, dis- tributed through it without any order or arrangement, the top, middle, and bottom being alike in composition. From the contour of the surrounding mountains it can be often seen that this deposit is of great though very variable thickness, probably often exceeding a hundred feet, and it certainly covers many hundred square miles of country in North Wales alone. On ascending the mountains it is often found on their less precipitous slopes and in the upland valleys, at more than a thousand feet elevation ; and it has even been traced around Snowdon by Professor Ramsay to a height of more than two thousand feet. The materials of which the drift is composed are various. Sometimes the rocks are nearly all those of the surrounding mountains, at other times they are such as must have been brought from a great distance. The geological age of the drift is determined by its overlying all, even the most recent formations, and by its containing occasionally marine shells of an arctic type and of species which are all now living. — Here we have materials of a loose and miscellaneous nature which were deposited zn the sea but not by the sea. That the drift was deposited in the sea is proved by the marine shells which have been found in it up to the height of 1,500 feet on some mountains of Carnarvonshire ; and we have thus a proof that North Wales was at a very recent epoch sunk to at least that depth beneath the ocean. The presence of the drift itself, however, at a height of more than 2,000 feet, would prove a much greater sub- mergence. ‘That the deposit could not have been made by the sea, is shown by the want of arrangement of the materials and the abundance of large angular fragments of rock. Water always sorts the materials it deposits. The rocks, the pebbles, the shingle, the sand, the mud, are carried different distances, and deposited in different places or in different layers. Water deposits are stratified. Neither can rocks be carried far by water and retain their angles and clean fractured surfaces. They get rounded into boulders or D2 36 Ice Marks in North Wales. [Jan.; pebbles, whereas many of the rocks and stones found in the drift are as sharp, angular, and irregular as the blocks and masses which are detached by the winter’s frost, and lie under an inland precipice. The solution of this curious problem of the origin of the drift, is to be found in the history of glaciers and icebergs. When a valley is filled with ice, the rocky débris from its slopes and precipices fall upon the suriace of the glacier. A quantity of the earth and stones of the bottom of the valley is also forced into the crevices or frozen to the bottom of the icy mass. Now when the ice-filled valley terminates in the sea, large fragments of the glacier break off and become icebergs, and floating away carry with them their load of earth and rocks, which are deposited where they melt, or topple over, or are stranded. In the North Atlantic as far as icebergs float, there must be an annual deposit of matter on its bottom exactly of the same nature as the drift, while in Hudson’s Bay and the Gulf of St. Lawrence it must be accumulating still more rapidly. When North Wales was one or two thousand feet lower than at present, it must have formed a group of islands, among which ice- bergs would frequently become entangled and deposit their loads of foreign matter. At the same time Snowdon and Cader Idris would have been sending down glaciers into the sea, which would spread the débris of their precipices and valley bottoms on what are now the upland slopes and low valleys, but which then were submerged banks and ocean straits. As the land rose above the sea to its present elevation, rivers, floods, and glaciers would more or less furrow and clear away the drift from the valleys,-and leave it dis- tributed in the irregular manner in which we now find it. The mere presence, therefore, of this unstratified mass of earth, rocks, . ~ and boulders would of itself prove a recent glacial period; since it clearly indicates the existence of icebergs and glaciers in seas and countries where they are now never found. 2nd. Morarnes.—Lvery modern glacier carries upon its surface more or less of the débris of the rocky valleys through which it passes. As the glacier moves downwards, these are carried with it, and at its termination, where its waste by melting exactly balances its downward progress, this débris must necessarily be -deposited, and form a more or less regular heap of rock and earth called the ferminal moraine. These moraines are sometimes destroyed almost as fast as they are formed by the streams which issue from the glacier itself or by torrents from the adjacent moun- taius, but under favourable conditions they remain, and long after the glacier has entirely disappeared tell the tale of its former existence. If owing to a steady change of climate a glacier retires regularly, the moraine-heaps will be distributed over the whole surface 1867. | Ice Marks in North Wales. 37 its terminal ice-cliff has successively occupied ; when on the other hand it is stationary for a considerable time, the débris accumulates to some height, and forms a well-defined terminal moraine. Some of the moraines formed by the old Swiss glaciers, when they stretched far down into the plains, are enormous. That of Ivrea in North Italy is many miles in extent, and 1,500 feet high—a mountain of débris brought down by a glacier which was sixty miles long. There is no other natural agent which can form on level ground such regular mounds as these moraines, many of which resemble artificial earthworks. Their presence becomes: therefore a very certain indication of the former existence of glaciers. In North Wales many very perfect moraines may be observed. Around Snowdon in particular they are very abundant, every one of the valleys which radiate from the central peak of the mountain exhibiting them more or less distinctly. ‘lhese are all described in Professor Ramsay’s little work on the Old Glaciers of Switzerland and North Wales; and I can bear witness that, far from exaggerating, he has hardly dwelt sufficiently on the wonderful clearness and well-marked character of this phenomenon. The most striking of all are perhaps those of the Cwm Glass Valley, which descends from the north of Snowdon to the pass of Lianberis. At the mouth of this valley, close above the road which ascends the pass, is what seems to the passer-by a steep rocky hill, but on viewing it from an elevation about a quarter of a mile lower down, it is seen to be a huge longitudinal roof-shaned mound of almost perfect regularity, scattered over with angular blocks of rock ; and whose position, with regard to the sides and bottom of the valley, shows it to be an addition—something put there—and having no relation to the proper contours of the surface. Higher up the valley is a small but wonderfully perfect moraine, which stretches across in a regular curve, and of almost uniform size and height, so that when standing on it one can hardly help believing it to be an artificial fortification. But the huge angular blocks of rocks scattered about it, and the other signs of ice-work all around, with the wild loneliness of-the situation, and its inferiority as a defensive position to many other points near it, utterly forbid this supposition. The best example of the wide-spreading of rocky débris by the gradual retreat of a glacier, is to be seen in Cwm Brwynog. Under one of the blackest precipices of Snowdon lies the little green lake Llyn dur Arddu, on the other side of which rises a steep ridge, most likely partly rock and partly moraine. Beyond this ridge extends for nearly a mile a gradually-sloping upland, so thickly covered with blocks of rock, often of large size, that from a distance the herbage can rarely be seen between them. In this case every one of these rocks must have been carried across the valley of the lake and deposited where it now lies, and no other natural agent can be found or imagined 38 Ice Marks in North Wales. [Jan., capable of doing this but ice. Lower down this same valley, on the spur which separates it from Llyn dwythwch, are portions of mo- raines deposited by the glacier when, during its greatest extension, it descended to join that of the vale of Llanberis. The moraines around Cader Idris are not so numerous nor so well marked as those of Snowdon. There is, however, a very fine one circling round Llyn y gader, under the highest peak; and lower down, below Llyn y Gafer, is-a rock-strewn slope, even more thickly covered than that of Cwn Brwynog. Llyn Cai, situated in the tremendous chasm on the south of Cader Idris, has also a small but very per- fect moraine at its extremity, through an opening in which its waters escape. I believe that the existence of moraines and moraine matter, when as well marked as those of North Wales, is of itself sufficient to prove that there has been a glacial period. There is, however, much other confirmatory evidence. drd. Rocuzs Moutonnérs.—Glaciers are often many hundred or even several thousand feet thick, and as they move slowly over the surface their enormous weight, assisted by the gravel, pebbles, and boulders frozen or imbedded in them, grinds down all sharp angles, peaks, and jagged edges of the rocks, giving to them a more or less blunted or rounded outline. The degree to which this erinding away takes place must depend on many causes, such as the weight of the glacier, its rate of motion, the material it carries with it, the time it continues in action, and the hardness, toughness, and original form of the rock itself. This peculiar effect of the passage of a glacier is very easily recognized when once seen, espe- cially if one studies the forms that the rock assumes by natural weathering or by the action of water, both of which will be seen to be very different from that produced by ice. In the valleys around Snowdon and Cader Idris this form of rock-surface is continually to be seen, and when, as is frequently the case, the comparatively soft, slaty rocks can be compared side by side with hard greenstone or grit, the first is found to be ground down to a smooth surface, gently curved or rounded, while the second is left in irregular bosses _ and lumps, all their asperities smoothed and rounded off, but not ground down to an eyen surface. This can be well seen on the banks of Llyn Padarn, near Llanberis. It is upon these roches moutonnées that are often found the peculiar markings we have next to consider. 4th. GRooveD anp SrriaTeD Rocxs.—During the process just described, it frequently happens that grooves or scratches are made upon the rocks by the hard materials imbedded in the bottom or sides of the glacier. Owing to the enormous weight and slow motion of glaciers, they move with great steadiness, and thus the markings 1867. ] Ice Marks in North Wales. 39 on rock-surfaces are almost straight lines parallel to each other, and show the direction in which the glacier moved. Nothing is more striking than to trace for the first time over miles of country these mysterious lines, ruled upon the hardest rocks, and always pointing in the same direction. In the neighbourhood of Llanberis they are so abundant, that it seems strange they were not observed, compared, and speculated on long before their true nature was known. The lines vary from fine scratches to grooves in which one’s finger may he, and even to troughs a foot or more in diameter. Sometimes on very hard rock the grooves are polished by the intense pressure of a hard smooth pebble. On the east side of Llyn y gader is an even slope of near a thousand feet at an angle of about 45° called the Fox’s Path, and covered with loose fragments of rock which roll away under one’s feet at every step. It descends from a saddle between two eminences of Cader Idris, and was probably long the path of avalanches or small glaciers. In the bed of a torrent which descends this slope I found, recently exposed, a large piece of yellowish porphyry, one surface of which (about 5 in, by 3 1m.) was slightly ridged and furrowed, and highly polished. ‘The rock is very heavy and excessively hard, and this fragment is of itself a striking proof both of the presence of ice and of its power as a erinding and polishing agent. I presume that the piece formed part of the rocky bed over which the ice once slid, that it had been split and loosened by atmospheric action and then covered up and preserved by sediment and stones, till the torrent exposed it again, and would soon have destroyed its polished surface had I not been lucky enough to hit upon it. But it is not only the surface of rocks zn situ that are thus marked: The pebbles, boulders, and fragments embedded in the “glacier are themselves equally scratched, but as they are capable of shifting their position the grooves and striz on them are not always parallel to each other. It is this kind of material that contributes largely to form the drift, and in some localities almost every boulder and pebble is more or less marked. On close examination we can often find proof that the grooves are really ancient markings by their correspondence in appearance with old surfaces of the stone, although this is sufficiently evident to anyone who sees their number, and the variety of rude masses which bear them. These various classes of markings are all found abundantly wherever glaciers now exist, and as no other mode of explaining their occurrence has ever been suggested, they may be considered to form the best and most convincing of all the various proofs of the former existence of glaciers and icebergs in places where they are not now found. 5th. BounpErs anD Prercuep Brocks.—As a glacier in its passage down a valley covers many irregularities of ground, some- 4() Ice Marks in North Wales. [Jan., _ times passing over lateral spurs or rocky eminences, so during its retreat the ice-cliff which terminates it will pass over each of these in succession, and will deposit on many of them some of the blocks which form its moraines or the boulders it has brought down with it. When the glacier has finally retreated, many of these blocks and boulders will remain in positions where neither simple gravitation nor the action of floods of water, nor the shocks of earthquakes could have placed them. Very similar phenomena have been pro- duced by the icebergs which deposited the drift, large masses of rock haying been carried and dropped on eminences as well as in valleys. Not unfrequently these blocks rest upon rock of a different kind from that of which they are themselves composed, and they often rest on ice-worn surfaces marked by grooves and scratches, showing plainly that the face of the country has undergone little or no change since the ice left it. Many of them occur on the edge of precipices and ravines, as is particularly the case at the torrent walk near Dolgelly, the sides of which on nearly level ground are thickly strewn with large angular blocks and boulders. One of these is 15 feet square and 9 feet high, and has lower ground all around it. It is when they stand upon the summit of conspicuous eminences, as they often do about Snowdon and Cader Idris, that they attract most attention, while when thickly strewn over level ground or on slight hillocks and ridges they are passed over by the tourist as too common a phenomenon of mountainous countries to deserve attention. Yet it is really as difficult to account for their presence in the one case as in the other, without the agency of ice. Neither do they form a universal feature of mountainous regions, as many suppose, for, as far as my memory serves me, they do not occur on mountains of moderate heights in the tropics. I have ascended many mountains in the Malayan Archipelago about the same height as Snowdon, and on calling to mind all the places where large blocks of rock were scattered about, I cannot remember any that were not at the foot of steep declivities to which they might easily have rolled. I much regret that I was not then aware of the importance of minute observations of the kind. It appears certain, however, that im hot countries and where there is no reason to believe that glaciers have ever existed, this phenomenon of the wide distribution of angular blocks of rock over slight slopes, level ground, and eminences, does not occur, otherwise it would have been brought forward long ago, as a complete disproof of the glacial hypothesis. In South America, however, I did meet with one remarkable perched block, a tabular mass from 20 to 30 feet in diameter supported on two points of rock only, and as far as I can recollect situated on a slight eminence, certainly not under a steep slope from which it could have fallen. Its position was exactly such as might be produced if it had been deposited by a grounded iceberg, but hardly by any other means. 1867. | Ice Marks in North Wales. 41 It was about haif-a-mile from an isolated granite mountain in lat. 0° 30’ N., long. 68° 50’ W.* This observation becomes of considerable importance now that Professor Agassiz tells us that he has found plain traces of glacial action in the valley of the Amazon. ‘That glaciers have ever descended from the Andes to the Atlantic ocean, a distance of more than 2,000 miles, will hardly be credited except on such overwhelming evidence as even Professor Agassiz does not pretend exists. There are not, however, the same difficulties in the way of the supposition that icebergs once floated over what is now the great Amazonian plain. A depression of 1,000 feet would sink the whole of that plain deep under the ocean, and that such a depression has occurred is rendered probable by the great extent and almost perfect level of its alluvial deposits. Neither is it unreasonable to suppose that during the glacial epoch of Kurope and North America the tempera- ture of South America was so much lowered as to bring the line of perpetual snow down to 12,000 or 13,000 feet. This would cause a wide extent of the plateaux in South Peru and Bolivia to become the feeders of glaciers, which might have been as much larger than those of the Alps, as the comparative height and extent of the two mountain systems would lead us to expect. Such glaciers descend- ing the highly inclined Andean valleys would move with propor- tionate rapidity, and might not improbably reach down into an almost tropical climate and send off rock-laden icebergs into the warm inland sea that then washed the base of the Andes. ‘This, - however, is quite a digression from our present subject. On the very summit of Cader Idris there are several detached eminences formed of large square and polygonal blocks, which in some places stream down the slopes of the undulating surface of the mountain top. Were they lower down we should at once pro- nounce them to be moraines, but in their present position they are somewhat difficult to account for. J think, however, there can be little doubt bu that they are due to the action of the snow and frost during the last portion of the glacial period. As soon as the perpetual snow line reached the top of the mountain, and the per- manent glaciers below had all melted away, there must have been a long period during which the rocks on the summit were subjected to the alternate action of ice, snow, and water. During the winter they would be buried under many feet of snow, which would be . forced into every crevice in the form of compact ice. During the short summer the snow would melt from the surface, but the water in the fissures would be probably frozen every night, leading to the further fracture and displacement of the rocks. The pressure of the snow and ice in the succeeding winter would force these always * See Wallace’s ‘‘T'avels in the Amazon and Rio Negro,’ p. 219. 42 Ice Marks in North Wales. [ Jan., a little downward in the direction of least resistance, and this alternate action, combined with the character of the rock, which is here chiefly basaltic and splits into rude tabular and columnar masses, seems sufficient to have produced that mass of blocks heaped confusedly on the very summit of the mountain, which almost always suggests to the mind of the non-geological visitor some tremendous convulsion of nature, and makes him readily accept the popular theory that the vast hollow of Llyn Cai is a volcanic crater. In the ‘Geological Magazine’ for September, 1866, Mr. Macin- © tosh maintains that the action of the sea has had most to do with the formation of the valleys, cwms, and rocky surfaces of the Welsh mountains; and he particularly instances Mynydd y Gader, a rounded rocky mountain between Cader Idris and the town of Dolgelly, as offerimg unmistakable evidence of a “ seaworn summit.” I therefore devoted an afternoon to an examination of this moun- tain, and was much surprised to find all over it what appeared to me the most unmistakable evidences of “ice-work.” The mountain is composed of greenstone and lower Silurian flags, with veims and masses of quartz. It is very rugged and uneven, consisting of rounded lumps and knolls with numberless hollows and litle valleys between them. ‘These are all more or less thickly covered with angular blocks, slabs, and columnar masses, some standing on the very summits of the knolls, others lying on steep slopes; but there is no arrangement of them in lines or layers, there are no water-worn pebbles or boulders, no .sand or shingle, nor, as far as I could see, any sign whatever of the action of the sea. On the other hand, the whole mountain offered the finest possible examples of roches moutonnées, the smooth slopes always facing Cader Idris, from which the glacier had come. Some of these ice-ground sur- faces were as smooth as a pavement although formed on the out- cropping edges of the hard Silurian rocks, an effect which the sea never produces. There is an angular block containing about twenty cubic yards of stone, standing on the slope of one of the highest bosses of the mountain, with no precipice from which it could have come nearer than Cader Idris, more than a mile off, with a valley between. Owing to the exposed situation of the roches moutonnées, their surfaces have been much weathered, and I did not succeed in , finding good groovings or scratches, though I have no doubt such could be found by a more careful search. With this exception, the evidences of recent glacial action are seldom to be seen more plainly than upon this mountain, The phenomena of existing glaciers and icebergs have been now so carefully studied, and the various effects which they produce are for the most part so well known, that there is no longer any 1867. | Ice Marks in North Wales. ' 43 difference of opinion among geologists about referrimg such pheno- mena as I have hitherto been considering to the action of ice, eyen though the countries where they occur no longer produce glaciers. But on the question of the origin of Alpme Lakes, which we have now to consider, there is no such unanimity. 6th. Atprve Laxes.—It is only about five years since Pro- fessor Ramsay propounded the startling theory that almost all the lakes which form .one of the greatest charms of our mountain districts, were actually produced by that comparatively recent irruption of thick-ribbed ice over a great part of the temperate zone, which we can hardly contemplate without a thrill of horror ; and that during the preceding warm tertiary epochs they were so scarce as to form no important feature in the scenery of Hurope. A short and simple statement of this theory is as follows. In all districts where glaciers have been proved to exist there are numerous lakes. In exactly similar districts where there is no trace of there having ever been glaciers, there are few or no lakes. This holds good all over the globe. Glaciers wear away their beds, as proved,—first, by the immense quantity of sediment in all glacial streams; secondly, by the existence of ‘‘ roches moutonnées ” where- ever glaciers have passed. It can almost always be shown that the old glaciers have passed over the exact spots where the lakes now are, and the size of the lakes bears a general proportion to the proved size of the old glaciers. This theory of the glacial origin of Alpine lakes is now the great battle-ground of physical geologists. In this country Ramsay, Jukes, Geikie, and Tyndall are its chief supporters ; Sir Roderick Murchison and Sir Charles Lyell, its chief opponents. Jivery year brings fresh evidence and new combatants ; and as it is a question of such great interest, and at the same time one rather of physical than of purely geological science, I shall endeavour to give such an outline of the subject as may enable the general reader to understand the question at issue and form his own judgment upon it. The first pomt to be considered in explaining the origin of lakes, is to form such a theory as shall not only show how such and such particular lakes were or might have been formed, but shall also account for their present actual distribution over the surface of the earth. This may be learnt from good maps as well as by personal observation, and is highly peculiar. In our own island we all know that it is only in three mountainous districts that lakes abound; in Wales, in Scotland, and in Cumberland. The lakes of these districts amount to some hundreds. In Europe the best known lake district is that of the Alps, which contains hundreds of lakes and many of very large size. In the Scandinavian 44 Ice Marks in North Wales. [Jan., peninsula lakes are still more numerous, abounding not only in the mountain valleys but also out in the low flat country, which, as well as all Finland and wide districts of North Russia, are literally studded with thousands of lakes. In North America, while the middle and Southern United States have scarcely any lakes, all the North-eastern States, Canada, Nova Scotia, Labrador, and in fact all the northern part of the continent, although much of it is level ground, is absolutely strewn broadcast with lakes, which must number very many thousands of every size, from the ereat inland seas like Lake Superior down to small tarns and ponds. In British Columbia, Oregon, and North California there are also abundance of lakes. In the great plateau of Asia there are lakes in plenty in Mongolia, in Tartary, and in ‘Thibet, and ail along the northern side of the Himalayas. But on going south from all these countries, the lakes in most cases abruptly cease. On carefully examining the best maps of Spain, a country of immense extent and highly diversified both geographically and geologically, I can find not a lake marked upon them. ‘The fine island of Sardinia contains groups of mountains rising to 3,000 and 6,000 feet high. It has a varied geology, presenting abundance of granitic, metamorphic, tertiary, and volcanic rocks, and yet, according to a large Italian Government map, it contains not a single moun- tain lake. ‘The Atlas range of mountains in North Africa presents us with no lakes. In America, the great West India Islands, Cuba, Jamaica, and Haiti, appear to have no lakes. Further south, the immense empire of Brazil, with its vast mountain ranges, its plains, savannas, and innumerable rivers, is almost destitute of lakes, except a few small ones near the sources of some of its southern rivers. In Asia the immense peninsula of India and the fine island of Ceylon seem to have hardly a true inland lake. In Africa, the Cape district and Natal have plenty of mountains but no lakes. Central, Africa, it is true, has lakes, few in number but of large size. They are not, however, accompanied by the immense number of smaller ones which occur in every one of the before- mentioned “ lake-districts,” and probably come under a distinct category, as lakes formed by unequal subsidence and upheaval. Australia possesses a few lakes; Van Diemen’s Land, several ; while in New Zealand they abound, especially in the southern districts where large glaciers still exist, and where there is a true lake-district very similar to that.of the European Alps. Now here we have a most remarkable fact,—the fact which must be considered in dealing with this question,—namely, that in all countries and districts of the globe where the universally- admitted evidence of extensive glacial action exists, lakes abound, and form one of the great features of the country ; while wherever 1867. | Ice Marks in North Wales. 45 there are no signs of ancient glaciers, or no reason to believe that the country has in recent geological times been subjected to the action of ice, these lakes are either very few, or (much more frequently) entirely absent. So vast is the disproportion, that if we leave out such lakes as are near the sea-coast, or in alluvial plains where they may have been easily formed by changes in the course of rivers, and such as in volcanic countries are formed in the craters of old volcanos, it is probable that for every thousand lakes that exist in glaciated districts, not one can be counted in all the rest of the globe! ‘There is, therefore, a strong priméd facie case in favour of a theory which directly connects glaciers and lakes as cause and effect ; and the opponents of that theory, if they cannot absolutely prove it to be false in a gocd many cases; should be prepared with some plausible hypothesis which will equally well explain this prominent fact. Yet, strange to say, I have been unable to find that any such hypothesis has been yet put forth. Professor Ramsay’s opponents all confine themselves to pointing out the difficulties of his theory in particular cases. They say that ice cannot travel up a long slope from a depth of more than 2,000 feet; that it would remain immovable at such depths, the upper layers sliding over the lower; that a glacier’s power of erosion is very slight; that the ends of some existmg glaciers are seen to rest on loose moraine matter without even disturbing it; and other arguments of a similar nature.* These arguments may be good or bad, and Professor Ramsay has answered them all himself * It appears to have escaped the notice, both of Professor Ramsay and of his opponents, that in the paper which immediatey precedes that on the “ Glacial Origin of Lakes” in the Geological Society’s Journal of Angust Ist, 1862, Mr, Jamieson adduces evidence of the very fact which has so repeatedly been denied in reference to Professor Ramsay’s theory, namely, that a glacier can move bodily for a considerable distance up a slope. Mr. Jamieson states, that from the point where the gorge below Loch Trieg opens into Glen Spean, all the ice-marks indicate that the glacier had parted in two directions, flowing both down the valley to the west, and up the valley to the east, along Loch Laggan and over the pass of Makoul into the valley of the Spey. This is proved by. the lower side of the rocks being abraded and smoothed above the entrance to Loch Treig, while lower down it is the upper sides that are ice-worn. In Glen Roy also the same thing has occurred, the glacier having moved up it instead of down it, and dis- charged itself over the water-shed into another valley instead of by what now appears its natural outlet into Glen Spean. A sufficient cause for this extra- ordinary phenomenon seems to be found in the former immense accumulation of ice in Glen Spean, rising far up above both these low passes, as proved by plain ice-marks to the height of more than 2,000 feet. It would be very important to have an accurate survey made of this district, with all the heights well determined, -and a thorough examination of the glacial phenomena it presents. These, as described by Mr. Jamieson, clearly indicate that in two separate cases glaciers about twelve miles long have been forced to move up hill, and to empty them- selves over the passes at the heads of their respective valleys ; and that in so doing they have abraded the rocks at the sides and bottoms of the valleys, showing that the ice could not have remained stationary below while it was flowing on above. 46 Ice Marks in North Wales. [Jan., in the ‘ Philosophical Magazine.’ What I particularly wish to eall attention to is the fact, that the only theory put forward even by the most eminent of his opponents 1s, that the depressions in» which lakes lie (when they are bounded by rocky strata and not merely dammed up by moraines) have been formed by unequal disturbances of the crust of the earth or upheavals of valley bottoms, and that - the ice during the glacial period may have filled up and slightly modified these basins, and also have prevented them from being silted up, but did not form them. In no one case that I am aware of has it been shown that the strata are thus tilted in opposite directions so as to produce a lake basin, nor is any hint given why these tiltings and depressions should have occurred in the proportion of a thousand times in glaciated districts to once in countries that have not been ice-ground. The suggestion that lakes, however numerous, formed beyond the limits of the ancient glaciers, may have been all silted up and converted into alluvial plains while those filled by ice have alone been preserved, seems at first sight to meet the case, but a little consideration shows that it is quite inadequate to solve the problem. First, we have no right to start with any other assumption than that lakes before the commencement of the glacial period were distributed with some average regularity over the different regions of the globe, if causes so universal as tiltings and depressions of strata were the chief causes that produced them. Secondly, if the present disproportion in the distribution of lakes was caused by those not preserved by ice being silted up, it would show that the process of filling up lakes is almost always very rapid, and therefore that no lakes can be very old. The ten thousands of existing lakes must therefore all have been originally formed just before the com- mencement of the glacial epoch, and in a time not so long as has since elapsed ; and yet, during the whole time that has since elapsed, the process of lake forming must have entirely ceased over more than one half of the globe! Another, though a minor difficulty, is that it is necessary on this hypothesis to suppose that the time the glacial epoch lasted was many times longer than the time which has elapsed since the ice left the lake basins, for we see that the existing lakes have been only to a very small extent silted up, whereas the supposition is that ninety-nine hundredths of the lakes of all the rest of the world were silted up during that period. I have gone a little into this general argument of distribution, because it is one that a man who knows very little either of geology. or glaciers may put forward without presumption, and also because it seems to me to have been very much lost sight of in the discussion of this question. We can all see that a true account of the origin of lakes must explain their present most remarkable distribution, 1867. | Ice Marks in North Wales. 47 although very few of us may be able to form any sound judgment as to what angle will stop a glacier’s motion up hill. ‘Tt would appear, then, that there is at all events a strong case in favour of glaciers having had something to do with the formation of lakes. I therefore examined with much interest into the peculiar arrangement and position of the small lakes of North Wales, to see if they gave any support to Professor Ramsay’s theory or seemed inconsistent with it. We may conveniently group most of these lakes into:—Ist, such as he in more or less regular bowl-shaped hollows of the mountains; and 2nd, those situated in longitudinal valleys. Immediately beneath the peak of Snowdon are three great chasms, which contain small lakes at an average elevation of 2,000 feet above the sea. On the east is Glas llyn, on the north are the two small lakes of Cwm glas, and on the west are the three little lakes of Cwm Clogwyn. All these he in irregularly bowl-shaped valleys with a comparatively narrow opening; they all spread out and are larger within than the entrance to them would lead one to expect. Another feature they have in common is a comparative flatness of bottom. From below you have to climb a steep ascent or even a precipice to reach them, but when you have surmounted this you find a rugged undulating surface spreading out to the foot of the precipices which every where surround it. Cader Idris has two somewhat similar chasms containing lakes, and on carefully examining the Ordnance maps we see that there are numbers of such lakes around the higher mountains, occupying lofty bowl-shaped chasms with a more or less narrow exit. One of the largest of this class of lakes is Llyn Llydaw, which is more than a mile long and lies right across between two spurs of Snowdon, which close round it so as to leave a very narrow entrance. How these valleys were originally formed it is not very easy to understand, unless they can be connected with varying texture and resistance of the rocks. The symmetry of their arrangement around or on each side of. lofty mountains is against this supposition, and I have been often inclined to think that they must owe their peculiar form to marine action during the various submergences the country has undergone. However this may be, it is evident that such a form of ground being already in existence when the glacial period came on, the ice must have accumulated in these crater-like hollows to a ereat height, and pressing forcibly on a nearly flat or undulated bottom while in slow but continued motion outwards, could hardly fail to deepen the basin here and there and thus form the little lakes we now see. The second class of lakes or those in longitudinal valleys are generally situated at a much lower level, and are as a rule larger than the mountain tarns just described. The two lakes of Llanberis, _ A8 Tce Marks in North Wales. [ Jan., together more than three miles long, are good examples of this class, and illustrate very clearly their characteristic peculiarities. There is a drainage into these lakes of about twenty square miles of country, bounded on both sides by mountain ranges over 3,000 feet high. The whole of the glaciers from these had to pass out between the ridge of the Clegr and that which descends from Cefn du, form- ing a pass about half-a-mile wide, while the shores of the lakes are all along bounded by steep and lofty slopes which would throw the whole weight of the accumulated ice into the nearly level trough between them. ‘That the grinding power here was very great is evidenced by the fact of the shores of these lakes presenting finer cases of striation and grooving, of mamellation, and of complete planing off of the softer rocks, than are perhaps to be found any where else in Wales. Now most of the other lakes show exactly the same arrangement,—wide upland valleys with many tributaries above them, and below them a sudden narrowing of the valley by projecting spurs. This can in most cases be sufficiently seen on the Ordnance maps, but it is still more striking to look down at the lakes themselves from a moderate elevation. Look at the two . ridges that meet together at an angle and shut in the valley at the lower end of Llyn Ogwen, or the precipitous slopes that confine Llyn Cwellyn, west of Snowdon, and Talyllyn, south of Cader Idris. In these and most other cases the valleys containing lakes are of very moderate inclination or nearly flat, so that the motion of the glacier would be slow and would chiefly arise from pressure. When therefore a sudden narrowing of the channel occurred, the ice would necessarily accumulate just above the obstruction, and thus give that increased weight and grinding power which are exactly the con- ditions said to have produced lake basins. Without going any further into particulars, I may state generally that the situation and surroundings of many of the lakes of North Wales are just such as ought to exist if Professor Ramsay’s theory be the true one. As a glacier can only be now grinding cut a lake basin in the very thickest part of its course, it is very difficult to see the opera- tion going on. At the same time so much is known about glaciers, and so many of the facts bearing upon this question are admitted by all, that some conclusions seem quite clear. For example, all admit that glaciers do (or once did) grind down the rocks over which they pass, to some extent. The grinding is caused chiefly by the weight of the glacier, and therefore where the glacier is thickest the grinding will be the greatest. Glaciers behave like a very thick semi-fluid mass, flowing and fillmg up channels of varying widths, and therefore accumulating where there are obstructions to their free passage. Now where such an accumulation takes place in a valley of tolerably uniform slope, there will be more weight 1867.| Ice Marks in North Wales. 49 and more grinding power than elsewhere, and thus hollows must be formed. And a hollow once formed the ice is there so much thicker and the pressure so much greater, and thus the hollow may increase more rapidly the deeper it goes. ‘Then there comes the objection, that when the hollow is deep the ice at its bottom will be motionless, the upper layers sliding over the lower ones. But who really knows this? It is a pure supposition ; and there seem to be as good arguments on one side as on the other. And who, of all our philosophers previous to direct observation, would have supposed that glaciers could flow at all, and retain their form and continuity? The fact seems to be, that these huge ancient glaciers, spreading over hundreds of miles of flat country half-a-mile thick, are too vast for us to say what they could have or could not have done. It is proverbially hard to prove a negative, and at present there is really no positive theory before the world, except Professor Ramsay’s, that in any way explains either the overwhelming pro- portion of lakes situated in glaciated regions—or the fact that so many of the great lakes of Switzerland and Italy are situated exactly where they should be if they were ground out by glaciers,— or that the size and depth of the lakes correspond to the admitted size and thickness of the ancient glaciers. Many who oppose this theory will perhaps say that they admit it to be good as regards the smaller lakes and tarns, but uphold the elevation and subsidence theory for the larger ones. But this will in no way avoid the difficulties of distribution I have already pointed out, since the large lakes are very numerous and, as well as the small ones, abruptly cease before reaching the limits of the ancient giaciers,—limits, it - must be remembered, traced before this theory was enunciated, and by men who even now do not all adopt it. Again the lakes form such a continuous series in position, form, and magnitude, that the presumption is against their having been formed by two quite dis- tinct processes. Lakes have, no doubt, been sometimes formed by disturbance, tilting, or subsidence; but these are evidently excep- tional causes, and are not to be assumed in any particular case unless they can be proved. In connection with this subject, I may allude to one main point of difference which has existed among geologists almost since the subject first attracted attention, and which still exists. It is the question whether the glacial phenomena, so abundant over the whole of the northern half of North America, have been pro- duced by enormous aérial glacial masses, covering at once or at different times the whole country,—or by icebergs floating down over it and grating along a shallow sea-bottom. Agassiz first pro- pounded the “ glacier” theory, and still upholds it. Sir W. Logan supports the same theory, and Professor Ramsay of course considers VOL. IV. | E 50 Ice Marks in North Wales. [Jan., that the vast American lakes are to some extent’ a: proof of it. On the other hand Sir Roderick Murchison, Sir Charles Lyell, and Mr. Dawson, all geologists of the greatest eminence, maintain the “iceberg” theory. Exactly the same difference of opiion occurs as to many other countries, such as North Russia, Finland, and even Scotland, but we will now consider America only, because I wish to state one difficulty which I cannot find alluded to im all that has been written on the subject in this country. The iceberg theory supposes that all the lake regions of North America were about a thousand feet under the sea at a very recent period, that the country was then ground and striated by icebergs, and has since risen to its present level. Now the great lakes, Michigan and Huron, are a thousand feet deep, their bottoms being about four hundred feet below the sea-level. When the land rose up these vast basins must have been full of salt water. What has become of it? No doubt it would soon run off at the surface, and be replaced by fresh, but as a mere physical problem, would all the salt water from a thousand feet deep be carried off by the influx and efflux of fresh water? Has water ever been brought up from the bottom of these lakes, and is it as fresh as that of the surface? * But even if no trace is or ought to be found of the salt-water lakes that must so recently have existed, a difficulty of a totally different nature arises. These lakes and all the lakes and rivers - north of them to the Arctic ocean now contain great abundance and variety of fresh-water fishes, and among them are many found in the lakes only and some entirely confined to single lakes. There are about twenty-two of these American lake-fishes described by ichthyologists, most of them quite distinct and well-marked species, found nowhere else in the world. About twelve are confined to the group of the Great lakes, and there is one distinct genus of the perch family (established by Cuvier) which has never been found except in Lake Huron. Now the glacial epoch is post- pliocene ; that is, it is within the period of existing species. ‘The mollusca were all identical with those now living; the vertebrates have been changed a little, but chiefly by the extinction of some species. How then are we to explain the occurrence of so many peculiar species and one peculiar genus in fresh-water, lakes the whole district around which was so recently under the sea? It may be said that the same difficulty affects the glacier theory, for if that be true, the lakes were only made by the ice and were not in existence till it left them. To this it may be answered that the country round the lakes in every direction was in existence though the lakes were not, and we need not suppose the whole land to have been covered with ice at once. It probably took different directions * Tam informed by an eminent physicist, that by the process of diffusion the whole of the salt water would no doubt in time be carried off. Quarterly Journal of Scienee N° XUL PLANS for the FUTURE SUPPLY OF WATER to LONDON Black. Pla of Mes’ Hemans & Hassard Red. Plow of M” Bateman YU &N Hanhart,lithr. 1 867. ] On the future Water-supply of London. 51 at different times, according to slight changes of climate and slow movements of the surface, and it is in accordance with all we know of the laws that have determined the distribution of animals, that so striking a modification of the physical geography of a country as the formation of thousands of lakes should lead to many changes and restrictions of the ranges of all animals, and especially of the fishes. The lakes may have proved more congenial to some which had. hitherto been confined to one or two streams only, and may have preserved others from extinction which were just dying out. But on the iceberg theory the difficulty is immensely greater; for all the country north of the lakes (and much also south of them) as well as westward, almost to the bases of the rocky mountains, is so Jevel that it must have been all under the ocean together; and it becomes difficult to understand where the great variety of fishes now inhabiting the streams and lakes of these regions can have come from, or how in so comparatively short a time they can have become modified into distinct local species. I leave this inter- esting ice-problem to those among my readers who take an interest in the great case of “Glacier v. Iceberg,” now being argued in the High Court of Physical Science. | V. THE FUTURE WATER-SUPPLY OF LONDON. By Epwarp Hutz, B.A., F.G.8., of the Geological Survey of Great Britain. Tue next Session of Parliament will probably be occupied with the consideration of two rival schemes for the supply of the Metropolis with water from distant sources, planned by engineers of eminence on gigantic proportions. That some distant source of supply is needed to replace the present arrangement, has been for some years foreseen by those who have taken an interest im the matter. Not only is the water from the Thames, the Lea, and other sources from which the Water Companies draw their supplies, destined shortly to become insufficient for the requirements of the inhabit- ants, but it is far from pure, containing in sensible quantities not only the salts of lime and magnesia which render it “hard,” but organic matter derived from the villages and towns situated along the banks of these streams. Now of all the disadvantages which can effect a large city none is more intolerable than the want of pure water. It is a prime necessity of health and comfort, which every day’s experience renders more obvious; nor can we doubt Mn the EQ Sees $a ais a See a SS SE = ee" 52 On the future Water-supply of London. [Jan., deadly effects of cholera in the East of London received an impulse, amongst other causes, from the impurity of the water supplied to the inhabitants of those districts. Of all cities in the world the Metropolis of the British Empire ought to be the first in procuring for itself all the elements of healthful existence. It has a population of 3,000,000 souls, ever increasing. It is the residence during some part of the year of the Court, the Parliament, and the aristocracy of rank and intellect: it is the common property, not of a county or a district, but of the nation, and hence whatever affects its social condition interests the nation at large. We should like to know from those enthusiastic philanthropists, the total abstainers, for whose opinions we entertain respect, whether such of them as may be residents in Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, or Birmingham, ever make the hazardous experiment of quaffing a glass of cold water fresh from the cistern or pipe in the city of London. If so, we venture to think their principles must sustain a severe test on such an occasion. For ourselves we are perfectly sincere in saying, that unless the water were previously boiled, it would require a large sum to induce us to perform a feat to which we are by no means unaccustomed in many of the large towns of the North. Boiling and filtration will no doubt render London water to a great degree innocuous, but it certainly does not render it palatable; and it can scarcely be denied that a supply which requires in its use such precautions is not adapted for general consumption. No blame can be attached to the Water Companies for this state of things. They have endeavoured to turn to account the sources which were conveniently at hand, and the water drawn from them undergoes a process of filtration through sand and gravel. But it ought to be thoroughly understood, that no such process can elimi- nate the soluble or microscopic ingredients which render water derived from an inhabited district unfit for human uses. That too- celebrated London pump, which was the cause of death to 600 persons, is said to have yielded water which was apparently clear and good. The water-supply of a large town ought to be derived either by pumping from considerable depths in the solid strata in a thinly inhabited district, or by utilizmg the streams which descend from mountainous tracts where the population is scant and the rainfall abundant. The position of London renders it admirably adapted for receiving its water-supply from wells. The London basin is | mdeed a great natural reservoir, from which large quantities of water are already obtained by wells sunken through the Tertiary Clay into the Chalk formation, and is capable of yielding much more. Even were the supply from the Chalk and Green Sand - 1867. | On the future Water-supply of London. 53 exhausted, the Oolitic formation—including the Coralline Oolite, and the Lower Oolite of Gloucestershire, Somersetshire, and 'Oxford- shire—forms a very large tract of water-bearing strata, from which vast quantities of water might be obtained by pumping, at eleva- tions varying from 400 up to 900 feet. If we project on the map a right-angled triangle, having its base formed by a line stretching from Salisbury Plain to the Cambridge Hills, and its apex in Kent, we shail have an area of not less than 1,500 square miles of water- bearing Cretaceous rocks, from which, if the whole of the water which percolates were utilized (after making deductions for local supply and the area covered by London clay, and loss), ought to yield 150,000,000 gallons per day, giving 50 gallons per day to each inhabitant of London.* If to the above be added the area of the Lower Oolite from its outcrop to the margin of the Oxford Clay, we have a tract composed of water-bearing strata of even larger extent; but owing to irregu- : larities, and interruptions in its horizontal range, scarcely so well adapted as the Chalk for the supply of large quantities. of water from wells. Nevertheless the yield from this tract might probably be set down at 100,000,000 gallons per day, while very large quantities could be tapped from the springs which now form the sources of the Thames, Isis, and other streams. An idea of the quantity of water which might be derived by pumping from the southern slopes of the Cotteswold Hills may be gathered from the fact, that many of the streams, owing to the porosity of the Oolite rock, lessen in volume while flowing over it. Thus, it is stated that the Churn loses as muchas 3,000,000 gallons per day before it joins the Thames at Cricklade ; + and this is only one of several others similarly constituted. This water percolates into the rock, and escapes in springs somewhere probably along the western slopes of the hills, but certainly not into the watershed of the Thames. There are also springs of extreme purity and persistence bursting forth from the base of the Chalk and Upper Greensand in Berks and Wiltshire, besides those which feed the Yedding, Brent, Lee, Reding, and other small streams which jom the Thames eastward of ' Teddington.{ To tap these springs at their sources, and conduct them by pipes and open channels to the reservoirs, as also to utilize to some extent by pumping the internal resources of the strata, which we have shown to be ample, is not we conceive beyond the power of engineering enterprise, and may perhaps be worth dis- - cussion before more elaborate schemes are undertaken. The objections to a proposal which would necessitate the employment of machinery on so large a scale are obvious. A large * Allowing one million gallons to every five square miles of area; deducting one-third for the latter and one-fourth for the former items, + Mr. J. Bailey Denton: Letter to ‘The Times, October 15, 1866. + Ibid. 54 On the future Water-supply of London. [Jan., number of reservoirs to be constructed in districts where the land is valuable would be necessary in addition to those now in existence in, and around, London. The expense of superintendence at each pumping station would be both large and permanent; but another objection, and one which is urged against the present supply, would apply even with greater force to the one here referred to.—the water would certainly be “hard,” as it would be derived entirely from calcareous deposits. An idea of the quality of such water may be gathered from that of the well at Thames head, pumped for the supply of the Gloucester Canal, which on analysis was found to contain 18 grains per gallon of solid matter, of which 4 grains were organic.* Having thus sketched out the general features and pointed out the advantages and some of the disadvantages of one plan for the future supply of the Metropolis—of the possibility of which there can be no question—and which amongst other advantages has that of being in proximity to the centre of demand, we propose now to consider the two great schemes which have been elaborated by Mr. Bateman on the one hand, and Messrs. Hemans and Hassard on the other. Mr. Bateman has the advantage of having been first in the field, for his proposal was published in November of last year, while that of his rivals is dated 1866; we may also add that the former bears marks of more careful elaboration than the latter, and is accompanied by more detailed information. The authors of both schemes naturally commence by stating the growing objections to a continuance of the present sources of supply ; Mr. Bateman, however, laying more stress on the subject of hardness, on the ground, first, that soft water is economical, and secondly, that the use of hard water is productive of many diseases of a painful character, which are entirely absent in communities where the soft waters of the Millstone Grit and the primitive for- mations are used; and he assures us, on estimates which were calculated in the introduction of the Loch Katrine water into Glasgow, that the saving to the inhabitants of London by the substitution of water as pure as that now supplied to Glasgow would not be less than 400,000/. per annum in the use of soap, soda, tea, coffee, and chemical substances. . As the engineer of the Glasgow and Manchester Waterworks, Mr. Bateman, with reasonable partiality, compares the cases of these towns with that of London, in which the proportions in the matter of hardness alone are as 1° to 12° or 16° in the former instance, and 1° to 5° or 8° in the latter, according to Dr. Clarke’s * Analysis by Mr. Horsley, County of Gloucester analyst, given in Appendix B to Dr Wright’s ‘Report on the Water-supply of Cheltenham,’ 1863. The water is pumped from the Great Oolite formation, 1867. ] On the future Water-supply of London. 5) scale ; and in this respect the following table will enable the reader to judge for himself :— _ Comparative Statement of Quality of the Waters supplied to Glasgow, Manchester, and the Metropolis Sram 1856 to 1865. Mineral Lee : Locality. Impurity. eae eure Hardness. Grs. per gallon. Re 2 Guiascow—(Loch Katrine) . 1°17 0°90 0°8 MancHesteER—(Moors of Millstone Crs ye” seas iiom\s 4°66 0°75; 2°25 Lonpon —Grand Junction (Thames) ; Hts ; a ‘ a ; vee Se ‘38 Sr : Ae : ee ae eee Max. 21°20 Max. 2°48 Max. 14°40 West Middlesex (Thames) + Min, 16°62 } Min 0°70 ; Min. 12°18 oat Max. 22°79 Max, 1°42 Max. 13°80 Chelsea (Thames) . + Min Capel Min. 0-84 5 Min. 12°67 Southwark and Mesebal ps 21°19 re 1'37 Max. 13°59 (Thames) . | ? Min. 17°81 Min. 0°98 + Min, 12°46 Max. 22°40 Max. 2°80 Max. 13°00 (nearly) Lambeth (Thames). . . 5 in 17°75 pre 1°¢l } Min. 13°16 Shay eave: ano 21°88 ; Max. 2°52 ea 13°45 SO INOS Ee ea Min. 16°70 Min. 0°45 Min. 12°46 Max. 24°80 Max. 2°30 Max. 15°50 (nearly) Hast London. . . = .- | Min 17°99 Min, 0-63 ; Min. 13-30 ene ; Max. 27:70 Max. 1°61 to 3°28 Max. 17°71 ~ oe See £ ears eae Min. 24°60 Min. 1°37 Min, 11°36 In reference to the above table, it is right to state that there are considerable variations in the ingredients, depending on the season of the year and the amount of rain. Most of the minimum quantities were obtained in September, 1865, after a dry season. The analysis of the Loch Katrine and Manchester Waters have been supplied to. us from a private source. It may be assumed that there are only two districts in Britain available for the supply of London by gravitation, namely, North Wales and the Lake Country. Mr. Bateman’s scheme applies to the former; Messrs. Hemans and Hassard to the latter.. In both of these districts the rainfall is abundant, and the elevation at which it is discharged admits of conveyance from the sources to the points of delivery without the aid of machinery; an essential element in a project of such magnitude. Mr. Bateman starts with the principle that no scheme is worthy of attention which would bring less than 200,000,000 gallons of water per day. He proposes, therefore, to take the head waters of the river Severn, consisting principally of the streams called the Wyrnwy, the Banw, the Tarannon, and the Ceryst, which rise on the eastern flanks of Aran Mowddy, Dinas Mowddy, and Plin- limmon, draining an area of 130,572 acres, over which he assumes a minimum rainfall of 36 inches per annum. ‘This estimate is obtained rather by the analogy of the physical features and geo- graphical position of this district with that of the Cumberland lakes, where the rainfall has been determined by Dr. Miller, from | ann ena sien aa manana { 56 On the future Water-supply of London. [Jan., observations extending over ten years to reach 89°93 inches per annum. ‘The physical conditions of the two districts are not very dissimilar, and we may allow that the estimate of Mr. Bateman as regards the quantity of supply is within the mark. The water of these brooks Mr. Bateman proposes to impound in six artificial reservoirs, four of which are of very large dimensions; from these it will be conducted by two aqueducts, each of about 20 miles in length, to Marten Mere, where a junction is to be effected. From this pomt the joint volume will be guided by a single aqueduct, crossing the river Severn at Bridgenorth, by means of inverted syphon pipes, and passing near to the towns of Stourbridge, Bromsgrove, Warwick, Banbury, and Watford, to the. high land near Stanmore, where extensive service reservoirs must be constructed at an elevation of at least 250 feet above Trmity high-water mark. From these reservoirs the water will be delivered to the City at “high pressure,” and under the “constant supply ” system. The length of the aqueducts will be 171 miles, to which must be added piping from the service-reservoirs to London, about 10 miles, making a total distance of 183 miles. The cost of the whole of these works is estimated at 3,600,000/., supposing the whole of the proposed supply to be actually obtained, but as 120,000,000 gallons would be sufficient for the present supply, the sum of 7,000,0002. may be considered as the actual amount to be raised. Mr. Bateman proposes to purchase the works, reservoirs, and mains of the existing companies (exclusive of any of the New River supplies, which may still be retained for trade purposes) by capitalizing the present dividends and interests at twenty-five years’ purchase, and to invest the whole property in some public body, similar to that of the Metropolitan Board of Works, with power to levy the rates necessary for the payment of interest on outlay and for the working expenses. It is natural to suppose that the existing companies would be willing to dispose of their works to such a body on condition of receiving the usual dividends secured on rates levied upon the whole property of the Metropolis. The scheme of Messrs. Hemans and Hassard appears at first sight even more stupendous than that we have just been considering, as the distance of the source of supply is 240 miles as against 183, but it possesses advantages which appear fully to counterbalance the drawback consequent on. the additional length of conveyance. The authors propose to make use of the waters which fall on part of the northern flanks of the Cumberland mountains, and which feed the lakes of Thirlmere, Ullswater, and Haweswater, together with some adjoining brooks. The plan consists of conducting by means of aqueducts the waters of both Thirlmere and Haweswater into the lower end of the central Lake of Ullswater, and from the head of the lake to construct an aqueduct, passing under Kirkstone 1867. ] On the future Water-supply of London. _ 57 Pass by tunnelling, and from thence through the districts of North and East Lancashire, North Staffordshire, and Warwickshire (avoiding all coal-fields), to a large service reservoir to be constructed to the north of Harrow, from which the water is to be supplied at an elevation of 220 feet above high-water mark to the houses of the Metropolis, utilizmg, as Mr. Bateman proposes, the present com- panies means of distribution. The entire area of drainage is over 177 square miles, at altitudes varying from 500 to 3,200 feet above the sea, the mean being 1,400 feet; with an additional area remaining for increased supply when it becomes necessary. The disadvantage of this scheme as compared with that of Mr. Bateman is the. greater distance of conveyance, besides the driving of a tunnel of seven miles in the very hard rocks of which the mountains between Windermere and Ullswater are composed, which of itself is estimated to cost 350,000/. The total expenses is placed at 9,650,000/. as against 7,500,000 of the competing scheme; but the former is subject to a deduction on account of a proposed distribution of 50,000,000 gallons per day to the populous towus of Lancashire lying along the line of the aqueduct. This we consider a valuable feature in the scheme. It is well known to those resident in Lancashire, that many of the large populous towns are ill-supplied with water for household and manufacturing purposes. Some of these towns, such as Liverpool, Blackburn, Bolton, and Wigan, owing to the rapid increase of population, are likely in a few years to be reduced to great straits; aud even now during very dry seasons, such as the early part of last summer, some of these towns are put on short supply. The introduction therefore of 50 millions of the pure and soft waters of the Cumberland lakes to supplement the present sources would be a very great boon to these districts, and the rental to be derived therefrom would, we have little doubt, more than com- pensate for the additional outlay which the plan of Messrs. Hemans and Hassard would involve. On this ground, therefore, we prefer the larger scheme. But there is another advantage. There is no doubt that the great drawback to Mr. Bateman’s plan is the construction of a number of large artificial reservoirs, subject to the accidents of all such constructions, however skilfully planned and executed. On the other hand, in the Lake district, nature herself has constructed rock-basins and reservoirs, altogether free from any such objections. It is true that in the proposed plan of Messrs. Hemans and Hassard the Thirlmere and Haweswater are to be raised by arti- ficial embankments 64 and 42 feet above the present levels respec- tively ; but these will be of less elevation than the embankments proposed by Mr. Bateman, which are not to exceed 80 feet, and are not of equal moment in reference to the general scheme, as it 58 - Richardson’s Ether-Spray. | - [Jan., is not proposed to embank Ullswater—the largest by far of the three lakes. As regards the comparative quality of the waters to be supplied from the two sources, the advantage would probably be found to lie with that drawn from the lakes: both, however, are sufficiently good for all necessary purposes. Of the waters from the Welsh rivers in Mr. Bateman’s scheme, the analyses show the total im- purity to vary from 2°6 grains per gallon to 7°24, and the hardness from 1°8 to 2°2. In the case of the lakes, the amount is 3°61 to 7°00, this latter being the amount of matter in the water of the river Lowther, which is to be utilized, and the degrees of hardness vary from 1°5° to 5:2°. There is, therefore, not much to choose between them, and both are vastly superior to the waters now supplied to London. Taking a general view of the two plans, we may say that Mr. Bateman’s has the advantage of shorter distance and smaller cost. On the other hand, the rival one has the advantage of natural storage-reservoirs, and of conferring a benefit on the habitants of South Lancashire; and we shall be well pleased if one or other of the schemes be carried out with as little loss of time as possible. As regards the cost of carrying out either of these schemes, the authors endeavour to show that the taxation, as applied to the Metropolis, would not be greater in proportion to the rateable value of the property than that of several larger towns in the north, and would be even less than in the case of others; and, considering the interests at stake, Mr. Bateman ventures to hint at the propriety of Imperial assistance, should any difficulty be found in raising the required capital. VI. RICHARDSON’S ETHER-SPRAY AND PAINLESS OPERATIONS. Lirriz do men of science think by what apparent accident it may please Providence to crown ther long, unwearying, and often derided efforts to gain some great end, be it the alleviation of human. suffermg or the elevation of human intelligence. Little did Dr. Richardson dream, as he once entered a London ball-room, that the practical joke of an acquaintance would suggest to him the readiest means of rendering the human body insensible to pain, without at the same time endangering life or robbing the patient of con- _ sclousness. Every one who is conversant with what is going on in the scientific world knows that the gentleman referred to has been for many years engaged in endeayouring to produce local ancesthesia, 1867. | Richardson's Hiher-Spray. 59 and about a year since it began to be rumoured in medical circles in London that he had succeeded in rendering diseased parts so com- pletely insensible to pain by external appliances as to admit of surgical operations being performed in which the use of chloroform had previously been indispensable, and where it had often. been followed by fatal results. He had for many years been applying substances to the surface of the body with a view to freeze the affected part, for he had arrived at the conclusion that the sense current in the nervous system is thermal and not electrical, and that therefore the proper means of producing insensibility in any part would be to rapidly abstract the heat from that part, but his success had been partial only, and the length of time occupied in preparing for the operation was such as to render the general in- troduction of his method impracticable. We purposely pass over his unsuccessful work (which was not, therefore, the less meri- torious), in order that our limited space may be devoted to the - account of what he has accomplished for the benefit of mankind ; and, as already hinted, an apparent accident it was that crowned his efforts with success. Whilst he was at a ball m London, in the year 1862, a lady approached him with one of Rimmel’s vaporisers, and drawing his attention to the new discovery for ministering to man’s—or we should, perhaps, rather say woman’s—enjoyment, she blew a little of the vapour or spray of Hau-de-Cologne against his forehead. He was taken by surprise, and was still more astonished when, on feeling his forehead, he found it cold, and that part on which the spray had played wanting in sensibility. He told the lady she had discovered a means of producing local ancesthesia, but it was he who had discovered it. Nor yet was it by accident; for if the young lady had puffed her scent into the faces of some dozens of young dandies, the effect would simply have been to amuse or to annoy them, whilst a meaningless joke practised upon the person of a man whose mind was penetrated with one great object, and in whose thoughts that object was ever present, led to a discovery for which the human race will bless the discoverer in all time. From the period referred to until the close of 1865, Dr. Richardson constantly but secretly studied the subject, and was en- gaged in experimenting with various volatile liquids and gases, and in the construction of a suitable apparatus for administering the spray, but although the process came into general use in the hospitals, as well as amongst the medical profession in London some months since, and a few country practitioners also apply it, its great advantages are not yet generally known, and it was not until the discoverer produced local ancesthesia on the arm of the President of the British Association, at Nottingham, and transfixed him with needles, that its wonderful efficacy began to attract public attention. 60 Richardson’s Ether-Spray. [Jan., The first time the process was applied at all was in the case of tooth extraction on the 11th of December, 1865. The instrument used was one in which the ether was exposed to freezing mixture before being distributed in the atomized form, and Dr. Richardson has thus described the case:— =~ “The patient was a lady, who required to have five front teeth extracted. I had previously administered chloroform to this lady for a tooth extraction, but the inhalation had produced so much irregularity in the action of the heart and other disagreeable symptoms, that I considered it inadvisable to repeat chloroform, and she herself was only too ready to give the local measure a trial. The extraction was performed by my friend, Mr. Peter Matthews. On directing the ether spray first at a distance, and then closely upon the gum over the first central incisor on the left side, we observed, at the end of fifty seconds, that the gum had become as white as the tooth itself, and quite insensible. I then directed the vapour upon the tooth for twenty or thirty seconds more, and on the patient intimating that she did not feel, I suggested to Mr. Matthews to proceed. He extracted a very firm tooth without the slightest expression of pain. The process bemg continued in the same manner, he extracted three other teeth with the forceps. The fourth gave way, and had to be removed by the lever; but m all cases the result was equally good. Not a drop of blood was lost ; there was no painful reaction; and the healing process pro- ceeded perfectly.” The writer of this article has also had an opportunity of wit- nessing the wonderful effects of the spray in an operation performed on a near relative, and a brief account of it may not be unin- teresting. She had long been suffering from a small tumour which had grown under the nail of the great toe, and the nail had been removed and various chemical substances applied, but after nearly two years’ treatment it remaimed as painful as ever, and nothing was left but the excision of the affected part. At the house of a friend Dr. Richardson applied the spray, whilst one of our ablest metro- politan surgeons removed the tumour. The spray was administered with an instrument to be described presently, and in a few seconds the whole of the end of the toe assumed a white appearance, as though it had been poulticed for many days, but it was perfectly hard, and the circulation was effectively arrested. In a few seconds more the skilful hand of the surgeon had, with the scalpel and other suitable instruments, painlessly removed the tumour and with it a little of the bone, for it proved to have arisen from an abnormal growth of the bone, known as exostosis. After it was removed, the surgeon discovered that a little more bone would have to be clipped off: the ether-spray was again applied, without pain, to the open wound, and the operation successfully accomplished. A little 1867. | Richardson’s Ether-Spray. 61 bleeding, which began shortly after the operation was performed, accompanied by some temporary pain, not so acute as the patient had often suffered in the same part, was the only subsequent incon- venience, and the wound healed rapidly. This operation is usually an agonising one, and has hitherto been performed under the influence of chloroform, sometimes with fatal consequences. After- wards, Dr. Richardson applied the spray to the hands of the writer and some of his friends, and it was found to vary in the rapidity with which it took effect. The writer’s hand soon became livid, and he has no hesitation in saying, that within a few seconds (say five or six) after the ether was first applied, he could have cut off the part against which the spray had been directed without any sense of pain, for it was as mummified as if it had been buried for thou- sands of years in some catacomb. In less than a minute after the pumping process was discontinued, the circulation was completely restored, and nothing was felt excepting a slight sensation of burning. We have given this brief account of the operation of Dr. Richardson’s process, as witnessed and experienced by the writer, in preference to quoting cases from hospital reports, as it will convey to the general reader a better idea of its effect than mere quotations in technical language from the medical press; and, in like manner, it will be as well to state generally for what class of diseases and in what degree it is found to be effective, our informa- tion beg derived from the best of. all sources—the skilful operator referred to, who is one of the chief surgeons of a leading metro- politan hospital. Before doing so, however, let us say a word concerning the apparatus employed; Dr. Richardson describes the imstrument which he now uses, as follows :— “The apparatus consists simply of a graduated bottle for holding ether ; through a perforated cork a double tube is inserted, one extremity of the inner part of which goes to the bottom of the bottle. Above the cork a little tube, connected with a hand- bellows, pierces the outer part of the double tube, and communicates by means of the outer part, by a small aperture, with the interior of the bottle. The inner tube for delivering the ether runs upwards nearly to the extremity of the outer tube. Now, when the bellows are worked, a double current of air is produced, one current de- scending and pressing upon the ether, forcing it along the inner tube, and the other ascending through the outer tube, and playing upon the column of ether as it escapes through the fine jet. By haying a series of jets to fit on the lower part of the inner tube, the volume of ether can be moderated at pleasure; and by having a double tube for the admission of air, and two pairs of hand-bellows, the volume of ether and of air can be equally increased at pleasure, and with the production of a degree of cold six below zero. 62 Richardson’s Hther-Spray. |Jan., “ By this simple apparatus, at any temperature of the day, and at any season, the surgeon has thus in his hands a means for producing cold even six degrees below zero; and by directing the spray upon a half-inch test-tube contaming water, he can produce a column of ice in two minutes at most.” The use of ether spray, we are told, is efficacious in all minor operations where the medical practitioner considers the risk of administering chloroform too great to justify its application; for the removal of small joints, such as the finger or toe end; for the eradication of cancer when not too deeply seated ; for all superficial tumours, abscesses, boils, and excrescences, such as piles, &c., for some of which the operations are very agonising. In fact, in nine- teen out of twenty cases where the knife has to be employed uz is quite effective, and renders the dreaded use of chloroform unnecessary. Itis daily used at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, where they see 100,000 patients annually, and at other metropolitan hospitals: and in some cases it is applied in the more serious operations of removing the larger limbs, in hernia, &c. Where a leg or arm has to be removed, Dr. Richardson, or whoever may administer the spray, plays around the limb as the knife enters, but here difficulties arise which diminish its usefulness. The red colour of the flesh is no longer there, and the vessels cannot be easily detected; the process of amputation is greatly retarded, and, generally, it is not at present a favourite auxiliary in the operation. We trust, however, that these difficulties may disappear, for it has enormous advantages over the chloroform process, which often leaves after-effects as dangerous as the operation itself, and the complete stoppage of circulation which it causes must also be of great advantage to the operator. But one of the most valuable results is where Dr. Richardson applies the vapour of a medicated ether internally, as im cases of internal hemorrhage, especially after confinements. Our readers are well aware how frequently such cases have baffled the ablest medical men, and how many poor creatures have- bled to death whilst the medical attendant has looked on helplessly. By the new process the wound is reached and attacked by a styptic vapour which effectually stops the hemorrhage. If, however, our readers desire to be more fully informed as to the present advantages of the application of Richardson’s ether- spray, they must consult the medical journals, for we are unable to afford the necessary space to inform them further, and the subject is. one with which we can hardly deal mm a detailed manner in this periodical. One word, however, concerning the inventor and his treatment by the medical profession. The first thought which naturally occurs to practical men, is that the invention must necessarily brmg something far more tangible than fame to the discoverer. In the medical profession, however, 1867.| Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade. 63 it is not considered etiquette to patent an invention—why not we are at a loss to understand—and Dr. Richardson has freely given his discovery and the power to use his apparatus to the world. But the medical practitioners of London know how to appreciate the un- tirmg zeal and earnest devotedness of a man who gives up wealth and professional éclat in their service and in the service of mankind, and they are manifesting their appreciation of Dr. Richardgon’s lengthened labours by contributions to a testimonial which shall in some small degree stand in place of the pecuniary results that might have accrued to him had he been less punctilious and more selfish ; and in setting such an example to all who are likely to derive benefit from the inventor’s toil, those gentlemen confer alike an honour upon Dr. Richardson and upon the noblest human calling. We feel grateful, not only that we have been able to reap a benefit from the new discovery, but that we are permitted to add our humble tribute of praise to the indefatigable and disinterested discoverer of what will prove to be one of the greatest blessings that has ever been conferred by Providence upon the human race. VIL. THE METEOROLOGICAL DEPARTMENT OF THE BOARD OF TRADE. As the reconstruction of the Meteorological Department is at present engaging the attention of Government and scientific men, we venture to make a few remarks on the subject; which may at some future time be extended as occasion requires. In these remarks, however, we shall not enter into scientific details; but would rather regard the project from a business point of view. In the first place, we take it for granted that Government ought to lend its support to the systematic prosecution of Meteoro- logy; for not only are Meteorological laws of immediate practical importance, but in order to discover these laws, the united action of many observers is required; and this united action can best be obtained by an influence and support such as Government can give. In the second place, it would appear that the following form the most prominent practical benefits which may be anticipated from the successful prosecution of Meteorology. (1) A determination of the ordinary climate, or Meteorological condition of the various places in this country, and of the various regions in the ocean. (2) A determination of the laws which regulate storms and all similar abrupt affections of the Meteorology of a place or region. 64 Meteorological Department of the Board of Trade. |Jan., (3) Besides the ordinary climate of a place and the abrupt disturbances thereof, it may ultimately be possible to understand the cause of long continued peculiarities of weather, whether on land or at sea, such, for instance, as the very wet autumn we have just experienced, and perhaps even to predict the approach of such peculiarities. In the third place, in order that the country may derive the fullest possible benefit from a systematic prosecution of Meteorology, it would seem to be necessary that there should be iwo bodies of Officers in communication with each other; but otherwise acting | independently of one another. There ought to be a body of men whose duty it is to investigate meteorological laws, and to publish them when discovered ; and also a body of men whose duty it is to make a practical application of these laws, when once they have been discovered. Thus, for example, a knowledge of the climate of various places is desirable in those who take charge of the Public Health, and in those who take part in Agriculture; while again a knowledge of oceanic climate, especially of the prevailing winds and currents of the various oceanic regions, is of great importance to mariners. But the scientific officer who investigates the climate of a place ought to be distinct from the officer whose duty it is to make a practical use of this knowledge of climate ; and also from the officer whose duty it is to see that a knowledge of the prevailing winds and currents is _ properly made use of by seafaring men. | To take another example, a knowledge of the laws which regulate the progress of storms is of great importance to a maritime nation like ourselves, and by means of the telegraph may be made of immense service, as the results achieved by the late Admiral Fitzroy have clearly shown ; but the scientific officer who investigates the laws of storms ought surely to be distinct from him who telegraphs to ports an intimation of an approaching storm ; im fine there ought to be what may be termed a legislative and an executive department, distinct from one another. Having thus endeavoured to point out the necessity for this separation of offices, we will in the remainder cf this short article confine ourselves to the legislative department, and say nothing about the executive ; because foreign considerations are mixed up with the executive in this as well as in other departments, and the most just and admirably conceived set of rules might be thought to infringe too much upon the liberty of the subject. Let us now therefore lay before our readers a few general considerations regarding the best machinery for discovering scien- tific laws. It would be desirable to introduce into some half-a-dozen stations m the British Islands self-recording instruments all on one plan; 1867.] The Public Health. 65 - such instruments would give results which cannot be furnished by the very best body of eye-observers: and we understand a system of this kind is under the consideration of Government. Besides these self-recording observatories, numerous stations in the British Isles and numerous vessels at sea ought to be supplied with instruments all verified at some central Observatory. Care ought also to be taken by inspection and otherwise, that the observ- ations are properly made. The whole body of observations both by land and sea ought to be discussed under the direction of one general Superintendent, over- looked if need be by a scientific board. ‘This general superintendent might also with propriety have under him two responsible officers ; one to take charge of the land, and the other of the sea observations. The general superintendent should likewise be well acquainted with those branches of science, which are or may prove to be akin to Meteorology. We have only to add, that the executive meteorological officers ought immediately to be informed of the observational laws when they are discovered ; and these ought also to be communicated to such of the scientific and general public as are interested in the subject. In conclusion, we venture to think that a Government which treats the matter in such a way, would be sure to gain the confidence and favour of the scientific worid. VII. THE PUBLIC HEALTH. Tue East Env or Lonpon. By Epwin Lanxusrer, M.D., F.R.S. Lonpon is not more favourably situated for health than other towns of England. The chief part of the great Metropolis is built directly upon the bed of clay which is deposited in the great chalk basin, whose edges rise round London on every side. This basin is divided into two sides by the river Thames: the larger population is on the north side. On this side stand the two great commercial and social centres of London—Westminster, with the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham and St. James's Palace ; and the City, with St. Paul’s Cathedral, the Mansion House, and Guildhall. The population of London is now nearly 3,000, 000. It is not governed by one Municipality, as other cities of the empire. The Cor} poration of London, withits Lord Mayor, have control over the affairs of only a very limaited number of citizens. The Metropolitan Management Act recognized upwards of forty Local Boards of Works, or Vestries. Hence London, in its general management is 3 at a disadvantage ag VOL. IV. , F 66 The Public Health. [Jan., compared with almost every other city of the empire. With this divided authority it is much to the credit of London that she can claim to be the healthiest city in the United Kingdom. During the last ten years the death-rate has been as low as 23 in the 1,000, whilst during the first four months of this year, 1866, the death-rate was lower than any of the thirteen cities whose death-rate was published weekly by the Registrar-General. The average death-rate of these four months was 25 in the 1,000. Since that time the death-rate of London has been up as high as 35 in the 1,000, but that was during the month of August when the Cholera was raging in the East. Even during that sad month the mortality of Newcastle- upon-Tyne was as high, and that of Liverpool much higher, without any outbreak of Cholera in the former. But London is not one city ; it is a congeries of cities. The whole death-rate may be low, but there are spots where it is excessive. Taking as an instance the parish of St. James’s, Westminster, we find the death-rate here during the past ten years to have been 20 in the 1,000; but on examination it will be found that in one district the death-rate has been as low as 12 in the 1,000, whilst in another it has been as high as 25 in the 1,000. So in many of the parishes of London, when the bills of mortality are low, there are plague-spots which present for a few hundreds or thousands of people a mortality as great as that to be found in any other town through- out the country. The health of London has undoubtedly been benefited by the general Act passed in 1855 under the name of the Metro- politan Management Act. ‘This Act gave to the various Local Boards of Works or Vestries the power of electing a central body, the Metropolitan Board of Works, in whom the management, making, and repairing the sewers of London was vested. One of the great acts of this body has been the construction of sewers, by which the whole of the sewage of London is carried several miles beyond its boundaries, and emptied into the river Thames. It is worthy of note that this great work is now nearly completed, and that the only locality not connected with the new Main Drainage Works, is that district in the Hast End of London which has lately been the seat of the ravages of Cholera. Another great good effected by the Metropolitan Management Act was, that it made it compulsory on the Vestries to elect Medical Officers of Health. To these officers was committed the duty of superintending the health of the district to which they were appointed. Under this Act forty-six Medical Officers of Health were elected in the various parishes of London. In some in- stances these gentlemen have been supported by the Vestries who appointed them, and material sanitary improvements have taken place as the consequence. But in a large number of instances : : 1867. | The Public Health. 67 the Medical Officers of Health have been obstructed and opposed in all their efforts to improve the sanitary state of their districts. Their salaries have been reduced, their suggestions neglected, and in too many instances they have found it wise to.say and do as little as possible for the sanitary improvement of their parishioners. The new Act gives powers to the Vestries to appoint Sanitary Inspectors, and where these officers have been appoimted they have been of great and permanent utility. But in many parishes of London no Sanitary Inspectors have been appointed at all, and there are whole districts, including thousands of people, who have never been bene- fited in the slightest possible manner by the passing of the Metro- politan Management Act. At a meeting of the Association of Medical Officers of Health on the 16th of August, at the time when _ Cholera was at its height in the Kast End of London, Dr. Sarvis, the Medical Officer of Health for the Bethnal Green district, stated that the Orders in Council had found his Vestry “ entirely unpre- pared,” and “so far from their being inclined to carry out his suggestions as Health Officer, they, in fact, opposed him.” “ There was scarcely any house-to-house inspection ; in fact, there were only three Sanitary Inspectors appointed for a district numbering up- wards of 115,000 inhabitants.” He added, “ the adjoining parishes were quite as bad.” Here, then, we have the most competent testi- mony to the fact that the East End of London had not only neglected taking advantage of the Metropolitan Management Act, but at the very time that the population was being carried off by hundreds in a day, they were opposing their Health Officers and refusing to supply the only means by which the disease could be stayed. The advantage of an organization with a Medical Officer of Health at its head has been clearly demonstrated in London during the recent outbreak of Cholera. There was no reason to suppose, from the general character of the disease in its progress from Asia through Europe, that the present epidemic would be less fatal than it had been in 1849 or in 1854, but the numbers who have perished in London have been much less than in either of those two epidemics. Before the epidemic had fairly broken out in the Kast End of London, the Privy Council issued instructions to every Vestry, which com- pelled those bodies to take immediate action, and although these instructions were issued too late to be acted upon in the Eastern districts before the terrible explosion at the latter end of July, they were nevertheless very generally carried out in the Northern, Southern, and Western districts of the Metropolis. The principal measures adopted under their instructions were as follows :— 1. A Sanitary Committee, appoited by the Vestry, was consti- tuted in every parish, to whom full power was given to take such measures as were found necessary for the prevention or arrest of the disease. The meetings of the Committee were regulated according F 2 68 The Public Health. [Jan., to the urgency of the outbreak ; and the Medical Officers of Health attended these meetings, reported on the progress of the disease, an recommended what steps should be taken. | 2. In most of the Metropolitan parishes where it was ascertained that Cholera had actually broken out, medical visitors were appointed to whom every case of Cholera and Diarrhcea was reported, and whe went toevery house where persons had taken the disease, and not only prescribed for and treated the sick, but inspected the house and reported its condition to the Medical Officer of Health, who met the medical visitors every day. The medical visitors also had power to order food, wine, and other stimulants that were necessary for persons suffermg under Cholera or Diarrhea. 3. Arrangements were made with dispensaries, hospitals, or chemists and druggists, for the supply of medicines ordered by the medical visitors at all hours of the night and day. Nurses were also engaged to be in readiness to attend on any persons who might immediately require assistance at their own houses. 4, The staff of sanitary inspectors was increased, and a house- - to-house visitation made by. them in. those districts, where, from unhealthy arrangements, or over-crowding, Cholera was likely to break out. The inspectors were supplied with disinfectants, which they applied in all cases where persons had been attacked with Diarrhoea or Cholera; and in many districts water-carts containing a solution of carbolic acid were sent round to gulley-holes, and stable-yards, and other places where disinfectants were likely to be of service. 5. The clothes of all persons who had died of Cholera, ar the bed and bed-linen in which they had slept, were immediately destroyed. The things thus destroyed were immediately replaced at the expense of the Vestry or parish in which the case*occurred. 6. The surface well-pumps were directed to be closed, and the waters from cisterns and butts, where Cholera and Diarrhea prevailed, were examined by the Medical Officer of Health; and all cisterns and butts were directed to be well cleansed at least once a- fortnight during the epidemic. . This will give a general idea of the measures taken in those districts of London where the fewest number of cases of Cholera have occurred. ‘That these measures were not fully carried out in the Eastern districts of the Metropolis is well known. Whether that outbreak, and its subsequent development, could have been pre- vented altogether, may be questioned; but that its severity might have been, mitigated and the mortality lessened to a large extent, had more active measures been adopted, there can be no doubt. The only excuse that Vestries and Local Boards make for their supineness in sanitary matters, is the expense, and yet who can doubt that by the saving of life and disease, the community would have 13867.| The Public Health. 69 . benefited pecuniarily by ten times the amount that has been spent on sanitary measures. The difference between the mortality of the present epidemic in London, as far as it has at present gone, and those of 1849 and 1854, is as follows: From the 22nd to the 45th week of 1849, 16,525 persons died of Cholera and Diarrhcea. In 1854, 13,264 died in the same period, whilst in 1866 only 8,245 persons have died of these diseases. ‘Taking the difference between the deaths of 1854 and 1866 in round numbers, it shows that 5,000 persons less have died. This is an enormous number, and would amply repay all the expenditure that has been bestowed on sanitary measures. There has been,. however, no saving in the East of London, where the proportion of deaths to the population has been greater than during the previous epidemic; thus clearly proving that Cholera is not less virulent where neglect courts its attacks, than it was during our earliest experience of its visitations. The district of London which is known as the East End will be easily recognized by those who are not well acquainted with London, as lying on each side of the Great Eastern Railway. Starting from the Shoreditch Station, we have on the left the parishes of Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, and Old Ford, bounded by the Victoria Park, and terminating at Stratford. On the right of the line are Whitechapel, Stepney, Bow, and West Ham. Farther to the right, is the Blackwall Railway, which runs through Shadwell, Limehouse, and Poplar, to Blackwall. ‘These last places are on the Thames. It is this large area which was principally attacked with Cholera. In some of the outlying districts the population is sparse, but in many other districts it is dense, poverty-stricken, and over-crowded. The neighbourhood of the Docks is especially over-crowded, and abounds with low public-houses, in which the poor and hard-working population indulge in large potations of bad spirits and adulterated beer. It is also this district that has felt, at present, little or no benefit from the new and costly system of sewerage which is now so materially improving the health of the rest of London. The one great medical institution of the East Hind is the London Hospital, which is situated in Whitechapel, and stands almost in the middle of the district. The population of all the parishes of the East of London may be roughly estimated at half-a-million. On Saturday, the 7th of July, four deaths were registered from Cholera in London, but not one of them occurred in the East. On the 14th of July, 32 cases were registered, and of these, 20 occurred in the Kast. It is interesting to observe that these cases did not occur in a batch at one spot, but were distributed over the whole district. Thus there was 1 case in Shoreditch ; 2 in Bethnal Green ; 1 in Whitechapel; 1 in Stepney; 2 in Limehouse; 1 ir 70 The Public Health. [ Jan., Mile End Old Town; and 4 in Poplar; and 1 each in other parishes. In the week ending July 21st, 346 deaths from Cholera occurred in London. This fatal explosion occurred chiefly in the poor districts of the East End of London: 39 cases occurred in Bow; 52 in Poplar; 43 in Limehouse ; 30 in Bethnal Green ; 83 in Mile End Old Town. On the 28th of July, 904 deaths from Cholera were reported, and of these 811 cases occurred in the six districts of Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, St. George’s-in- the-Hast, Stepney, Mile End, and Poplar. In the week ending the 4th of August, 1,053 persons died of Cholera, of these 916 cases occurred in the Hast. In that week the disease had attained its greatest mortality, and how it fell upon the Eastern districts may be estimated by the statement of the Registrar-General, that whilst the mortality of the month from July 7th to August 4th was in the West district of London at the rate of 24 in the 1,000 per annum, it was at the rate of 82 in the 1,000 for the East of London! From that week the mortality gradually declined to the middle of the month of November. As the disease declined, it ceased more rapidly in the parishes which had been visited in the Hast than in the rest of London. As compared with the mortality of the epidemics of 1849 and 1854, the Cholera of 1866 has shown less disposition to retire than in those years. This ought to be regarded as a suspicious sign, and to lead the authorities in London not to relax in their sanitary efforts, lest the poison should lurk about, and be ready to break out in the more favourable weather of another year. The most interesting question connected with this outbreak of Cholera in the East of London, is to what cause can its remarkable localization be ascribed ? Not only has Cholera not spread alarm- ingly in any other great district of London, but in a large number of cases which occurred in other parts of London, they were clearly traced to persons having visited or come from the East End. The question of the origin of this outbreak has been largely discussed. by the Medical Officers of Health, the Registrar-General, and the leading medical journals in London. Before this visitation, the history of the present epidemic on the Continent of Europe, and the outbreak of Cholera in England at Southampton and Theidon- Bois, near Epping, in Essex, in the latter part of 1865, had confirmed the view originally taken by the late Dr. Snow, that drinking-water was the great source of Cholera-poisoning. In his weekly return on the 28th of July, the Registrar-General remarked, that the dis- trict attacked was “ essentially the part of London inhabited by its maritime population. The canals and the basins are full of foul water, and are apparently connected with the Limehouse Cut, the Hackney Cut, and the River Lea. The East London Waterworks’ Canal draws its supply from the river at Lea Bridge, where there is 1867. ] The Publie Health. TEA: a reservoir, and runs for a couple of miles by the side of the Hackney Cut, down to its other reservoir north of Bow, and near the Lea. The present Cholera field derives its waters from these works.” From the date this was written up to the termination of the epidemic, accumulated eviderice has all pointed to this one con- clusion, that the water-supply of the district was the exciting cause of this awful visitation of Cholera. At the same time, it should be remembered that up to the pre- sent moment no chemical or physical means exist by which the presence of Cholera poison, or any substance having a tendency to give Cholera, can be detected. No sooner had the Cholera appeared at the Kast End, than attention was directed to the chemical com- position of the water. Dr. Frankland, of the Royal College of Chemistry, who gives a monthly analysis of the principal waters supplied to London, in the Registrar-General’s Reports, had pub- lished an analysis of the water of the East London Company on the Ist of July, and after the Cholera had broken out, he again analysed the water on the Ist of August. We give the result of the two analyses :— O East London Company’s Solid Matter in | Organic Matter feanrcaita Degree of Water. 100,000 fect. in 100,000 feet | Oxydize again Hardness. with. Collected Ist of July, \ 94-38 1°94 ° 0344 Ee 16°0 Rar waisisiv'es sasicst eck ss Collected 1st of ee 26°14 1°44 0328 17°7 This analysis shows that, although the water contained less organic matter in August than in July, that nevertheless in July the water could not be regarded as unfit for drinking purposes. It has been sometimes supposed that water contaminated with a certain amount of organic matter, when taken by healthy persons, will engender a condition of the system in which the poison of Cholera conveyed through the air, will produce that disease. During the late epi- demic of Cholera in London there has been nothing to support this theory. In many districts of London the surface well-pumps remain open, and are, indeed, in certain spots the only source of the supply of water in the neighbourhood in which they exist. The water of these pumps has been again and again shown to con- tain organic matter varying from 5 to 40 grains in the gallon, and yet Cholera has not occurred as the result of their use. In all cases where the pump has been shown to be the cause of disease, then it has been either demonstrated that the well has communi- 72 The Public Health. [Jan., cated with a cesspool or drain into which Cholera evacuations have passed, or the well has been placed in a situation in which such an occurrence might have taken place. The great case of the Broad Street Pump, in the parish of St. James’s, Westminster, to the drinking of the water of which the outbreak of Cholera in that parish in 1854 was traced, is a capital instance in point. In that case the water was discovered to have been contaminated by the leakings of a cesspool connected with a house in which a fatal case of Cholera had occurred a few days before. The case also of the farmer and his family at Theidon-Bois, in Essex, is another, m . which it was clearly demonstrated that the well which supplied the family with water was connected with a cesspool, the overflowings of which passed directly into the well, and eight persons out of a family of eleven thus met their death. The poison was conveyed to this house by the farmer himself, who had been in the South of England, where Cholera prevailed, and had returned home with the disease of which he eventually died. It is curious that this case should have in any way been connected with the outbreak in the East of London, but it was observed by Mr. Radcliffe, and after- wards referred to by the Registrar-General, that the Cobbin—a small stream which drains Epping in the neighbourhood of Theidon- Bois—actually flows into the Lea through Waltham Abbey. Whe- ther the poison of the Epping cases could have got into the Lea and produced the poisoning of its waters or not, we are driven to the conclusion that the water supplied to the Hast End of London was one of the causes, if not the entire cause, of the great preva- lence of Cholera in that district. Another interesting pomt connected with the appearance of Cholera at the East End of London is the fact, that the attacks of the disease were actually limited to the districts supplied by the Kast London Water Company. Thus taking the district of Shore- ditch, which les to the north of the Great Eastern Railway, we find that the mortality from Cholera, although it is one of the poorest of the Hast End parishes, was only at the rate of 4 in the 1,000. Now, it is in this district that the Hast London Company’s Works come in contact with those of the New River; and im five sub-districts out of seven, into which Shoreditch is divided for water-supply, the houses are supplied with water from the New River. All London is divided into thirty-seven water-supply dis- tricts. Six of these districts are supplied with water from the Old Ford Reservoirs of the East London Water Company, and in every one of these districts Cholera raged. The communities supplied by the other thirty-one districts have only suffered slightly from the ‘lisease, and in no one instance has the mortality been perceptibly increased,or of a character to lead to the supposition that it had been otherwise than imported from the Eastern districts ; and it is quite 1867. | The Public Health. 73 impossible, we think, after the evidence produced, to come to any other conclusion than that the destruction of the 5,000 lives which were sacrificed to Cholera and Diarrhcea in the East End of London, during the months of July, August, September, and October, 1866, must be attributed to the nature of the water-supply.* If the question be now asked whether there were any strongly predisposing causes existing among the population of the East End? we answer that up to the present time no prevailing predis- posing cause has been demonstrated. It was not poverty, for the people of Bow and Poplar are wealthier than those of Bethnal Green, and yet they suffered most. It was not over-crowding, for the most over-crowded districts of Shoreditch escaped. It was not drunkenness, for drunkards who did not drink the tainted water escaped. It was not ignorance or vice, for the Medical Officer of Health for Bow, Mr. Ansell, and the Clerk of the Vestry of the same parish, Mr. Ceely, were both carried off at the commence- ment of the epidemic. Seldom has the demonstration in the case of an epidemic been more complete, and never has a warning more solemn been given to local authorities of the duty they owe to their fellow-creatures. Had attention been paid to the admonitions which have been given in season and out of season by men of science, and Medical Officers of Health, water would not have been supplied for drinking purposes contaminated with the sewage of docks, canals, and foul streams. Had the Local Boards of Health heeded the warnings of those who saw the disease approaching their doors, they might have arrested it before it attamed the severity of an unexampled plague. It is a still greater warning to our legislators. They have no excuse for the ignorance they betray of the advances of disease, and the causes of death in the community. It is our legislature that has thrown around the water companies of London the shield of protection. Whilst one of our water companies can boast that its original one-hundred pound shares are now worth twenty-three thousand pounds, our Parliament has steadily refused to allow further supplies to be introduced into London. and has opposed every attempt that has been made to procure for London a more constant and improved supply. Looking at these visitations of disease from the lowest point of view, their money loss, they are reproaches upon the economy and prudence of the * Since the above was in type I have seen a report by Dr. Letheby, in which he states as a reason for hesitating to accept the water supply as a cause of Cholera, that in two workhouses, one of which was supplied with Kast London water, there was no Cholera, and in another, which was nof supplied with that water, there were twenty-seven cases of Cholera. Such exceptional cases as these might, no doubt, be explained by a careful investigation, and cannot be said under any cir- cumstances to invalidate the overwhelining testimony of the connection of Cholera of 1866 with the East ind water supply. 74 The Public Health. [Jan., communities in which they occur. All that is sacred in the obligations of one man to another, all that is prudent in the economy of every- day life urges, upon our legislators, our corporations, and our people the necessity of an honest, energetic, and earnest determination, that the terrible blot of thousands being annually carried off by preventive diseases should no longer disgrace at once our boasted Christianity and civilization. We have received a letter from Mr. George Greaves, M.R.C.S., an active sanitarian in Manchester, from which we publish (with his permission) the following extracts :— “ Mancuester, Nov. 23, 1866. “Permit me to thank you for the very vigorous exposé of the sanitary abominations of Manchester made in the last number of your Journal. If anything would bring the Authorities to a sense of their duty, such writing would. But I fear the case is a hopeless one,* and that while the present régime lasts we must continue to breathe an atmosphere more or less loaded with the emanations from feculent matter, in various stages of decomposition. Thanks to our good water-supply—the one sanitary benefit conferred upon us by the Corporation—we have escaped Cholera. This fact was cited by the Town- Clerk at one of the meetings of the recent Social Science Congress, to prove that our midden-system is not injurious to health. It would almost have been better for us, in the end, if we had hada smart epidemic of Cholera. The deaths from Fever (chiefly Typhus) have in the two last weeks been 20 and 22, and our death-rate last week was one death higher than that of Liverpool.” These statements afford striking confirmation of the views expressed by the author of the above article; and moreover, we suspect that if the cause of the Cholera outbreak in Liverpool could be traced, it would be found to be in some way connected with the water-supply. That has been (until the recent floods) notoriously deficient, and in a Report published by Mr. Duncan, the Liverpool Water Engineer, in July last, about the time of the outbreak of Cholera, he said : “‘The Committee are aware that the water now at command is insufficient to admit of its bemg kept constantly on. Thirty gallons per person per day are not considered more than enough for each person, of the entire population. At the present time we are short of that quantity by about 33 per cent.; and I may add that, on a very recent occasion, evidence was given by an authority to the effect that to the scarcity of water have been traced demoralization, disease, and death.” In the same Report, he says of three wells, two of which are situated in the town (Water Street, Hotham Street, and Soho): “The waters of these wells are hard, inferior in quality, costly in obtaining, compared with those of others, and would not be used, did not necessity compel.” During the existence of Cholera, suspicion fell upon those wells. They were permanently closed, and when it was attempted to raise a discussion on the cause of their discontinuance, silence was the order of the day; but recently again there was a Report from Mr. Duncan, published in November, * Mr. Greaves does not refer to Salford. 1867. | The Public Health. 75 in which he says of those wells: “1st. As resards Hotham Street . . . the water is not good, and costly to obtain. It is situated in a densely-populated district, where no well can be insured against pollution” . . . “As regards Soho Well . . . the water inferior, costly, and objectionable.” . . . Water Street Well appears to be still used. We make these observations with a view to add further evidence to that cited by Dr. Lankester, not at all to draw invidious comparisons. The Liverpool Water Authorities deserve well of the town, and they merit (what up to the time these remarks are written they have not received) the support of the Council, in their endeavours to extricate Liverpool from a grave difficulty by providing the-town with a large and constant water-supply. We would, however, draw the attention of Mr. Greaves, as well as that of the author of the foregoing article, to the 49th Section of the Sanitary Act of 1866, and would ask them, whether, with their strong conviction of the danger to which the inhabitants of their respective cities are exposed through the neglect of the Local Authorities, it would not be desirable that they should induce their townsmen to bring the facts stated by them under the notice of the Home Secretary. An inquiry was lately held in Liverpool in connection with a similar grievance to that complained of by Mr. Greaves—namely, the manure wharves within the borough, and after an impartial hearing before Mr. A. Taylor (whose industry and demeanour cannot be too highly lauded) an official intimation was sent down to Liverpool from the Home Office politely limiting the time for the discontinuance of the wharves in the towns. If the Home Secretary be firm, and insist upon compliance with his courteously-worded request, he will deserve great praise for having broken the ice, in putting the Act into operation ; and it will no doubt be gratifying to Mr. Bruce, M.P., the framer of the Act, to find it so soon carried out. The influence of this decision will be felt in every town where such abominations exist. THe Eprrors. WI) (Jan., CHRONICLES OF SCIENCE. 1. AGRICULTURE. THe Cattle Plague has at length dwindled to altogether imsignifi- cant proportions. The number of cases reported weekly is rarely more than 10; and an occasional aggravation of the disease, or its reappearance now and then in old localities, raising the weekly total to 20 or 30, while it no doubt shows what a malignant disorder we still retain among us, may, we hope, be taken to be merely the occasional flare of an expirmg flame. How much we owe to the policy of extermination, rather than attempted cure, may be seen by the results of the opposite system, as witnessed both in Holland and among ourselves. In the annual address, recently given by the President of the Royal Agricultural Society, it was pointed out that the number of cases reported in two weeks—the one in Sep- tember, 1865, and the other in September, 1866, was exactly the same. Unrestricted cattle traffic during the two months following the former period, had swelled the tale of cases up to thousands. Destruction of affected stock and absolute isolation of infected places during the two months followmg the corresponding week of 1866, had reduced the disease almost to extinction. In Holland again, during the past summer, when here the disease was yielding to restrictive measures, it grew to lamentable proportions—rising from two or three hundred cases weekly during June, to nearly eight times as many in September. There is certainly sufficient guidance for us here as to the policy to be followed if the disease should reappear among us in anything like its original severity. Up to the present time about 54 per cent. of the whole cattle stock of Great Britain have been attacked, while of the whole stock upon infected farms, nearly 60 per cent. took the disease. Of the total number of attacks whose results were known, 35 per cent. were killed; 512 per cent. died ; and 132 per cent. recovered. The utilization of Town Sewage was the subject of a conference at Leamington during October, which was attended by a number of gentlemen interested in the solution of the difficulties surrounding the subject. These difficulties are almost entirely the result of an extension of the water-closet system, by which the waste of houses, no longer received into cesspools and carted away to market-gardens, is washed into culverts, and thence pollutes our rivers. The remedy offered by one party to this discussion is the irrigation of grass 1867. | Agriculture. 77 lands with the drainage water, which thus becomes clarified before reaching the river, and yields a valuable produce during the process. The other plan consists in the substitution of earth-closets for water-closets in our houses. It only needs that a storage of dry earth be provided for use in this way, and occasionally replenished ; that the prejudices of servants be removed or overruled; and that frequent removals of the boxes be provided for. A well-arranged system of scavenging would then be easily carried out with perfect inoffensiveness, both in the house and out; and we should have a most valuable manure, which might be carried, load by load, to farms all round our towns, where loads of top soil for similar use would be readily obtained in exchange for it, the difference in value being paid. The difficulty of displacing the existing system would, however, be very great ; and, committed as we are by an enormous expenditure to the plan of keeping our towns clean by washing into drains, it is not at all likely that the earth-closet system will be adopted, except in detached houses or small villages. Meanwhile, at Croydon, at Barking, Rugby, and elsewhere, evidence is accumulating that the irrigation of grass lands with filthy sewage water, is both a perfectly inoffensive and a profitable process. A meeting of gentlemen interested in the Utilization of Sewage was held in Liverpool in December, and owing probably. to the presence of Lord Robert Montagu, who delivered an admirable address on the subject, the attendance was very numerous, and included the élite of the town and neighbourhood. There the advocates of the Harth-Closet were in a decided minority, for the reasons stated—viz. that the system is not suitable for large towns, where the quantity of earth to be carted would be enormous, and because arrangements have already been entered into between the Liverpool Corporation and the Sewage Company, which promoted the meeting, for the utilization of all the sewage of the town. Most of the statements made by Lord Robert Montagu were repetitions of what is already known to agriculturists, and has been announced from time to time in these pages, but it may be of interest to our readers to know that in Liverpool it is intended to intercept the sewage at the outfall of the sewers, and at first to experiment with it upon the sandy soil skirting the Lancashire and Yorkshire line from Liverpool to Southport. ‘There is a large tract of country all about the north side of Liverpool, which is at present a mere sandy waste, but no doubt the application of sewage water will render it fertile and suitable for the growth of rye-grass, and if the promoters of this sewage scheme can at the same time fertilize waste land, and render the most unhealthy town in England more healthy, they will confer a double favour upon society. They have our very best wishes for their success. Professor Voelcker has lately given a lecture on the application 78 Chronicles of Science. [ Jan., of manures before the London Farmers’ Club, which is a remark-: able illustration of the progress made towards a satisfactory relationship between scientific teaching and farm practice. Instead of treating vegetable growth as a purely chemical phe- nomenon; or supposing, as lecturers on agricultural chemistry seemed formerly to do, that it only needs the supply of ele- ments in manure to ensure a corresponding assimilation of them by the growing plant, we now learn from the chemist what we already knew by experience, that luxuriance of growth and abun- dance of produce depend as much upon the mere question of even and uniform distribution of food for plants—as much in fact upon its accessibility—as upon the increase of its supply. We are told, for example, that an inferior guano well powdered and mingled with a sufficient quantity of diluent material so as to ensure its even dis- tribution through the land, may be a greater help to the fertility of the soil and a greater fertilizer of the current crop than a better guano imperfectly applied. It is a truth of the same kind, which Dr. Voelcker also told us, that no manure at all upon a stiff clay land well tilled will tend to its fertility rather than a heavy dressing of farm dung applied when the land is soft and liable to be poached by the horses and carts employed in putting it on. The application of farm manure as a top dressing in dry weather is now confidently advocated—even though a scorching sun and driving winds should cause the separation of all evaporable matter from it. There is no loss of ammonia during the putrefaction of farm dung. The loss which it suffers during that process is due to the washing of soluble salts out of it by ram. And if the dung be spread at once upon the land, all its valuable constituents will find their way into the soil. Among the other topics which have occupied the agricultural world during the past quarter, is the growing organization of tenant farmers in Chambers of Agriculture, through which their voice may be heard in public discussions, and through which their views may be influentially urged on Government. We must also refer to the attempt of the Royal Agricultural Society to promote agricultural education by the addition of their prizes to the list of distinctions offered for competition before the University examiners of- middle- class schools. And lastly, we may mention that, moved by the disasters of the past harvest season, the Society of Arts is about to offer a prize for any contrivance or machine which shall artificially accomplish or facilitate the drying process on which our hay and corn harvests depend for the quality of their produce. 1867.] | based 2. ARCH AHOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY. Tus Chronicle bears a heading new to the ‘ Quarterly Journal of Science,’ and it may therefore be as well to define at the outset the subjects which we shall attempt to represent in it. Of late years Archeology has dived deeply into the records of our race, bringing to the surface many facts and inferences, which throw light on the most recent portions of Geological History. Ethnology also hag made rapid progress, and, from having been a mere catalogue of the characters of the several varieties of one Natural History species, has come to possess a wider scope and a higher aim. Archeology and Ethnology thus shade off, on the one hand, into Geology and Zoology, and on the other, into Modern History and Politics. It is in their former relation only that we shall in this Chronicle discuss their progress, as in this respect only do they concern the student of Natural Science. We cannot do better than begin our new Chronicle with an account of the great work, entitled ‘Reliquiz Aquitanice,’ * commenced by the late Mr. Henry Christy, F.R.S., and M. E. Lartét, and continued by the latter with the assistance of some of the best antiquaries, including Mr. John Evans, Mr. A. W. Franks, and Mr. W. Tipping; it is published at the expense of Mr. Christy’s executors, and is edited by Professor T. Rupert Jones. Three parts have now appeared, illustrated by numerous plates and woodcuts; but there does not seem to be any systematic arrange- ment, the different objects appearing to have been figured and described as convenience, rather than a system, required. The results, however, are sufficiently interesting now, and will probably be made much more so by the inferences which will hereafter be drawn from their consideration by the experienced savans concerned in the publication of the work. In the Dordogne district the sides of the valley of the Vézére, and of the gorges of its tributary streams, rise in great escarpments, crowned with projecting cornices, below which are seen horizontal niches or hollow flutings; in these cliffs occur also numerous caves and rock-shelters either at the level of the floods ofthe present day, or higher up, thus showing that no alteration im the level of the district has taken place since their formation. These cavities are for the most part mere shelters, so we must suppose that when they were inhabited by man, as they no doubt were at a remote period, a protection was erected outside them, or that the people using them were extremely uncivilized. Indeed it is evident that they * ‘Reliquie Aquitanice. Being Contributions to the Archeology and Paleontology of Perigord and the Adjoining Provinces of Southern France,’ By Edward Lartét and Henry Christy. London: Bailliere. 80 Chronicles of Scrence. [ Jan., were used chiefly as fireplaces, for hearth-stuff is abundantly found in most of them ; and it is curious to observe that at the present day the cottages of the district are built in precisely similar posi- tions, the fireplaces being situated in the face of the rock. The hearth-stuff has yielded a mine of organic wealth in the shape of remains of animals, which had been killed for food, consisting chiefly of the reindeer, the horse, and the ox, with the ibex and the chamois. The “ wild boar was scarce or but little eaten,” and with the excep- tion of the horse the fauna tends to a northern grouping. The rock-dwellers were not unaccustomed to more delicate food, as is proved by “the many bones of birds and of salmon which are mixed | with the refuse ;” they also seem to have been very fond of marrow, : | as the marrow-bones have invariably been split for the purpose of | extracting it. ‘The question whether the rock-dwellers cooked their food is at present unsettled. ‘The bones do not show traces of the action of fire, so that the meat could not have been roasted; and there is not sufficient depth of earth below the hearths to encourage the supposition that it was cooked by being buried in the earth, and having a fire lighted over it. ‘Thus there remains but one method possible—boiling: that these people boiled water is certain because the “boiling-stones” have been found, and they have evidently | been heated for the purpose; but no pottery is forthcoming, so the water was probably boiled in hollows in the rock. ‘The climate | of the country at the time when the rock-dwellers peopled it, was, : as already indicated by the fauna, very much colder than it is now; but another argument has been very ingeniously used by the authors, namely, that in the South of France at the present day such masses of animal remains as we find in the cayes, would speedily become a fearfully decomposing mass; besides which the rock- dwellers have “almost invariably chosen a southern exposure, and the warmest and sunniest nooks for their residences.” The causes of this colder climate have not yet been entered upon; but as there has been little or no change of level, and there are no high mountains in the | vicinity, it will certainly be a puzzle. The implements and the fauna point to a much later period than that usually denomimated “ Glacial,” so it is unlikely that the cause was cosmical; and it is difficult to conceive what local changes in the character of the sur- face would have so great an effect. ; The implements found in the caves and rock-shelters are won- derfully interesting, and, fortunately for antiquaries, are illustrated with the most prodigal liberality. A comparison of them with . recent implements in use amongst uncivilized peoples poits in the | same direction as the fauna, namely, northwards. The implements are either of flint, bone, or deerhorn, and comprise almost every | conceivable variety; in flint “from lance-heads long enough and . stout enough to have been used against the largest animals, down 1867. | Archxology and Eth nology. 81 to lanceis no larger than the blade of a penknife, and piercing instruments of the size of the smallest bodkin;” and in horn or bone every variety of chisel, awl, harpoon, and arrow, with, lastly, “eyed needles of compact bone, finely pointed, polished, and drilled, with round eyes so smail and regular,” that it requires experiment to prove that they could have been drilled with stone. Although we have dwelt too long on this most interesting publication in its unfinished state, we must just mention that 1t shows already that in these caves the works of art were discovered which have already been noticed and figured in this Journal* MM. Lartét and Christy have, indeed, proved that, so far as we know, France was the birth-place of the Fine Arts, the Dordogne Caves having furnished evidence of the cultivation by the rock-dwellers of Music, Painting, and Sculpture, Music being represented by whistles made out of the phalangeal bones of the reindeer or chamois; Sculpture by an ornamented poniard-handle and many similar examples, ficured as before cited; and Painting by the traditional red ochre paint of the savage. Dr. Ferdinand Keller's ‘ Lake-dwellings of Switzerland and other parts of Europe, t which has been translated and arranged by Mr. J. EH. Lee, is a work of hardly less interest, and claims also a special notice at our hands. The lake-dwellings consist of pule-dwellings, fascine-dwellings, and crannoges. The pile-dwellings were thus built: piles having been driven into the bed of the lake, their heads were brought to a level and connected by platform-beams, fastened either by wooden pins or by means of mortises or central hollows in the heads of the vertical piles; and the hold of the piles in the bed of the lake was in some cases further strengthened by large quantities of stones beng brought in boats and sunk around them. The fascine-dwellings have a very peculiarly constructed founda- tion, which was composed of horizontal layers of twigs instead of vertical piles; but afew of the latter were also used as stays or guides for the great mass of sticks. These fascine-dwellings are to some extent of similar construction to the crannoges, which consist of the following portions: (1.) an outer rim, or stockade of piles or boards, enclosing either a circular or oval space, the lowest bed within which is made up of ‘‘a mass of ferns, branches, and other vegetable matter, generally covered over with a layer of round logs, cut into lengths of from four to six feet, over which is usually found a quantity of clay, gravel, and stones.” Such are the varieties of substructure of the lake-dwellings; but * No. III., July, 1864, pp. 578-582. +t ‘The Lake Dwellings of Switzerland and Other Parts of Europe.’ By Ferdinand Keller, President of the Antiquarian Association of Zurich. ‘Trans- lated by J. KE. Lee, F.S.A., F.G.S. Longmans, VOL, IV. j G 82 Chronicles of Science. [Jan of the superstructure very little is known, except that the huts were rectangular, and that each one was provided with a hearth consisting of three or four large slabs of stone. There are some peculiarities in the distribution of these dwellings which deserve notice ; for instance, fascine-dwellings “occur chiefly in the smaller lakes, and apparently belong to the Stone age,” while many of the pile-dwellings have been inhabited in the Stone, Bronze, and Iron ages. Crannoges have been found chiefly, if not entirely, in Ire- land and Scotland, and they appear to have been chieftains’ forts, and fastnesses for occasional retreat, while the Swiss lake-dwellings were places of permanent habitation for families and tribes. ‘The latter were placed at a greater or less distance from the shore, and their site appears to have been determined by such circumstances as would be appreciated by people enjoying a peaceful existence, “as even the earliest settlers were not only fishermen and hunters, but also shepherds and agriculturists.” It also appears that they were traders, even in the Stone age, for such a material as nephrite could only have been obtained by barter, as it does not occur in Kurope; while in later times they must have procured iron by the same means. ‘They apparently clothed themselves with hides and skins, as well as with plaited and woven flax, and it seems probable that they had a religion, for Dr. Keller infers certain figures of the crescent moon to have been objects of worship from the earliest period. We have no space to trace the advance of civilization amongst the lake-dwellers during the supposed successive periods of Stone, Bronze, and Iron; but we have said enough to draw atten- tion to the subject, which is illustrated with extraordinary com- pleteness by the discoveries described in Dr. Keller’s work, and we therefore leave it, with the question of the existence of the lake- dwellings so late as the Gallo-Roman period, to be discussed by the antiquary and the ethnologist. The Crannoges of Ireland and Scotland were built on shallows or islands, and, as already remarked, appear to have been places of retreat, thus indicating a great contrast in the habits of these people from those of the Swiss lake-dwellers. Dr. Keller is of opinion “ that the different settlements in what are called the Stone, the Bronze, and the Iron ages do not indicate a succession of races, or the destruction of one people by another, but merely different grades of civilization amongst one and the same people,” and that the lake-dwellers belonged to the same people as their contemporaries on the mainland. He also accepts the conclusion that certain bronze objects of a peculiar form and ornamentation, such as some of those found in the settlements on the land and in the lakes, are referable to the Celts; and as history _makes no mention of any early people but the Celts, who received their civilization in later times from the Romans, he infers “ that 1867.) Archzxology and Ethnology. 83 it would be contrary to all the facts adduced to arrive at any conclusion but this:—that the builders of the lake-dwellings were a branch of the Celtic population of Switzerland, but that the earlier settlements belong to the prehistoric period, and had already fallen = decay before the Celts took their place in the history of urope.” | _ Mr. Laing’s book on the “ Prehistoric Remains of Caithness,”* has been received with small favour by the antiquaries of that county, and his conclusion that the human remains found by him in certain kists and mounds belong to the Early Stone-period, has excited a rather warm controversy; while his assertion that the Caithness people of that time were addicted to cannibalism, has been indignantly repudiated by every patriotic Scot. The last two numbers of the ‘ Anthropelogical Review’ contain several papers by Messrs. Anderson, Shearer, Cleghorn, Petrie, and Dr Hunt, in which, Mr. Laing’s statements and inferences are severely criticized, and the opinion of these authors seems to be that the remains are very recent, probably not more than three or four centuries old. ‘The principal series of graves are said to be the burial places of shipwrecked seamen, and to occur in a raised beach, not in an artificial mound. That some stone implements have been found is admitted, but they do not seem to have been in any case discovered by the explorers themselves; but even if their authenticity is hereafter proved, as Mr. Shearer remarks, “the whole thing is now so mixed up together as to render any of the things in a scientific inquiry utterly useless.” Mr. Laing is thus charged by these authors with having made a most extraordinary series of blunders, and to have been rather careless of ensuring the authenticity and isolation of specimens from different localities and of different ages. The Congress of the Archeological Institute, held in London during the past summer, deserves notice here chiefly on account of the luminous address delivered on the occasion by Sir John Lubbock,t in which that zealous ethnologist, antiquary, and zoologist, sketched out the present condition of that portion of archeological science which relates to what he terms the ‘“‘ Primeval Period,” chiefly with a view of showing that the method hitherto employed almost entirely in geology and zoology had been applied to archeology with the same success as had attended its use in the former branches of knowledge. By the term ‘“ Primeval Period,” Sir John indicated that extending from the first appearance of man down to the commencement of the Christian era, and to **The Prehistoric Remains of Caithness.’ By Samuel Laing, Esq., M.P:, FGS. With Notes on the Human Remains, by Thomas H. Huxley, F.R:S. Williams & Norgate. t Our notice of this Address is based on the Report of it which appeared in the ‘Atheneum’ for July 21st, 1866. rs. 84 Chronicles of Science. [Jan., this range of time he confined his observations. The period has been divided into four epochs, namely, (1) the Paleolithic or First Stone-age ; (2) the Neolithic or Second Stone-age; (3) the Bronze- age; and (4) the Iron-age; so we cannot do better than consider their distinctive characters serzatim. The Palzolithic age is the most ancient period in which we have any proofs of the existence of man, although there are faint indica- tions of his presence in still earlier times. The antiquities belonging to this epoch are those which, occurring in beds of gravel and loess, as well as in caves, associated with the remains of extinct animals, have received so much attention from geologists and antiquaries during the last few years. The climate of Western Europe during this period was much colder than it is now, and the inhabitants used rude implements of stone (flint chiefly), which were not polished, and some types of which differ remarkably from any of those of later date; they were ignorant of pottery and of metals, as also are many races of savages at the present day. During the Neolithic age in Europe polished stone axes and hand-made pottery were extensively used, long before the discovery or introduction of metals. To this period belong the Danish kjokkenméddings, many of the Swiss lake-dwellings, and several of . the tumuli or burial-mounds; but the objects referable to it do not occur in river-gravels. Domestic animals were reared, and agricultural pursuits were followed by the Neolithic people, who belonged, apparently, to at least two distinct races, as in the eu two forms of skull have been found—one long and the other round. Implements of stone remained in use during the Bronze age, and those of bronze were chiefly copies of the former; the pottery was much better than that of the Neolithic age; and although much of it was still hand-made, some is said to show marks of the potter’s wheel. Gold, amber, and glass were used for ornamental purposes ; but silver, zinc, lead, and iron were apparently unknown, as well as coins and writing. During the Iron age the metal which gives its name to the period was first used for weapons and cutting instruments, and here, Sir John Lubbock remarks, “we emerge into the broad and, in many respects, delusive glare of history.” With the exception of the use of iron, the differences between the implements of this period and those of the Bronze age are mosily relative; e.g. “the objects which accompany bronze weapons are much more archaic than those which are found with weapons of iron.” This fact, and “the frequent occurrence of iron blades with bronze handles, and the entire absence of the reverse,” are sufficient to show that the use of iron must have succeeded and replaced that of bronze. Another fact of interest is, that the bronze associated with iron 1867. | Astronomy. 85 - frequently contains lead and zinc in considerable quantities. Besides these characteristics, we may mention that silver was used for orna- ments, and that inscriptions of the Iron age have been discovered in more than one locality. The foregoing is a mere outline, more or less indefinite, of the characteristics of these four epochs, as described by Sir John Lubbock; we have already filled in some of the details for the earlier ages in noticing the works of Messrs. Christy and Lartét, and of Dr. Keller; but with respect to the later periods, we hope to have an apportunity of saymg something more on a future occasion. 8. ASTRONOMY. CIncluding the Proceedings of the Royal Astronomical Society.) Since our last Chronicle was in type, we have heard, with regret, of the death of Hermann Goldschmidt, the astronomer. The loss to science is a serious one. Originally intended to succeed his father as a merchant, Goldschmidt at the age of thirty commenced the study of painting. He pursued this art successfully for fifteen years, and was already forty-five years old when he turned his attention to astronomical observation. He devoted himself with such success to this new pursuit, that m the course of nine years he added thirteen new asteroids to the solar system, discovered many variable stars, and determined the places of 3,000 stars not marked in the charts published by the Academy of Berlin. It is to be noted, for the encouragement of amateurs, that the instru- ments used by Goldschmidt in effecting this important series of labours were of very moderate dimensions. We believe his most powerful instrument was a five-foot achromatic mounted on a movable tripod stand. The Padre Secchi at Rome has attacked the spectrum-analysis of stars with considerable success. Before presenting the results attained by him, however. we must premise that interesting as they are, the method of observation does not seem comparable for accuracy to that pursued by Mr. Huggins and Professor Miller. The spectrometer used by Secchi consists of a cylindrical lens (focal length, three inches) placed in front of and near the eye-piece. Beyond the lens is placed a prism of Amici, in which the deviation is nul. He recommends this arrangement as powerful, and also as cheaply applicable to amateurs’ telescopes. Secchi applies the following method of comparison :—the spectrometer being so placed that the lines in the spectrum are parallel to the celestial equator (that is, to the direction of the star’s apparent motion) a known or comparison-star is brought on to one 86 7 Chronicles of Science. [Jan., of the threads of the finder; returning then to the large telescope the observer brings one of the points of the micrometer behind one of the principal lines of the star’s spectrum. ‘The star to be com- pared with the first is then brought under the same thread of the finder. If then the micrometer point coincides with a line of the spectrum, this line and the Ime of the first star’s spectrum are evidently identical. One of the most remarkable results (assuming its correctness) of Secchi’s researches, is the observation that two stars—y Cassiopeie, and 6 Lyre—show bright lines. In y Cassiopeie, for instance, there are several bright lines, but one dominant line in the blue- green, taking the place of a dark lne—the well-known line F of hydrogen—in other star-spectra. The spectra of these two stars are compared by Secchi: with the continuous spectrum crossed by bright lines given by magnesium. The observation would seem to indicate that some stars owe their light in part to the luminosity of their gaseous envelopes, and notably to the presence of burning hydrogen. Before leaving the subject of spectrum-analysis, we must note the investigation by M. Jansen, of Paris, of the formation of dark lines when light passes through aqueous vapour. He has ascer- tained that the intensity of certain lines seen in the solar spectrum varies with the amount of moisture present in the atmosphere. By transmitting the light of sixteen gas-burners through a tube filled with steam he reproduced all these lmes. Father Secchi appears to have anticipated this discovery. | M. Chacornac has published an interesting paper on Comets. Space will not permit us to deal with the subject otherwise than briefly. He compares together the atmospheres of the sun, of planets, and of comets, under the several conditions of temperature and attraction to which those atmospheres are subject. In the case of planets it is possible that there should be an equilibrium between the attractive force of the planet on the external layers of the atmosphere, and the elastic forces of the layers below; in such a case the atmosphere will have a definite limit. But this clearly cannot be the state of the atmospheres of comets near perihelion, nor of the solar atmosphere. Beyond the bounds of the solar attraction the forces of dilatation exhibit themselves as projective forces acting outwards from the solar periphery. The rays of the solar aureole, in total eclipses of the sun, indicate, by their configu- ration, the expansive force of gases violently projected mto plane- tary space. To a similar expansive action, acting upon cometary atmospheres, the formation of cometary aigrettes is attributed, while the formation of comets’ tails is ascribed to repulsion, pro- duced by the expansive forces of the solar atmosphere. M. Léon Foucault has devised a new method of solar observa- ¥ 1867. | Astronomy. 2 tion. This consists in covering an achromatic object-glass with a thin film of silver. Such a film, he finds, does not interfere with the definition of the sun. The rays from the less refrangible end of the spectrum are stopped, while the others suffice to exhibit the solar features. M. Leverrier pronounces very favourably on this arrangement, which “ seems to promise,” he says, mere distinct views of the sun than have hitherto been obtained. Other observers find the details of the solar disc slightly “ veiled” when thus viewed. It appears to us that there are several objections to the new method, and we should not recommend amateurs to have a valuable object- glass silvered, until something more is heard ag to the possibility of restoring the glass to its original state. But we hear of a contrivance by Messrs. G. and 8. Merz of Munich, which seems to promise better views of the sun than have ever yet been obtained. In their solar eye-piece, two pairs of plane unsilvered glass mirrors are so placed, that, by rotating one pair, any part whatever of the sun’s light may be intercepted. By this arrangement no false colour is introduced, as with blue, or neutral-tint glasses. Father Secchi says that films are seen with a frosy tint (the colour of the protuberances seen in solar eclipses), in the new ocular, which appeared blue in the common oculars. The display of meteors (or Humboldt’s star-shower, as some name the phenomenon) fully equalled the expectations of the most sanguine. Mr. Dawes considers that upwards of 3,500 fell before 2h. 15m., on the morning of November 14th. Mr. Tal- mage noted the following numbers in successive intervals of five minutes from 12h. 52m. to 2h. 12m.:—115, 125, 231, 324, 239, 214, 147, 104, 109, 57, 56, 31, 22, 28, 37, 20; showing that the maximum intensity of the shower occurred at about a quarter-past one. While Mr. Hind and M. Du Chaillu (who assisted him) note that “few of the meteors were remarkable for brilliancy or persistence of the trains,” Mr. Harris, of Southern-hay, near Exeter, remarks, that at Lh. 15m.a very bright meteor burst, causing a light as bright as daylight, leaving a train which lasted for a quarter of an hour. This is probably the same meteor that is described by Mr. Heath as passing through the Pleiades at 1.80 a.m, and leaving a trail which did not disappear for four minutes. A more satisfactory observation of this “bright, particular star,” is that made by Capt. Noble, the astronomer. He notesit as “‘a splendid one,” hour 13h, 20m. 10s. (that is, lh. 20m.) 8.W. of Pleiades, leaving a train which lasted upwards of five minutes by the Observatory clock, and which gradually contracted into a fusiform mass (like 31 M. Andromedz), then into an amorphous one, and finally disap- peared behind a cloud. Some of these more permanent streaks, observed in the telescope, were found to be in focus with the stars, 88 Chronicles of Seience. [Jan., ~ indicating a distance of at least 40 or 50 miles. This observation is due to Mr. Bird, of Birmingham. 7 While on the subject of meteorites, we may note that the French Academy has received an intimation from Marshal Vail- lant, that Marshal Bazaine has found an aerolite in Mexico weighing no less than 860) kilogrammes (considerably more than three-quarters of a ton!) Tn the ‘ Astronomische Nachrichten’ (No. 1,606) is an account from C. Behrmann, of Gottingen, of shooting stars coming out of a thick cloud, about 15° from the horizon. The cloud, which covered the sky, was so dense that meteors could not have been seen through it. He considers, therefore, that the stars were driven through the cloud, and came within one-tenth of a mile from the earth. Itappears tous that we have read of phenomena strikingly resembling those described by M. Behrmann,—in Arago’s Meteoro- logical Essays, under the head ‘ globular lightnings, The planet Mars will be in opposition on January 10th, 1867, and though less favourably situated as respects distance than in November and December, 1864, or October, 1862, will be well worth careful study. In fact, the presentation of Mars, and the phenomena exhibited upon his surface, vary considerably from opposition to opposition; the complete study of the planet requires that he should be observed at oppositions oceurring all round the ecliptic. As respects the oppositions of 1862 and 1864, we refer our readers to Professor Phillips’s graphic paper in our volume for 1865. In the approaching opposition the Polar pre- sentation of the planet (as seen in an inverting telescope) will be that shown in Fig. 1. F/G./ FIC. The outlines of continents and seas here marked m are obtained from the map accompanying the above-named article. By tracing (from Fig. 1) a series of meridian outlines, and 1867. | _ Astronomy. — 89 filling in from Professor Phillips’ map, our astronomical readers will be enabled to obtain views of the planet at successive intervals of two (Martial) hours. Such views would suffice for comparison with any telescopic views taken near the time of southing,* or with views taken at any hour, if due regard be paid to the varying slope of the planet’s axis. Towards the end of February the planet (now become much smaller) will appear per- ceptibly gibbous; his maximum stage of gibbosity, attained early April, and his apparent disc at that time are exhibited in ig. 2. Owing, apparently, to a change of authorities, the apparent diameter assigned to the planet in the ‘ Nautical Almanac’ is larger for January 10, 1867, than for December Ist, 1864. Observers, however, must not expect to find the planet larger; in fact, he will be more than 9,000,000 miles farther from the earth on January 10th, than when in opposition in 1864. Two more minor planets, the 90th and 91st, have been disco- vered : the first by Dr. Luther, of Bilk, near Diisseldorf, on October Ist; the second at the Marseilles observatory. On the 6th of March there will be an annular eclipse of the sun, visible throughout England as a partial eclipse. It will begin at Greenwich at 8h. 17m. a.m.,.and reach its greatest phase at 9h. 32m. a.m., and end at 10h. 52m. a.m. - About seven-tenths of the sun’s diameter will be obscured at the time of the greatest hase. ; We call the special attention of our readers to the obscuration of the Lunar Crater Linné (on the Mare Serenitatis) observed by Herr Schmidt at Athens. The epoch at which the crater again becomes visible should be carefully noted. This is the same crater that Schréter saw transformed into a dark spot on November 5th, 1788. | PROCEEDINGS OF THE RoyaL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY. Professor Kaiser, of Leyden, in a letter to the Astronomer- Royal, discusses the qualities of the latter’s double image micro- meter. He expresses a favourable opinion on the instrument, but in one respect astronomers will be disappointed. It has long been known that measurements effected by the best observers with the wire-micrometer present considerable discrepancies. Now, if it had resulted from Professor Kaiser’s experiments that the mstrument was in fault in such cases, there would have been a prospect of remedying the evil. It appears, however, that the same observer * The horizontal line through the centre represents the true path of the planet ; at the moment of ‘‘ southing”’ the slope of the axis will be a few degrees Jess than in Fig. J, since the planet's motion in opposition will be ,earrying him slightly northwards, 90 Chronicles of Science. [Jan., using both the wire-micrometer and ‘the double-image micrometer in delicate measurements, obtains results appreciably coimcident ; so that, as Professor Kaiser remarks, “the discrepancies are far more to be sought in the observers than in the instruments.” Referring ‘specially to double-star measurements, he remarks further, that they appear “far too imaccurate for the consequences one will derive from them.’ ‘The Professor’s list of observations serves to exhibit the close approach to comeidence attained by the use of the two instruments, and to afford to observers new estimates of some favourite test-objects. P General Shortrede discusses the effect of the vapour of mercury in depressing the théfometric column. In temperate climates this effect is not often appreciable, and except in very delicate experiments may perhaps be safely disregarded ; but in the tropics, or in exceptionally warm weather, the height of the mercurial column is very sensibly depressed from this cause. In India, for Instance, General Shortrede found that the true reading, obtained after tiltmg the barometer so as to condense the vapour, differed from the observed reading before that operation by from 10 to 20-thousandths of an inch, and on one occasion by so much as -023. The tubes were in exceptionally good order, one haying been boiled more than twenty times, the vacuum being so perfect that after the tube had been placed some hours in a horizontal position “the mercury, by electrical attraction, would adhere to the top of the tube, and not separate till shaken by tapping,’—the tube of 82in. remaining full in this way, at Pana, where the average height is 28 in. ! The subject seems worthy of investigation, since if we would learn the laws regulating the variations of atmospheric pressure, the minutest circumstances affecting the truth of barometric indi- cations must be recognized, so as to be either eliminated or cor- rected. The Greenwich photographic registrations are evidently liable to be peculiarly affected by a cause of this kind. General Shortrede noticed, indeed, that on one warm day of the past summer the vacuum of the barometer for outside indications (at Greenwich) was studded with minute globules of mercury, derived from the condensation of the mercurial vapour. Father Secchi sends a drawing of the spectrum of Antares (the Sirius of red stars). Antares attains a sufficient elevation in the latitude of Rome for satisfactory observation with the spectrometer. As might be expected the spectrum (which, by the way, is presented in a reversed position) exhibits a crowding of lines towards the more refrangible (or violet) end, and several spaces clear of lines, or in which lines are more sparsely strewn, towards the red end. _ Captain Noble remarks that Jupiter’s third satellite reappeared two minutes before the time predicted in the Nautical Almanac. 1867. | Astronomy. 91 The error is, of course, due to a misprint; but the circumstance is noteworthy, as showing the confidence with which astronomers are in the habit of accepting a series of predictions crowded together in a thick octavo volume, published three or four years before the predicted events happen. ‘The non-astronomical world are astonished when the few events which admit of general observation happen as predicted; but it is a source of far greater astonishment to the astronomer that a single telescopic phenomenon out of many thou- sands predicted should occur a few seconds before or after the predicted time. In the Comptes Rendus of July 30, and August 6, 1866, there is an interesting paper by M. Faye on variable stars. He sums up the results of his examination of recorded phenomena as follows :— “So-called new stars are not really new, their all but sudden apparition being only an exaggeration of the ordinary phenomenon of periodical variables, a phenomenon corresponding (in turn) to simple oscillations, more or less sensible, in the phenomenon of the production and maintenance of the photospheres ofall stars. These phenomena, considered as successive when the history of a star is examined in part, characterize the progress of the cooling of the star, and the decline of its solar or photospheric phase. When these phenomena occur thus in an irregularly intermittent manner, with very long and gradually increasing intervals, they are the precursors of the star’s extinction, or at any rate of the formation of a first crust more or less consistent. Hence it is that phenomena of this sort take place only in stars already very faint, and never result in the formation of a fine new star.” he, Our space will not permit us to deal at length with the papers read and discussed at the November meeting of the Astronomical Society. The remarks in which the President claimed for astronomy the credit of recovering the Atlantic Cable are noteworthy. The connection between the price of Atlantic Telegraph shares and the transit-tube at Greenwich, seems at first sight as far-fetched (and is in reality as just), as that traced by a French astronomer between the cotton trade and Jupiter’s satellites. A paper by Mr. Lynn, “On the mass of Jupiter, as deduced by Herr Kriger from observations of Themis,” deals with an important subject. The determination by Pound in the 17th century had for a long time been adopted as the true value, though no account remained of the observations made by Pound beyond the mere statement of the numbers in Newton's ‘Principia’ (lib. i1., prop. vill., cor. 1.). The mass thus assigned was a eth of the sun’s mass. But about the year 1826, Nicola calculated a larger value ( oss-a2z ) by means of the perturbations 92 Chronicles of Science. [Jan., = Juno; Encke from the perturbations of Vesta found the value = = 5» and from the perturbations of the comet bearing his name, Gauss confirmed these results by observations of Pallas. Airy, in 1837; a and by Captain 1 1054° ; 1 returning to the satellites, obtained the value = ; Fave 1 result confirmed ue Bessel’s determination, == Jacob’s estimate,—_,—both these results beg also deduced ae 54 from observations of the satellites. Herr Kriiger’s estimate, obtained from a series of most careful investigations of Themis (one of the minor planets) gives The mean of the four last-named 1 1047-16" 1 : values ( warae} may safely be accepted as a very close approxi- mation to the true mass of the largest planet of the solar system. It is to be expected that the influence of Jupiter on Saturn, which seemed to ee (before the discovery of Neptune) to indicate a = 0? assigned to Jupiter’s mass. The variable in Corona, whose appearance (sudden, we think, despite Mr. Hind’s verdict) ‘startled astronomers in May, and which had sunk to the 9th magnitude, increased in brightness to the 7th magnitude] towards the end of August last; but Mr. Huggins’s spectroscope revealed no traces of the bright lines which in May formed so marked a feature of the star’s spectrum. The star has now returned to the 9th magnitude. 4. BOTANY AND VEGETABLE PHYSIOLOGY. EncianD.—Homologies of the Flowers of Conifere.—Mr. Andrew Murray has published an interesting paper on this subject, in which, at some length, he demonstrates that the male flowers are monopetalous and diandrous in the firs and pines, monopetalous and polyandrous in the cypresses and allied genera. The female flower is also monopetalous. In the young state, the petal is a small bract, sometimes green, sometimes even more richly coloured than the petal of the male flower, always petaloid in texture, at least at the margins. The author supposes the envelopes to have the following homologies :—1. Outermost envelope, or its appendage, corresponds to, in ordinary dicotyledons, the petal ; in conifers, to the bract. 2. Next envelope corresponds ordinarily to the disk ; in conifers, to the scale. 3. First covering of the fruit, ordinarily the pericarp; in conifers, the wing of the seed. 4. 1867.) Botany and Vegetable Physiology. 93 Second covering of the fruit, ordinarily mesocarp; in conifers, cellular substance between 3 and 5. 5. Third covering of fruit, ordinarily endocarp ; in conifers, the testa. The remaining envelopes of the nucleus of the ovuli in the conifers (primine, secundine, &c.) in no respect differ in appearance or function from those of other seeds, and therefore need not be specially noted. Inchenology—The Reverend W. A. Leighton continues his series of papers on this subject in the ‘ Annals.’ He has lately given a notice of the Abbé Coeman’s essay on the Cladoniz of the Herbarium of the great lichenologist, Acharius, and the results of the application to his.own herbarium of a chemical test as a means of deciphering species of Lichens. The reaction which is found so useful, is that of hydrate of potash, which in certain cases produces a yellow colour, whilst in others there is no reaction, or only a slight fuscescence. In no case, says Mr. Leighton, is the reaction of greater utility than in the difficult tribe of Cladonie, that crux of lichenologists, where its application enables us with admirable precision and exactness to determine the various species, to re- distribute the confounded species, and to refer to their proper systematic places the innumerable varieties and forms which may resemble each other in external character. Climbing Plants—Herr Fritz Miller, who is so well known among zoologists by his many valuable contributions to their science, and more especially by his essay, entitled ‘Fur Darwin,’ writes from Desterro, in South Brazil, to Mr. Darwin, on the subject of his paper on the movements and habits of climbing plants. Mr. Darwin, in that paper, says that he has seen no tendrils formed by the modification of branches, and even seems to entertain some doubt whether such tendrils exist. Herr Miller gives an account of various plants which are known to him exhibiting this structural phenomenon, and traces the following stages in the development of branch-climbers :—1. Plants supporting themselves only by their branches stretched out at right angles, for example, Chiococea. 2. Plants clasping a support with their branches unmodified, Securidaca (Hippocratia). 3. Plants climbing with the tendril-lke ends of their branches. According to Endlicher, this is the case with Helinus (vamulorum apicis cirrhosis scandens”). 4. Plants with highly modified tendrils, which may, however, be transformed again into branches, for example, Hecastaphyllum, a Papillionaceous plant. 5. Plants with tendrils used exclusively for climbing, Strychnos, Caulotretus. The letter contains many other interesting observations, which may be read in full in the Linnean Society’s ‘Journal’ of November 29th. With respect to the thickness of the support which can be ascended by spirally twining plants, Herr Miller states that he has A ~— Chromeles of Sczence. | Jan., lately seen a trunk about five feet in circumference, which was thus ascended by a plant apparently belonging to the Menisper- macez. Newfoundland Heather.—Dr. Berthold Seeman has figured this form of Caluna in a late number of the ‘Journal of Botany, and proposes to give it a distinct specific name. When planted by the side of the common Scotch heather, it was observed that whereas the native plant stood the weather easily, this was browned and withered up by the cold. A full-blossomed variety of the heather is cultivated in German gardens, which is also observed to haye this peculiarity of habit, and may perhaps be similar in other respects to the Newfoundland form. Dr. Seeman states that it is difficult to seize on any constant character of differentiation between the Trans- atlantic and Scotch forms, excepting this one of habit; at the same time he considers that they ought to be distinct species. Pollen Grains as characteristic of Species—Mr. Gulliver, F.R.S., communicates to the same contemporary his notes on the pollen grains of certain allied plants, which he finds differ most markedly in size and roughness. The pollen grains of Ranunculus acris are rough and very much larger than those of allied species, while Lotus corniculatus. and Lotus major, which are sometimes declared to be identical species, present a most striking difference .as regards size in their pollen-grains, those of L. major being invariably smaller than those of L. corniculatus. The late numbers of the Journal also contain a paper by Mr. Carruthers ‘On the Structure and Affinities of Lepidodendron and Calamites,” and many of the botanical papers which were read before the British Association at Nottingham. The Cedars of Lebanon.—Dr. Hooker makes the following interesting communication to a recent number of the ‘Gardeners’ Chronicle’ :—“The Rey. M. Tristram, F.L.S., informs me of a - most interesting discovery lately made in the Lebanon, vz. of several extensive groves of cedar-trees, by Mr. Jessup, an American missionary, a friend of his own, to whom he pointed out the pro- bable localities in the interior. Of these there are five, three of ereat extent east of ‘Ain Zabalteh, in the Southern Lebanon. This grove lately contained 10,000 trees, and had been purchased by a barbarous Sheikh, from the more barbarous (?) Turkish govern- ment, for the purpose of trying to extract pitch from the wood. The experiment of course failed, and the Sheikh was ruined, but several thousand trees were destroyed in the attempt. One of the trees measured fifteen feet in diameter, and the forest is full of young trees, springing up with great vigour. He also found two small groves on the eastern slope of Lebanon, overlooking the Buka’a, above El Medetk ; and. two other large groves containing 1867. | Botany and Vegetable Physiology. 95 many thousand trees, one above El Barttk and another near Ma/asiv, where the trees are very large and equal to any others: all are being destroyed for firewood. Still another grove has been dis- covered near Dima, in the western slope of Lebanon, near the one discovered by Mr. Tristram himself. This gives ten distinct localities in the Lebanon, to the south of the originally discovered one, and including it. Ehrenberg had already discovered one the north of that locality, and thence northwards the chain is unex- plored by voyager or naturalist.” The Flora of Ireland—Mr. A. G. More and Dr. D. Moore ~ have published their work entitled ‘Contributions to a Cybele Hibernica, which has been for some time expected. The work was one which was much wanted by: Irish botanists, and appears to be ereditably done. A grant from the British Association of 251., which was voted to Dr. E. P. Wright, of Dublin, for the purpose of investigating the flora of the north-west of Ireland, was handed over to the authors of this work, since they had already done much which Dr. Wright was contemplating, and by its assistance they have been enabled to finish their task successfully. | Acquisitions at the British Museum.—The national collection has lately been enriched by the invaluable series of Diatomacess which belonged to the late Dr. Greville, many hundreds of which were described by him for the first time, and figured in the ‘ Micro- scopical Journal’ and other periodicals. They will now be acces- sible to all persons for purposes of comparison and identification, and, together with the collection of the late Professor Smith, also in the British Museum, form probably the largest and best collection of Diatomaceze in the world. The Botanical department has also received an addition in the collection of ferns formed by the late Mr. Smith, which was considered to be, next to that of Sir William Hooker, the finest in existence. : France.—Boussingault’s Researches on the Action of Foliage.— From the earlier part of these highly important investigations, it appears that leaves taken alone (avoiding the complication of roots, &c.) and exposed to the action of sunshine in pure carbonic acid gas, do not decompose this gas at all, or only with extreme slowness. Secondly, that in a mixture with atmospheric air, they decompose carbonic acid rapidly. The oxygen of the atmospheric air, however, appears to play no part. Thirdly, leaves decompose carbonic acid in sunshine as readily when this gas is mixed with nitrogen or with hydrogen. Finally, Boussingault determined that rarefaction of the carbonic acid by diminished pressure had the same effect as diluting it, and considered the case analogous to the oxidation of phosphorus by rarefied or dilute oxygen. In a continuation of his investigations, published in the ‘Comptes Rendus,’ Sept. 25, the 96 _» Chronicles of Science. [Jan., author shows that carbonic oxide is not decomposable by foliage, and considers this as confirming his view, that leaves simultaneously decompose carbonic acid and water CO, + H,O = CO,H,, O,, O, bemg liberated, CO,H, expresses the relation under which carbon is united with the elements of water in cellulose, starch, sugar, &c., 7.e. in the important principles elaborated by the leaves, the composition of which is represented by carbon and water. In the third part of his investigations the author shows that detached leaves, kept in shade for many days, with the cut end of the petiole in water to prevent desiccation, preserve the power of decomposing: carbonic acid whenever brought into sunshine. It is necessary that they be kept in oxygen, for in darkness oxygen is slowly transformed by the leaf into carbonic acid, through an operation answering to respiration in the animal. A healthy leaf, however, decomposes in sunshine far more carbonic acid than it forms in darkness. In eighteen experiments with. oleander leaves, exposed to the sun from 8 a.m. to 5 P.m., in an atmosphere rich in carbonic acid, a square metre of foliage decomposed, on the average, over a litre of carbonic acid per hour, while in darkness only sisths of a litre of carbonic acid were produced per hour. In the complete absence of oxygen, leaves, as animals, die from the impossibility of respiration. Boussingault and his assistant, Lewy, were the first to analyse the air contained in a well-manured soil, which they found to be rich in carbonic acid. He has since examined the air contained in a branch of oleander in full vegetation, and found it to contain nitrogen, 88°01 per cent.; oxygen, 6°64 per cent. ; carbonic acid, 5°35 per cent.; being about the same composition as the air of a well-manured soil. He now promises to demonstrate the direct formation of saccharine matter in leaves by the action of sunlight. These researches, obviously, have a most important bearing upon the distinctive functions of plants and animals, since it appears that oxygen is equally necessary to both. > 5. CHEMISTRY. (Including the Proceedings of the Chemical Society.) Bryonp the announcement of the discovery of a new metal by MM. Meinecke and Rossler,* there is no great novelty to record in our present Chronicle. These gentlemen mention that in the course of a mineral analysis they have found a metal, allied to those of the alkaline series, which gives a sharp dark-blue line in the spectroscope in a different position to that given by Indium. They promise a further account of the metal in a short time. * « Zeitschrift fiir Chemie,’ H. xix., p. 605. 1867. | Chemistry. 97 With regard to Indium, Winckler * has published a process for its easy extraction from Blende. He treats the roasted blende with hydrochloric acid, then by an excess of zinc precipitates the indium together with copper, lead, cadmium, &e., and afterwards separates these metals by means of sulphuretted hydrogen and carbonate of baryta. a connection with zine we may mention the publication by B. Renault + of some notes on the phosphoretted compounds of this metal. He finds that zinc and phosphorus unite in many and variable proportions, and he describes no fewer than six phosphides, only one of which calls for notice. This is the compound Zn, P, which will keep without alteration even in the air, and serves well for the preparation of spontaneously inflammable phosphoretted hydrogen. The author prepares this compound by mixing one equivalent of phosphate of magnesia, with two of artificial sulphide of zine, and seven of carbon. The mixture is heated in an earthen crucible, and the phosphide of zinc sublimes. Hydrochloric acid added to fragments of the phosphide, causes the evolution of gas which inflames at 30°, but with the powder, the spontaneously inflammable gas is obtained. 3 Mr. Carey Lea has suggested an extremely delicate test for the detection of iodine. To a solution, for example, suspected to contain iodide of potassium, the author adds, Ist, a drop or two of solution of starch, then a drop of a dilute solution of bichromate of potash, just sufficient to give a pale yellow colour to the liquid, and lastly, a few drops of dilute hydrochloric acid. The effect varies of course with the amount of iodine present, but with a solution of iodide of potassium, containing only tos,co0th, an abundant blue precipitate is obtained, which, however, becomes tawny as the dilution increases. In the case of great dilution, approaching to a half-milhonth, merely a tawny shade is given to the solution. The same indefatigable experimenter has carried still further his researches on the chemistry of the photographic picture. Contrary to the assertion'of Vogel, he shows that light has an action,on perfectly neutral iodide of silver, since he has produced an image on silvered glass, merely treated with solution of iodme. The physical part of the paper we may leave unnoticed here, and merely give the author’s opinion that on an ordinary negative there are really four super- imposed pictures: Ist, that produced by the physical action of light on iodide of silver; 2nd, another by the reduction of iodide to subiodide of silver, if the exposure has been sufficiently long; 3rd, one produced by light in connection with the organic matter of the film ; and 4th, the reduction of bromide and chloride if present. With regard to the 3rd, it should be mentioned that the author * «Journ. f. prakt. Chemie.’ xciv., p. 414. + ‘ Annales de Chimie et de-Pharm.,’ Ovt., 1866. VOL. IV. H 98 Chronicles of Science. [Jan., has exposed an ordinary bromo-iodized plate, and then thrown it into a dilute solution of pernitrate of mercury, by which the iodide and bromide of silver are dissolved, and the film left clear as glass. Nevertheless, after the plate had been well washed, the image appeared when the developer was applied. Two correspondents of the ‘Chemical News, Mr. Spiller and Mr. Clarke, have recently called attention to the hability of the composition for making red fire to spontaneous ignition. ‘The fact was well known with regard to red fire, but Mr. Clarke informs us that the composition for ‘purple fire made with black oxide of copper, as it usually is, is almost certain to take fire of itself sooner or later; and he adds, that carbonate of copper should always be used in preference to the oxide. On the border-land, between mineral and purely organic chemistry, we may ee the formation by R. Maly of an ether of tungstic acid by treating oxychloride of tungsten with strong alcohol. Tungstic ether forms a hard, brittle, glassy mass, insoluble in water, alcohol, and ether. When heated on platinum foil it burns with a smoky flame, and in the end yellow tungstic acid is left as the residue. We have several times mentioned M. Berthelot’s researches on the hydrocarbons, which have already thrown so much light on the constitution of these bodies, and which the author continues to pursue with unwearied industry. One of his latest published results is the synthesis of benzol. Our readers will remember that M. Berthelot has effected the direct synthesis of acetylene C, H, by the union of carbon and hydrogen. He has now passed the acetylene so produced through a red-hot tube, by which he obtained a yellowish liquid, more than one half of which was benzol, the remainder being polymers, styrol, fluorescent carbides of hydrogen and retene, &e. The author therefore regards benzol as tri- acetylene :— Crs 1; a = 3 C, He a The reader who wishes to peruse this : important paper at length will find it in the places indicated below.* In another paper M. Berthelot describes the results of the set of heat on benzol and analogous hydrocarbons. Benzol when passed through a red-hot tube is decomposed with condensation into several hydrocarbons, the principal being phenyl C., H,,. Chrysen C.; Hy. is another product, and there is a residue of other solid hydrocarbons. A mixture of benzol and ethylene passed through a red-hot tube yielded styrol C,; H, and naphthalin C., H, as the principal products. Styrol heated to redness breaks up into benzol and acetylene, and reciprocally a mixture of benzol and acetylene * «Comptes Rendus,’ xiii. p.472. ‘Chemical News,’ No. 365, p. 254. 1867. | Chemistry. ~ 99 when heated forms styrol. These and other interesting results will be found fully described in the ‘Comptes Rendus’ for November 5th and 12th, 1866. ~The occurrence of homologous compounds among the products of destructive distillation, has received another illustration at the hands of Dr. Anderson,* who has found propionic and butyric acids in the crude product of the distillation of wood. Mr. Skey, a chemist at the Antipodes, sends wordy that a sub- stance resembling artificial tannin is produced by the action of nitric acid on bituminous coal or lignite. The substance is soluble in water, has a bitter taste, and is precipitated from its solution by gelatin and albumen. Dr. R. Wagner has recently published{t what would appear to be a very satisfactory process for the determination of gallo-tannic acid. It depends upon the insolubility of tannate of cinchonine. The author prepares a slightly acid solution of sulphate of cin- chonine, 4°523 grammes in a litre. 1 cubic centimeter of this solution answers to 0°01 gramme of tannic acid. As indicator the solution is coloured with acetate of rosaniline. Rosaniline being also precipitated by gallo-tannic acid, a red colour is left, when the reaction hasended. In applying the test the author boils 10 grammes of the substance in pure water, dilutes to 500 c.cs. filters, and then takes 50 c.cs. to precipitate with the cinchonine solution. The precipitate collects together, and it is easily seen when all the tannic acid is thrown down. The calculations, and a number of determinations made by the process, will be seen in the paper quoted from, in which it is also mentioned that the precipi- tates may be put aside and the cinchonine recovered for subse- quent use. Frohde has lately shown§ that molybdic acid gives a sensitive and characteristic reaction with morphia. He dissolves molybdic acid in strong sulphuric acid, and a drop of this solution shows, with the smallest amount of morphia, or its salts, a beautiful violet coloration, which soon passes to blue, afterwards turns dirty-green, and, lastly, leaves a nearly colourless spot. A solution of molybdate of soda in sulphuric answers well for the test, which is said to be more sensitive than nitric acid. Chloroform is subject to spontaneous alteration, which results in the disengagement of phosgene gas. Although the nose will generally serve to discover the presence of this gas, a delicate test is useful, and Stadeler pomts out that bilirubin, the red colouring- matter of bile, answers the purpose. When this body is brought in * «Chemical News,’ No. 365, p. 257. + ‘Chemical News, No. 361, p. 206. + ‘Zeitschrift f, Analyt. Chem.,’ 5, 1. § ‘Archiv. der Pharm.’ Bd. 186, p. 54. 100 Chronicles of Scrence. [Jan., contact with the altered chloroform, it turns orange-red, and soon Teen. : Dragendorff gives* an easy process for obtaining bilirubin su. ciently pure. He simply extracts inspissated bile with sulphide of carbon, filters, evaporates, and then repeatedly extracts the residue with alcohol and ether. After this a red powder remains, which is sufficiently pure bilirubin. To prepare a small quantity quickly, fresh bile may be taken and diluted with water, and acidu- iated with a few drops of hydrochloric acid. After this it is shaken with a little bisulphide of carbon. The layer of bisulphide is then separated, evaporated, and the residue washed with alcohol and ether. The undissolved red powder can be used directly for the test. Zalesky has isolated the poison of the Salamander. It is a creamy liquid, strongly alkaline, and having a bitter taste. It contains an active principle, precipitated by phospho-molybdie acid, and to which the author has given the name Salamandrine. Its composition 18 Ga, Hs Ne Os. In conclusion, we may mention two papers of considerable practical interest. The first is the description of a process devised. by Mr. Sutherland for the estimation of resin in soaps.| The author first decomposes the soap by boiling with strong hydrochloric acid ; he then treats the cake of mixed fatty and resinous acids with strong nitric acid, by which the resinous matter is converted imto soluble terebic acid, while the fatty acid is left comparatively unacted on. ‘This process, though not rigidly exact, may afford reasonably approximate results. The last paper is on the igniting point of Petroleum by Dr | Attfield { The igniting point of petroleum is a matter of dispute, partly mm consequence of the different methods which chemists adopt in determining it, and, partly, because all are not agreed as to the exact meanmeg of the Petroleum Act. Dr. Attfield has devised a simple set of apparatus to ensure uniformity in the mode of ope- _ rating, and thus removes one source of disagreement, if the appa- ratus be adopted. He uses simply a wide-test tube, in which the specific gravity may first be taken by -means of a hydrometer. The tube is marked, so that in determining the igniting point, equal volumes of petroleum may always be taken—a poimt of considerable importance. A narrow thermometer answers for a stirring rod, while it indicates the temperature. Dr. Attfield recommends the use of a small gas-jet as a test flame, which he arranges so that it can be easily brought within the tube, and to within half-an-inch of the surface of the liquid. The petroleum * «Pharm. Zeitsch. f. Russland,’ 3, 49. + ‘ Chemical News,’ No. 359, p. 185. { ‘ Piuarmaccutical Journal,’ December, 1866, oe 1867. | Chemastry. 101 is heated by passing the tube gently through the flame of a spirit lamp, or, better still, by placing it in hot water. Whena thin blue flame is seen to run between the test-flame and the surface of the oil, the igniting point is arrived at. PROCEEDINGS OF THE CHEMICAL SOCIETY. At the first meeting of this season, held on the Ist of November, 1866, Dr. Hermann Sprengel exhibited and described an instrument for obtaining a vertical section of a heterogeneous mass of liquid preliminary to the determination of the average specific gravity. This instrument—which is specially applicable for taking samples of acid from sulphuric acid chambers, in which the heaviest acid is — necessarily at the bottom of the chamber—is fully described, and its use explained in the ‘ Journal of the Chemical Society’ for No- vember, 1866. At the same meeting, Mr. E. T. Chapman read a paper entitled “The Relation between the Products of Gradual Oxidation and the Molecular Constitution of the Bodies Oxidized.” ‘The paper gave an account of the results of an action of chromic acid on several organic compounds. Vinicalcohol submitted to the action of a mix- ture of bichromate of potash and sulphuric acid in sealed tubes yielded acetic acid without the production of any gaseous carbon compound. At one stage of the process, however, acetic ether was the only product. Amylic alcohol furnished valerianic acid. In the case of compound ethers, acetate of ethyl was converted entirely into acetic acid; acetate of amyl ito acetic and valerianic acids. At high temperatures it was found that carbonic acid in variable quantity was produced. One noteworthy result of the experiments was the observation that natural valerianic acid obtained from valerian root, behaves under the chromic acid treatment differently from the acid obtained by the oxidation of amylic alcohol. The real origin of the supposed natural oil is, however, doubtful. The author also obtained results which seem to show that fusel oil contains two isomeric alcohols, one of which is more easily oxidized than the other. Tlie fusel oil which yielded these results is supposed to have been obtained by the distillation of a mixture of grain and rice. At the meeting on November 15th, Dr. Daubeny read a paper “On Ozone.” The author has made experiments at Torquay in the winter months, and Oxford in the summer months. In the former place the south-west and westerly winds were most strongly charged with ozone; and in the latter city, the easterly winds brought most. The results at Torquay Dr. Daubeny considers to prove the influ- ence of the sea in increasing the amount of ozone. The principal natural source of ozone the author finds to be the air.exhaled from 102 Chronicles of Science. [ Jan., growing plants, and he considers the generation of ozone in the process of vegetation to be one of the appointed means of nature for purifying the atmosphere from pernicious organic compounds. Dr. Daubeny, in his observations, used both Schonbein’s paper, and the sulphate of manganese paper, but considers the first, if pro- tected from light, to give the most reliable indications. It was admitted, however, by Dr. Daubeny himself, and most of the speakers who joined in the discussion, that more accurate tests for ozone are wanted. In reply to a question put by Dr. Frankland, the author remarked that the outbreak of epidemics was often ascribed to a deficiency of atmospheric ozone, but he had no evidence on the point. In the course of the discussion which followed the reading of Dr. Daubeny’s paper, Dr. Gilbert expressed some doubts of the identity of the ozone-like emanations from growing plants, and the odorous substance produced by the slow combustion of phosphorus in moist air. Dr. Oding mentioned also that he had found some of the properties of ozone wanting in the odour evolved on mixing permanganate of potash with an acid. In closing the discussion, the President (Dr. W. A. Miller) observed that no one doubted the existence of ozone in the atmo- sphere; but it must be admitted that, as yet, the proof was very imperfect. On the same evening, Mr. W. N. Hartley gave an account of a new body called “ chlor-sulphoform,” C, Cl, §,. The next communication was by Messrs. Chapman and Thorpe, who gave a continuation of the paper mentioned above. It detailed experiments on the oxidation of mannite and glycerine by chromic acid, by which it seems only formic acid is produced. Mr. Chapman afterwards read a short paper “ On the Synthesis of Butyiene,” which he has obtained by the action of zine ethyl on mono-brom-ethylene. Dr. FRANKLAND’S LecTurRE Nores ror CHEMICAL STUDENTS.* ‘Lecture Notes for Chemical Students, by a Professor who stands in the position of the first teacher of the Science in England, must necessarily command a large share of attention; and these notes will receive it no less on account of the position of the author than the essentially novel character of the book. We may, at the outset, express our regret that Dr. Frankland has not published a full educational treatise on the Science. This book he correctly describes as a skeleton, which the student is himself to clothe with already known facts. For these he is * «Lecture Notes for Chemical Students, Embracing Mineral and Organic Chemistry.” London: Van Voorst. 1866, 1867.] Chemistry. 103° referred to various works, in no one of which will he find the same system of nomenclature and notation, and no two of which we believe, he will find completely agreeing one with the other. To the “Student” this can be no other than a source of embar- rassment, and will, we fear, tend to limit the use of these “notes” to the students attending the author’s own classes. More advanced chemists, however, will go through the book with great interest. They will find a very successful attempt at a complete and consistent system of nomenclature and notation ; and for that reason alone every chemist will wish for the book a wide circulation. With regard to nomenclature, the author makes the following remark, with which all chemists will agree: —‘“ The chemical name of a substance should not only identify and indi- vidualize that substance, but it should also express the composition and constitution of the body, if a compound, to which it is applied. The first of these is readily attained, but the second is much more dificult to secure, Inasmuch as our ideas of the constitution of chemical compounds—the mode in which they are built up as it were —require frequent modification.” On this account the author adds, ‘‘all attempts to frame a perfectly consistent system of chemical nomenclature have hitherto been only partially successful.” It would be superfluous to allude here more particularly to the system Dr. Frankland has adopted; but it is only fair to remark that Professor Williamson had already led the way to it. The system of notation made use of is, to a great extent, original, and not a little interest is given to the book by the introduction of “oraphic formule” in illustration of the atomic constitution of bodies. Some of these formule, particularly those of minerals, for which the author owns himself indebted to Mr. McCleod, display remarkable ingenuity in their construction. it is beyond our purpose here to attempt anything like a review of the work. ‘The very first sentence, the definition of Chemistry, challenges some discussion; but -we pass by it to notice one most valuable feature of the book for students. A “large amount of space is devoted to equations expressing the reactions occurring in the formation and decomposition of the substances treated of.” Anyone who has been, or is, a student of Chemistry, will recognize the value of this part of the work, which we may recommend to both students and teachers,in the hope—vain though it may be—that it may bring us one step nearer the adoption of one uniform system in teaching what we may be excused for considering the most important of all sciences. CASO Es) . [Jan., 6. ENGINEERING—CIVIL AND MECHANICAL. THE subject which has generally attracted the most interest during the past quarter has been the trial of H.M.S. ‘ Waterwitch,’ which has been fitted with a Ruthven’s hydraulic propeller. The results as to speed proved, however, anything but satisfactory. With an indicated engine power of 750 horses, scarcely more than one-third of that power was ascertained to have acted effectively in propelling the vessel, and the speed attained was but nine knots an hour. The mode of propulsion is by the ejection of jets from the sides of the vessel, a short distance above water line, the reaction of which upon the water causes the ship to be propelled forward in a direc- tion opposite to that m which the jets act. The great question of guns versus armour-plates, is still unde- cided ; for whilst, on the one hand, guns can now be made that will pierce any thickness of metal hitherto employed as armour for ships, it is still possible to mcerease that thickness to 15 or even 20 inches, if necessary, which would defy the largest guns yet manu- factured. ‘Two iron-clads are at present under construction for the British Navy, namely, the ‘Hercules’ and the ‘ Monarch,’ and their armour-plateg will vary from four to nine inches in thickness. Recent experiments at Shoeburyness have sealed the fate of steel shot and shells, and resulted in the final approval of Major Palliser’s projectiles for battering purposes; and chilled-iron pro- jectiles will henceforth be exclusively employed by sea and land for penetrating iron-plated defences. The Armstrong Gun would appear to have had its day, for land purposes at least, and the Royal Gun Factories at Woolwich are now principally employed in the manufacture of large numbers of the Fraser guns. The Ordnance Select Committee has recently recommended that we should revert to muzzle-loading guns for field use, and that the existing store of breech-loading Armstrongs should be converted, if possible, into muzzle-loaders on the Wool- wich principle. With regard to small arms, the Sneider principle of converting our Enfields into breech-loaders, does not, appa- rently, quite satisfy our military authorities. The Secretary of State for War has mvited proposals for breech-loaders to replace the present service rifles, offermg four prizes for the best guns and cartridges,and asum of 3002. is to be allowed to each accepted competitor for expenses. Constant improvements are now taking place in the construction of locomotives. Attempts are being made to roll locomotive boilers in one single tube, which would have neither seam nor joint, and several patents have recently been taken out with that object. Should the attempt prove successful, we may count upon a consider- 1867.| ~ Engineering —Civil and Mechanical. 105, able direct gain in the strength of boilers, and, probably, upon the disappearance of “ furrowing,” which generally appears to be localized in the near neighbourhood of a seam of rivets. A few years ago the safe limit of steam pressure in a locomotive boiler was considered to be but 50 lbs.,and now many engines on the lines about London are worked at 160 lbs. Great advantage would follow the use of a higher pressure, as it would enable the steam to be worked more expansively, and this may probably soon be accomplished, since a small steel boiler has recently been made for Mr. Salt, of Saltaire, which has not one rivet init; all the joints are welded, and it has been proved to 300 lbs., and is intended to work at 250 Ibs. There is a growing tendency greatly to increase the weight of locomotives, as there is a constant demand for engines of greater and greater tractive power, and Mr. Fairlie is building one of 72 tons weight for the Paris Exhibition. By his plan of double bogies of coupled wheels, each driven by a separate pair of cylinders, he not only dis- tributes the weight of the engine upon eight or twelve points, as required, but he obtains great ease of working round very short curves, the governing wheel base being that only of each bogie. On fhe Northern Railway of France four-cylinder engines have been in use since 1863, and it has been proved, by experience, that the cost of maintenance of a four-cylinder locomotive is less than that of ordinary engines in proportion to the power developed. Two very useful little machines have lately been, designed by Mr. R. Angus, Locomotive Superintendent, North Staffordshire Railway, the one being for the purpose of planing the valve-faces, and the other for boring the cylinders, of locomotives whilst they remain fixed on the engine, thus saving a large amount of manual labour and time. Delegates have, during the past quarter, arrived in London from Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Canada, for the purpose of arranging for the commencement of the Intercolonial Railway to complete the line of communication between Halifax and Quebec. By the shortest of the three routes that have been surveyed, the distance is 588 miles, of which 192 miles are already occupied by railways, leaving 396 miles to be constructed to complete the communication. The estimated cost of construction is 8,300/. per mile, or 3,286,800/. for the whole length, and it is understood that an Imperial guarantee of the interest upon 3,000,0002. has been conceded for the line. A short line of railway has recently been opened in one of the most hilly outskirts of Paris, namely from Enghien to Montmo- rency. he length of this new line is less than two miles, and its peculiarity is that it consists almost entirely of curves of 300 metres radius, and inclines of 0°045, with the exception of a level bit of 150 metres at either end. The completion of the Chemin de Fer 106 Chronicles of Science. [ Jan., de Ceinture, the circular line to connect all the Paris termini, and its continuation to the Champ de Mars, for the purposes of the Exhibition next year, is now in hand, and presents many features of interest. A curious and ingenious method of enlarging the post- office carriages has been adopted by the Lyons Railway Company. Two vans are connected together by a strong junction of leather, arranged bellows-fashion, so that it expands and contracts with the movements of the buffers, and forms a safe means of communication between the two carriages. A remarkable work is now in progress at the Place de Europe, in Paris. From that point, which is some 170 feet square, six roads, each 50 feet wide, diverge symmetrically, under which com- plication of thoroughfares the Chemin de Fer de Ouest passes through three openings, two of which are square, with spans of 98 feet 6 inches, and 82 feet respectively, and the remaining one skew, with a clear opening of 98 feet 6 inches, and a span of 102 feet, In September last the opening took place of the section of the Madrid, Saragossa, and Alicante Railway, between Venta di Car- denas and Andujar, across the Sierra Morena, which was the only piece of line unfinished on the great route from Irun to Cadiz. The Railways in Algeria conceded to the Lyons and the Mediterranean Railway Company are now actively in progress. The principal works bemg constructed at the present time are the prolongation of the Algiers and Blidah Railway to the valley of the Chetif, the Oran and Relizane Railway by Saint Denis-du-Sig, and the line from Phillippeville to Constantine. From the last annual report on the Mont Cenis Tunnel, it appears that up to the end of last June the progress made at the Modane, or French side, amounted to 2,321 metres, of which 2,031 metres were completely finished. At Bardoneche, on the Italian side, the tunnelling was found to extend to 3,470 metres, of which 2,533 were finished. On the French side, the quartz rock had © been met with at the exact spot anticipated by the geologists and engineers, and was not expected to extend beyond the 400 metres originally suggested. On the other hand, the work at the Italian end is reported to have made more rapid progress, in consequence of the softer character of the material to be passed through. ‘The total length to be excavated is 12,220 metres, or about 74 miles. In London, the works of the Metropolitan District Railway continue to make satisfactory progress, although they have been greatly impeded, owing to the numerous difficulties which beset the construction of an underground line through the metropolis. In laying out such a line, not only have the levels of various streets passed under to be considered, but also those of the sewers, these latter often giving considerable trouble. At all points numbers of gas and water mains had to be dealt with, whilst at numerous 1867. | Engineering—Civil and Mechanical. 107 parts of the works special modes of construction must be adopted. The Metropolitan Extension Railway to Brompton and Notting Hill, passes in its course immediately beneath several fine and lofty houses at Pembridge Square. In order to avoid pulling these houses down, they have in the first place been underpinned ; trenches were then dug, in which the side walls of the railway tunnel have been built, and wrought-iron girders are now being placed from wall to wall; the spaces between each girder will be arched over with brick in cement, and upon these the foundations of the houses will ultimately rest. The other principal works in progress in London are the Holborn Valley Improvement, the Thames Embankment, and the Metropolitan Main Drainage. With reference to the latter work, the quantity of sewage to be disposed of on the north and south sides of the Thames amounts to 10,000,000 and 4,000,000 cubic feet respectively, and the sewers have been proportioned for an increase up to 11,500,000 c.f, in addition to a rainfall of 28,500,000 c.f. per day on the north side, and up to 5,720,000 ¢.f, and a rainfall of 17,250,000 c.f. per _ day on the south side. Altogether there are now in London about 1,300 miles of sewers, and 82 miles of main intercepting sewers, and the pumping power amounts to 2,380-horse power nominal, whilst the execution of the main drainage works has involved the excavation of 3,500,000 cubic yards of earth, and the consumption of 880,000 cubic yards of concrete, and 318,000,000 of bricks. An improved machine for tunnelling through soft ground has been invented by Mr. R. Morton, of London. It consists of a tube the size of the tunnel, formed of rings of cast iron, in front of which a large wrought-iron wedge-shaped shield is pushed by hydraulic pressure. ‘This shield is made at the back of a similar section to the tube, over which it makes a movable but watertight jomt; the pointed shield having been thrust forward a few feet, another ring of segments is added to the tube inside the shield, and the work goes on as before. On the 11th October the inauguration of a graving dock at Suez took place. ‘The dimensions of the dock are sufficient for it to contain ships of the largest tonnage, its length being 492 feet, its breadth 95 feet, and depth, 832°8 feet. The total cost of the work amounted to 360,00042. Mr. Richardson’s experiments in Woolwich Dockyard on the use of petroleum as fuel are likely to lead to very important results. Already we hear that one of the locomotives on the Scinde Railway is about to be fitted with apparatus on this gentleman’s plan, and in the event of the experiment proving successful, it is intended to take advantage of the large quantities of petroleum which are pro- curable from Assam. One of the four great tubes of the Waterloo and Whitehall 108 Chronicles of Science. [ Jan., Railway is now completed at Messrs. Samuda’s yard, Poplar. It is 230 feet long, 12 feet 9 inches internal diameter, and is formed of 3-inch boiler plate, surrounded by four rings of brickwork; its weight as it lies is nearly 1,000 tons, Bulkheads are to be fitted at each end, when it will be floated to its destination above Hunger- ford Bridge. Here an inner ring of brickwork will be built inside it, and it will then be sunk upon its piers, and its ends secured ina junction chamber. A pneumatic despatch tube is now being laid down in Paris, from the telegraph office near the Grand Hotel, to that in the Place de la Bourse, and others will shortly connect those with the central telegraphic office on the other side of the river, the head-quarters of the post-office, and other stations. ‘The system adopted in Paris is the reverse of ours. While we exhaust the air in advance, our neighbours’ system is to compress it behind the despatch truck, at a pressure of one atmosphere and a half. The surveys for the Russo-American telegraph have been com- pleted from Anadyrsk to the Amoor, a distance of 6,000 versts, and the direction of the line has been determined. As soon as the sea of Ohkhotsk shall be free, vessels belonging to the Telegraph Com- pany are expected to arrive at Guigiga from America with the necessary materials for commencing the works immediately. Already between Anadyrsk and Ohkhotsk the works have been commenced with the assistance of the inhabitants of the country, who are engaged in constructing houses and trimming — to serve as telegraph posts. An iron floating dock for Bermuda is now being constenaiee by Messrs. Campbell, Johnstone, & Co., of North Woolwich. It is to be capable of docking ships of the Bellerophon class when water- logged; it 1s fitted with a caisson at each end, and has a double bottom and sides 20 feet apart. Its internal dimensions are— length, 330 feet; breadth, 84 feet; and depth, 52 feet. The Norfoik Estuary Company have recently completed another embankment of a mile and a half in length, at Walferty, reclaiming another 300 acres of land in the “ Wash.” This now makes a total of about 500 out of the 32,000 acres to be recovered from the sea. The new Ladoga Canal has recently been opened for traffic. The first canal was commenced by Peter the Great, in order to develop the commerce of St Petersburg; it, however, proved inadequate to its purpose, owing to the defective system of locks. The new canal has no locks, and thus the project of Peter the Great, who intended that the first canal should be constructed without locks, is now realized. The new screw pile pier at Brighton was opened on the 6th October last. ‘The entire length of the structure is 1,115 feet; it is approached from the shore by an abutment 290 feet long ‘and 1367. | Entomology. 109 140 feet wide; a fine promenade, 560 feet long by 50 feet wide, leads to the pier head., which is 310 feet long by 140 feet wide. The pier head has an area of 39,000 feet, and at each end of its four corners is an ornamental tower, two similar edifices adorning the abutments also. The Cincinnati Suspension Bridge is rapidly approaching com- pletion. Its total length, including the approaches, will be 2,252 feet ; leneth of main span from centre to centre of the towers, 1,057 feet ; length of end spans, 281 feet; width of bridge in the clear, 36 feet; and height above low water, 100 feet. It is sup- ported by two cables of 124 inches diameter, made up of 7 strands, each of which contains 740 wires. ‘The floor beams are of wrought iron ; two iron trusses, 10 feet high, will separate the footways from the carriageways, and an ornamental iron railing will protect the foot passengers on either side. Wrought-iron girders, 30 feet long and 12 inches wide, will run the entire length under the middle of the bridge. 7. ENTOMOLOGY. (Including the Proceedings of the Entomological Society.) In 1863 the Linnean Society published the first part of a memoir by Sir John Lubbock, “On the Development of Chloéon dimidi- atum.” The second and concluding part of that memoir has just appeared in the twenty-fifth volume of the Society’s ‘ Trans- actions, p.477. It is generally believed that all insects, with few exceptions, pass through three definite stages of existence after leaving the egg; but in the case of Chloéon there are no such stages; instead we have a series of gradations. It is true that the Hphemeride, the family to which Chlogon belongs, have been long known to have their metamorphoses incomplete, but we are indebted to Sir J. Lubbock for a definite account of their various changes. The condition m which the young Chloéon leaves the egg is un- certain, but the smallest specimens being only 18-800ths of an inch in length, and quite colourless and transparent, it is assumed that these are in their “ first state.” From this pot there are not less than twenty states (or moultings), through which the insect pro- gresses before it leaves the water, in which it has hitherto passed its life, to assume the “ proimago” form, and this differs apparently from the perfect insect chiefly in certain peculiarities of the wings and legs. It is quite impossible here to follow the various changes which are minutely detailed in the two memoirs ; we can only observe that it is not until the eighteenth stage that the external sexual characters of the males begin to show themselves, and that in some of the stages a sort of retrograde movement takes place. 110 Chronicles of Science. [Jan., It is one of the conclusions of the author that “external forces” acting on the larva produce those changes in the organization which have reference to its immediate wants rather than to its final form, and this, he thinks, accounts for “those cases in which animals, very similar in their mature condition, are very unlike in their earlier stages.” In reference to “dimorphism” or “ polymor- phism,” Sir J. Lubbock would confine the term to the cases of those animals or plants which “preserve themselves at maturity under two different forms,’ as in Ants and Bees: the “ differentiating action of external circumstances, not on the mature but on the young individual,” resulting in another series of phenomena, many of which have been described under the name of alternation of generations, he would distinguish by the term “dieidism” or “ polyeidism.” A discussion on the nature of Pebrine (the silk-worm disease) has been recently carried on in the‘ Comptes Rendus’ between MM. Becamp, Joly, and Pasteur. The last-named author believes the “vibratory corpuscules” (one of the peculiarities of the disease) to be pathological productions analogous to the globules of pus, or of the blood. M. Becamp, on the contrary, considered them to be of a vegetable nature. M. Joly had also observed in 1862 innu- merable quantities of infusoria, which he described under the name of Vibrio aglatz mixed with the vibratory corpuscules; these cor- puscules have since been stated to owe their origin to the Vzbrio, but M. Joly denies this and asserts the Vzb720 to be the effect and not the cause of the corpuscules. Of the origin of the disease nothing seems to be known, but, as a remedy, M. Becamp suggests the vapour of creosote, which, although it would not directly destroy the disease, would prevent the formation of spores by which the disease is propagated. The Zoological Society has recently published a paper by Mr. Pascoe, on the “Coleoptera of Penang ;” the writer attempts to show that “the area into which the earth’s surface may be divided in relation to its organic productions, will not hold good for all classes, or even in some cases for all orders ;’ ’and that “so far as the Coleoptera are concerned, the Malayan region, with its centre in Borneo, finds its South-eastern limit in New Guinea, Australia constitutig a very distinct and remarkable region of its own.” Messrs. Lovell Reeve and Co. have issued another of their cheap works on Natural History ; it is entitled, ‘ British Bees: an Introduction, &., by W. E. Shuckard. It is remarkable for its “spirit of captiousness,” and might have been written twenty years ago so far as most of its statements are concerned; indeed the author tells us that “from the length of time that has intervened,” the “facts recorded have become so blended in his mind,” that whether they are the result of his own observations, or of “ diligent 1867. | Entomology. 1 study ” (of the observations of others ?) he “can no longer separate their sources.” | Mr. Roland Trimen, of Cape Town, has published the second part of his Rhopalocera Africee australis (South African Butter- flies), including the Satyride, Eurytelide, Lycenide, and Hes- peridee. PROCEEDINGS OF THE ENTOMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. Sept. 3.—Among the exhibitions was a small collection of Coleoptera from Jamaica made by Mr. Gloyne. In reference to the Ailanthus silk-worm, Prof. Westwood said that he had found wasps very destructive to the young caterpillars. Mr. Trimen communi- cated a paper on the Butterflies of the Mauritius. This portion of the fauna of that island appears to be of decidedly African origin, most of the species being identical with those found in South Africa and Madagascar. There were only twenty-five species. Mr. F. Smith read an account of a collection of Hymenoptera—mostly Bees—sent to him from Catagallo, in Brazil. It contained the female of Trigona, the male only of that genus having been pre- viously known ; in the gravid state their abdomens were enormously distended, and in this respect they bore a remarkable similarity to the same sex of the white Ants (Termes). In consequence of the new arrangement with reference to the Meetings of this Society at Burlington House, no meeting was held in October. Nov. 5.—Mr. Janson exhibited some rare Coleoptera from Tas- mania. Mr. Stainton exhibited a collection of Tineina from Asia Minor and Syria. Some large galls from the elm, supposed to be formed by Aphides, were shown by Mr. F. Smith. A singular case or covering of a species of Coccus, resembling a small limpet-shell (Patella), from Port Lincoln, was sent for exhibition by Mr. Angas. The President (Sir J. Lubbock) brought under the notice of the meeting specimens and drawings of a new Myriapod found in his erounds at High Elms; it was remarkable for its small size, and for having only nine pairs of legs; it was proposed to be called Pauropus. The Key. Douglas Timins communicated a note “On the _ Habits of Argynnis Lathonia, in the north of France.” Mr. M‘Lachlan read a paper ‘‘On new Genera and Species of Psocidez.” Mr. E. Saunders read a paper, entitled “ Descriptions of Six New Species of Buprestide, belongmg to the Chalcophorides of Lacordaire.” Noy. 19.—Mr. Stainton exhibited drawings and specimens of the Stathmopoda G'uerinit, bred from Aphides galls found on the Pistacia terebinthus, and sent by Dr. Staudinger from Celles-les- 112 Chronicles of Science. [Jan., Bains, in the Ardéche. This is one of the very few cases in which a moth is found as an inquiline of a gall; another such case Mr. Stainton stated comes to us from North America. Dr. Sharp exhibited seventy-one species of Coleoptera new to Britain, eleven of these, it was believed, were unknown on the Continent; descrip- tions of the new species were read. Mr. Meek exhibited an undescribed Noctua, taken at Bermondsey, and Dicrorhampha fulvo-dorsalis, taken in North Devon, and new to the British list. Prof. Westwood, in introducing the subject of an extraordinary hermaphrodite butterfly (Pieris Pyrrha), a drawing of which was exhibited, took occasion to make several observations on the Dar- winian hypothesis. Mimetic forms, he considered, could only be looked upon as illustrations of the law of resemblance ; he believed that all species were created with the same characters and attributes that they now possess, and consequently that there was no “ relation- ship ” between species even of the same genus, but that “ similarity alone constituted the bond of union. He was replied to by Messrs. Wallace and Bates, and a discussion ensued in which Dr. Sharp, and Messrs. M‘Lachlan and Pascoe took part. 8. GEOGRAPHY. (Including the Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society.) Tue flow of geographical knowledge is something like that of that ereat river, which has at all times attracted and even is now attracting the principal attention of travellers—it is of an intermittent cha- racter. Occasionally an overwhelming flood pours down upon us, so that we are unable at the time to make full use of its fertilize powers, and we have to wait until the waters have somewhat sub- sided before the seeds of rational theory can be sown upon the new alluvium. The present is rather the time of ebb. But few travellers have of late returned to these shores, and though much solid advance is being made by means of accurate descriptions and statistics, but little startlmg enterprise attracts the attention of those who are dazzled by hair-breadth escapes. In Abyssinia English captives still lmger, though additional tidings and gradual steps towards thew ultimate return are from time to time reported. The Europeans supposed to be held in captivity in Somali land, where they were cast by the shipwreck of the St. Abbs, are now being sought by a native, whose diligence has been stimulated by the promise of 1002. per head for all brought back in safety. _ The report now published, with maps, photographs, &c., of the 1867. | Geography. — 113 Palestine Exploration Fund is of the character which we have described above, a solid increase to our knowledge of an already tolerably well-known country, but it contains no startling adventure to make it attractive to any but the scientific mind. ‘The sites of forty-nine places of importance have been determined with accuracy, amongst these the exact position of the synagogue at Capernaum. The scenes ef many events in the Old and New Testaments have been fixed, the main back-bone of the country been mapped out, besides photographs of natural objects, ruins, inscriptions, &c., prepared. Much light is likely to be thrown upon a subject as yet but little understood, wiz. Semitic Paleography, of which several scholars are springing up. M. Terrell has sent a paper to the French Academy on the composition of the Dead Sea, in which he states that he distinctly saw small fish thriving well near the site of the ancient Sodom. : . The regions of Cambodia and Siam have been visited by Mr. J. Thomson, who has photographed many most interesting ruins of ancient cities and temples. An account of these was read before the British Association, and it is probable that a fuller narrative will appear before long of a very carefully undertaken and successful journey in search of almost unknown records of a for- gotten civilization. In Australia it was reported that the remains of Dr. Leichhardt had been discovered by the exploring party fitted out for that purpose, but the news turns out to be unfounded. On the other hand, it appears that the leader of the expedition, Mr. Duncan Mcintire, had died from fever, but the search was being continued under Mr. Campbell. The continent has again been crossed from Victoria to the Guif of Carpentaria, but the main objects of the expedition are reported to have failed. We are now promised speedier intelligence by a new route to Australia—the natural one, vid Panama. The journey outwards was very successfully per- formed, and New Zealand in particular reaps the benefit of the change; but the homeward mail, though starting a few days before the so-called overland mail, arrived in this country after its rival. A careful study of the ocean currents and the periodical winds may perhaps help to overcome some of the difficulties. One of these currents, the Gulf stream, is said by M. Grad to keep its identity beyond Spitzbergen and Nova Zembla into the Polar Basin, thus affording open sea far to the north of these islands, where an entrance must be sought by future travellers searching for the North Pole—a subject we have discussed in a former number. Slight alterations in the direction of this current, arising from the abrasion of rocks where it first enters the ocean, are from time to time reported, leading, we may suppose, to extensive changes in the effects on this side of the Atlantic. Similar changes ~“¥OL.. IV: I 114 Chronicles of Science. [Jan., are taking place in the Niagara Falls. The Horseshoe Fall has become more triangular, and it is said more beautiful. It has retired considerably on the American side. The American rivers are undergoing a considerable change. It is not to be wondered at that Mr. Marsh, an inhabitant of that continent, should have been struck with the power that man has in altering the appearance of the country, and consequently its atmospheric phenomena. The book* he wrote some time back could receive no more striking illustrations than from his native continent. The clearing the primeval forests, the cultivation of the land, and the diversion of drainage in new directions have led to astonishing results. The mighty Mississippi is developmg sand-banks and shoals, and is running with steadily decreased stream. The rapid rising after rain no longer takes place, and the nein of the river is much altered in character. The first separate map of Candia, a place about which we are all now beginning to inquire, has lately been published by Mr. Wylde. It is extremely clear and distinct, and will be useful for reference, both during the revolution, and also when that revolution has accomplished its object. It is not often that we have to record enti done to scientific men. It is with great pleasure that we chronicle the fact that Mr. Baker has received knighthood at the hands of Her Majesty, and that Captain Speke has been made Commander of the Bath, both to commemorate their researches about the head waters of the Nile. Whilst mentioning the notice taken of the enterprise of these gentlemen, we cannot pass over the intrepidity, the self-denial, and the patient endurance of the wife of the former. It is pleasant to think that whilst she endured privation, assisting and being assisted by her husband, she with him receives a portion of the honour bestowed on him. PROCEEDINGS OF THE Royat GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY. At the commencement of the session of 1866—7 the President, Sir Roderick I. Murchison, gave a slight sketch of recent geo- graphical doings, and mentioned some of the papers that it was expected would be read at the forthcoming meetings. But little that is new or startling had been effected, but work was going steadily onward. Dr. Livingstone is advancing and gaining im- portant knowledge as to the watershed of Africa. A letter, of which an abstract is given below, was read at a subsequent meeting detailing his discoveries. Mr. W. Chandless, the recipient of the Victoria Medal for his exploration of the Purus river, has examined its tributary, the Aquiry, and is expected before the end of the session * «Man and Nature; or, Physical Geography as modified by Human Action.’ By G. P. Marsh. 1867. | Geography. 115 toe read in person a paper on his discoveries. ‘The rivers of Caravaya, in Southern Peru, had been explored for three years by Don Antonio Raimondy, who will furnish another paper on this subject. The expedition to the North Pole had not received much attention from the late government, it was to be hoped that the present would feel more fully the necessity of satisfying the expectations of the scientific men, not only of this country, but of all Europe. With an allusion to the Leichhardt expedition and the monument to Sir John Franklin, erected near the Atheneum Ciub-house, which has since been uncovered, the address concluded, and was followed by a paper on Mr. W. H. Johnson’s recent journey from Leh, in Ladakh, to Khotan in Chinese Tartary. It appears that Mr. Johnson was born and educated in India, and that he was engaged on the Great Trigonometrical Survey ef India. Whilst in this pursuit he was residing in the extreme northern limits of the territories cf the Maharajah of Cashmere, and on this occasion was invited by the Khan of Khotan to visit this territory. The principal novelty that he saw was the city of Ichi or Khokan, which had previously been visited only by Marco Polo, Benedict Grey, and a few Jesuit mission- aries. ‘The whole of this country has, until quite lately, been under the dominion of the Chinese, but since they have been so weakened by internal revolution and war with England, these districts have revoited and asserted their independence. All communication with China being at an end, they are anxious to open a system of commerce with India, but the high tolls levied by the Maharajah of Cashmere have almost entirely prevented this desirable consumma- tion. A more direct route was afterwards taken by Mr. Johnson over passes from 15,000 feet to 18,000 feet above the sea-level, which, it 1s hoped, will be found available for the produce of the country, metals, jade, coal, cereals, cotton, and especially fine wool, of which latter there appears to be enormous quantities, from this the largest pastoral region in the world. This district had in former times been the stronghold of the Buddhist religion in Central Asia, now the inhabitants are essentially Turkish, and speak Turkish exclusively over an enormous district. It is anticipated that the commerce of this country will be of great importance, the more so as Russian influence was not likely to be strongly exerted in this direction. The letter from Dr. Livingstone, to which we referred above, gives an account of his having discovered an excellent harbour about 25 miles to the north of the Rovuma river. The entrance is some 300 yards wide, and if this be considered the handle, the rest of the harbour may be looked upon as the blade of a spade on cards. After leaving this harbour he returned to the Rovuma and advanced up its north or left bank as far as Ugoniano, the confluence of this Rovuma or Louma, and the Louendi, a larger stream coming from 12 116 Chronicles of Science. — [Jan., the 8.W. Dr. Livingstone expresses his determination to make this spot, where he has been well received and is in the confidence of the chief of the Makonde, his head-quarters, until he has fully explored the Lake Nyassa and determined its relationship to the other great lakes and the water system generally. The Makonde have some notion of a Divine being, nevertheless the Arabs had done nothing towards proselytism, a circumstance which is reported of them elsewhere. An interesting paper, “On the Physical Geography of Natal,’ was read by Dr. R. J. Mann, who exhibited various maps and diagrams illustrative of the experience gained in an eight years’ residence in the country. The colony forms a portion of the peculiar raised coast which surrounds the flatter interior of Africa. in consequence the rapid slope from the ccast to the Drakenberg mountains, meets the sea breezes in the summer, causing a rainfall of 24 inches, whilst the winter monsoon brings but 6 inches of moisture, affording a remarkable climate, well suited for most tropical and temperate vegetation, but unsuited to other plants, amongst which is especially to be remarked the vme. The harbour of Natal admits vessels of 700 tons, and could easily be made available for those of larger tonnage. 9. GEOLOGY AND PALAONTOLOGY. (Including the Proceedings of the Geological Society.) Unt recently all deposits contaming gold in situ were generally considered, on the authority of Sir R. I. Murchison, to be of Paleozoic age,* notably Lower Silurian. Sir Roderick Murchison also believed that, in all cases, the gold was introduced into these ancient rocks during the Tertiary period. But we now possess a more perfect knowledge of the phenomena attending the occur- rence of gold, and are proportionately better qualified to discuss the question, and one consequence has been that these old theories have been entirely contradicted by well-ascertained facts. In the first place, fossils were discovered in situ in the auriferous slates of California in the year 1863, which, on examination, proved to be of Jurassic age ;7 then, Professor Whitney has remarked that not a trace of any Silurian or Devonian fossil has ever been found in California; but, on the other hand, gold occurs in many localities in rocks as new as the Cretaceous. , We may conclude, therefore, that the Geological Survey of California has effectually disproved the old views; but they had * «Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society,’ vol. viii. p. 134. t+ Whitney. Report on the Geology of California. 1867.| Geology and Paleontology. 11y been previously shown to be erroneous by Mr. David Forbes, who in 1860* reported the presence of gold in Upper Oolitic strata in South America due to the eruption of dioritic rocks of still younger age. More recently Mr. Forbes has publishedt a more general conclusion, to the effect that there have been two epochs of auri- ferous impregnation, namely, (1) the older, or granite intrusion, which is not older than the Upper Silurian, nor younger than the Carboniferous strata; and (2) the newer, or dioritic outburst, which Mr. Forbes calls Post-oolitic, and which is probably as recent as early Cretaceous. , Mr. Selwyn’s last report to the Government of Victoria “on the probable age of the Lower Gold-drifts”{ makes public a view which is antagonistic to that enunciated by Mr. David Forbes. He believes that the quartz-veins of Victoria belong to two groups: an older, which is non-auriferous, and a younger, which is auriferous. From the former he believes the Miocene gravels have been derived, they being entirely barren; and by the degradation of the latter he considers that the rich Pliocene gold-drifts have been produced. If this interpretation be correct, we have proof of a third period of gold-impregnation, namely, in later Tertiary times. The last number of the Transactions of the Geological Society of Glasgow (vol. u., part 2) is a most creditable production, and contains, amongst many papers of merit, one ‘On the Auriferous Rocks and Drifts of Victoria,” by Mr. W. Cameron, well worth a perusal by those interested in the subject. But the paper to which we must especially draw attention, is that by the Rev. H. W. Crosskey “On the relation between the Glacial Deposits of Scotland and those of Canada.’ The author infers, from a study of Dr. Dawson’s papers on the Canadian deposits, that “the difference between the glacial fossil fauna of Canada and that now existing 10 the Gulf of St. Lawrence is far less marked than the difference between the glacial fauna of the Clyde-beds and-that now existing in the Firth;” but even in Canada the difference gives a more arctic character to the fossils; and in Scotland, as is well known, this arctic element is the predominant characteristic. In Canada also, the beds occur in a distinct order, whereas in the Clyde-district their order is only a matter of inference. Another point is. that the fossiliferous beds are superimposed, in both countries, on the true Boulder-clay, beneath which occurs in Canada a peaty deposit corresponding in position with the vegetable remains found at Chapel-hall, near Airdrie. Speaking generally, about two-thirds of the Scottish species occur fossil in Canada, leading to the * «Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society,’ vol. xvii. pp. 31 and 34. t ‘ Geological Magazine,’ vol. tii. p. 885. September, 1866. } Reprinted, nearly entire, in the ‘Geological Magazine,’ vol. iii. p. 457, October, 1866. 118 Chronicles of Science. | | Jan., inference that the climate at the period of their entombment was slightly colder than that of the Gulf of St. Lawrence at the present day ; but the author thinks that they cannot be considered to mark “the extreme point of cold reached during the epoch; but rather as indicating the commencement of slightly milder climatic conditions than had hitherto prevailed.” Mr. Crosskey also suggests that the conditions which produced the colder climate of Scotland during the glacial period were similar to those which now exercise the same influence on the climate of Canada. Amongst the facts which have been relied on as most clearly proving the vast extension of the Alpine glaciers during the glacial period, none have been regarded as more certainly the result of that icy development than the occurrence of erratic blocks of Alpine rocks on the mountains of the Jura, which has been held by most geologists to demonstrate that the Alpine glaciers formerly extended to the Jura range. M. Sartorius von Waltershausen, the distin- guished Professor of Geology at Gdttingen, however, has lately, in his prize-essay crowned by the University of Haarlem,* advocated the theory that the Alpme glaciers terminated in an inland sea or lake, where they formed icebergs, some of which, floating towards the Jura, deposited their burdens on that shore. The publication of this work has called forth an able reviewt from the pen of Proe- fessor B. Studer of Berne, m which Professor von Waltershausen’s theory is shown to be inconsistent with positive facts, and to be rendered-extremely improbable by negative evidence. Most geolo- ~ gists, however, will no doubt read the arguments on both sides with pleasure and profit, for although this theory is probably not appli- cable to the particular case of the Alps and the Jura, the possibility of its being the true explanation of the phenomena observed in other regions should not be lost sight of by those who prefer simple truth to the universal triumph of a pet hypothesis. In the number of the “ Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France” for September, M. Gaudry gives the results of his long and laborious examination of the fossil mammals of Pikermi. His paper is short, and will well repay a careful consideration ; but we can here only mention one of the points he brings forward, namely, that the facies of the Pikermi fauna is altogether African. M. Gaudry recommends this fact to the notice of geologists who inves- tigate the history of the Tertiary period ; but it is equally important in its bearmgs on the origin of the recent African fauna,{ and is thus worthy the attention of those naturalists who are at present * Untersuchungen iiber die Klimate der Gegenwart und der Vorwelt. + ‘Recherches sur les climats de l’époque actuelle,’ &c. Bibliothéque Uni- verselle, September, 1866. { See ‘Quarterly Journal of Science,’ No. II., p. 213; No. IV., p. 648; and No. X., p. 169. 1867. | Geology and Palxontology. 119 endeavouring to unravel the tangled web of affinity which forms the connection between the recent and fossil faunas of different regions. The last number of the ‘Natural History Transactions of Northumberland and Durham’ contains a short paper by Mr. H. B. Brady “On Casts of Paleozoic Corals found amongst the Refuse of Alkali Works,” which possesses considerable interest for those who investigate the means by which fossilization is produced. ‘The specimens consist of siliceous casts of the calcareous skeletons of certain corals, and they were so completely decalcified by the pro- cess for the generation of carbonic acid, to which they had been submitted, that they remained unaltered on a second maceration in strong acid. The contents of the ‘Geological Magazine’ during the past quarter have been so important that our brief notice of them kere must not be regarded as at all exhausting the subjects which are brought before us in the several papers that the numbers contain. In the first place we must notice the conclusion of Dr. Lindstrém’s paper on the Rugosa, in the September number; but we can only summarize the conclusions at which the author has arrived, namely, (1) “that Goniophyllum pyramidale is an undoubted Zoantharia rugosd,... . and that it coimcides with the three species of the genus Calceola,” which must therefore be removed from the class Brachiopoda ; (2) that the Rugosa must be separated from the Actinozoa, and must form a class of their own in the great division of Radiated animals. Dr. Lindstrém, indeed, accepts Professor Agassiz’s opinion that the Rugosa are related to the living Lucer- nariz. It cannot be said that there is much evidence in support of this supposition, and we should be rather inclined to seek for the affinity of these aberrant corals in a higher rather than in a lower direction; but, however the case may ultimately be decided, Dr. Lindstrém’s is a most valuable and welcome contribution. In the November number is a paper on a kindred subject, by Mr. H. A. Nicholson, who has discovered in the Moffat. shales, Dumfriesshire, certain structures associated with Graptolites, which he interprets to be external organs of reproduction, and therefore corroborative of Professor James Hall’s opinion of the Sertularian nature of the Graptolitide, and to’ disprove the prevalent opinion of their Bryozoan affinities. PROCEEDINGS OF THE GEOLOGICAL Soctety. It would be quite useless, in this Chronicle, to endeavour to give an abstract of all the papers, thirty-three in number, contained in the last number of the Society’s journal. We shall, therefore, select a few of the more interesting and important communications, more 120 Chromeles of Science. — [Jan., especially as several of the others are of too technical a nature to be dealt with here. | In the first paper in the Journal, Mr. Boyd Dawkins grapples with the question of the origin of our domestic races of cattle, which he believes can only be solved by a careful examination of each of the three European fossil animals, namely, (1) the great Urus, Bos Urus of Julius Ceesar ; (2) the small Short-horn, Bos longifrons of Professor Owen; and (8) the Bison, Bos bison of Pliny. He confines himself now to a consideration of the Urus, and after a careful statement of the historical evidence on the subject, he infers that this animal “ probably lingered in the wilder parts of conti- nental Europe till at least the sixteenth century.” Mr. Whitaker's paper “On the Lower London Tertiaries of Kent,” deserves especial notice, on account of its value as a contti- bution to systematic Geology. Hitherto, over the whole of the London Basin, Mr. Prestwich’s classification has been adopted, namely, in descending order, (1) Basement-bed of the London Clay ; (2) Woolwich and Reading series; and (3) Thanet Sands. Mr. Whitaker shows that the beds of Hast Kent (Upnor, Reculvers, &c.), until now considered identical with the Basement-bed of the London Clay at Lewisham, &c., belong to a lower series, imtermediate between this Basement-bed and the Woolwich and Reading series. To this new division he gives the name Oldhaven Beds; and he refers to it also the pebble-bed of Blackheath, Abbey Wood, &c., which have been referred to the same division as that of Lewisham, as well as some sandy pebble-beds in West Kent, hitherto considered to form part of the underlying Woolwich and Reading series. The paper is extremely valuable for containing so many facts bearing on the changes of the various members of the divisions of the Lower London Tertiaries, in passing from east to west. We will just mention one instance. The only constant portion of the Thanet Beds is its lowest member,—the base-bed. In West Kent this is succeeded by the thick mass of unfossiliferous sands so familiar to metropolhtan geologists; these sands, how- ever, thin out towards the east, until, near Canterbury, they entirely disappear ; and the base-bed is then succeeded by a band of loamy clay, which thins out towards the west beneath the member just noticed. But in the eastern division of Kent, the bulk of the Thanet Beds consists of two fossiliferous members, neither of which extends farther east than Rochester, beyond which the series’ is entirely represented by the base-bed and the great mass of un- fossiliferous sands already noticed. Here, therefore, is the explana- tion of the fact that fossils are found in one district and not in the other,—the beds are not the same, as has hitherto been supposed. Geologists seem to have accepted with passive submission, and with one accord, Mr. Prestwich’s conclusions as to the relative ages, 1867. | Geology and Paleontology. 121 * of the valley-gravels of the Somme, the Ouse, and other rivers ; but whether this docility has resulted from supineness or conviction we cannot undertake to pronounce. Mr. Tylor, however, seems to think that this state of things has lasted long enough, and in a paper “Upon the Interval of Time which has passed between the Formation of the Upper and Lower Valley-gravels of part of England and France,” he endeavours to show that the value of this interval is nothing, and that the two sets of gravels are of the same age. He explains and illustrates this view by stating his belief, that the valleys themselves are of very ancient date, that subsequent to their formation they were entirely filled with gravel, and that more recently still the valleys have been re-excavated, leaving at different heights patches of gravel which have escaped being washed away. Mr. Tylor endeavours to explain the history of the valley of the Somme on this supposition, by reference to the valleys of Devonshire, just as Fluellin argued, “there is a river in Macedon ; and there is also, moreover, a river at Monmouth”... . “and there is salmons in both.” * The tendency of geological opinion on the subject. of metamor- phism has of late years been in favour of ascribing that phenomenon to hydrothermal action; but for the evidence in support of this theory, geologists are almost entirely indebted to chemists and mineral- ogists, the geological data in its favour being very scanty, and more or less vague. We have now, however, to chronicle the publication of a most important paper by Mr. J. Geikie, “On the Metamorphic Lower Silurian Rocks of Carrick, Ayrshire,” which contains a generalized description of certain felspathic, dioritic, serpentinous, and calcareous rocks, treated with a view of ascertaining what evi- dence they may yield bearing on the cause of their metamorphism ; for it is shown that these are all metamorphic, not igneous, rocks in this region. In Mr. Geikie’s own opinion, the details seem to prove:—“(1) That the strata owe their metamorphism to hydro- thermal action. (2) That the varymg mineralogical character of the rocks is due principally to original differences of chemical com- position, and not to infiltration of foreign matter at the time of metamorphism. (8) That the highly alkaline portions of the strata have been most susceptible of change. (4) That in beds having the same composition, but exhibiting various degrees of alteration, the intensity of the metamorphism has been in direct proportion to the amount of water passing through the strata. (5) That in some places the rocks have been reduced to a softened or pasty condition.” A paper “On the Structure of the Red Crag,” by that veteran paleontologist, Mr. 8. V.Wood, sen., contains an entirely new view (so far as we are aware) of the succession of life in those deposits which are grouped under the name of Red Crag. No man is so 122 Chronicles of Science. [Jan., - * well qualified to write on this subject as the author of this paper, who has spent most of his life in the thorough investigation of the Crag deposits; his inferences are therefore entitled to more than ordinary consideration. Within the last few months, Geology has suffered from the loss of several of her followers; amongst them Mr. C. Maclaren, author of ‘The Geology of Fife and the Lothians, and Mr. Alexander Bryson, were men of local eminence. Don Casiano di Prado was the leading geologist of Spain, where his death will be severely felt by his small band of associates; and M. Louis Saemann, who was at the same time an accomplished mineralogist and a liberal-minded dealer in minerals and fossils, will be regretted by a large circle of friends and customers; for he was the most enlightened, most liberal, and most enterprising of all dealers; and by his death Geology has therefore sustained a severe blow of a most peculiar nature. But however much we may regret these losses, they are trifles compared with that caused by the death of Mr. William Hopkins, of Cambridge, for by this sad event it seems as if our science were deprived of a limb, this distinguished man being the founder and only master of what may be termed Mathematical Geology. | 10. MINING. At the time when there is something more than indications that the Cornish copper mines are giving symptoms of exhaustion, we hear of the extraordinary development of copper mines in California. Fifteen counties, from San Diego to Del Norte, possess veins of copper, which will give, it is said, at least 10 per cent. of metal. The cost of transit so largely interferes with the development of those mines, that those only which are at a short distance from San Francisco are worked. Amongst those the Union Mine at Cop- peropolis has lately exported 110 tons of ore a-day, of which 50 tons contained 20 per cent. of metal. Notwithstanding the value of this ore, the cost of carriage absorbed nearly all the profit. Attempts have been made—and considerable success has attended them—to smelt the ores near the place of production, and we are told that cakes of copper containing from 90 to 95 per cent. of copper are obtained. Allowing for some exaggeration, there appears to be no doubt that immense deposits of copper exist in California, and that in a few years, when roads have been constructed, these will be extensively and profitably worked. After the remarks which we made in our last, on the depressed state of mining in the British Isles, the above does not encourage the hope of any great improvement in the condition of our copper * 1867. | Mining. 123 mines. Tin mining is rather more encouraging, for, although at the present prices of that metal, the mimes cannot make a profit, there is a prospect that the price will shortly improve. The Duich candidly state that they cannot continue to import the tin from Banca and the Straits at the present low scale of prices. From some cause or other, not satisfactorily explained, there has been for some time, a gradual fallmg off in the quantity of tin produced in Banca. At present the supply of tin is considerably im excess of the demand, and with the depression which pervades every branch of metal manufacture, there is no immediate prospect of any large quantity of tin beimg consumed. But. with a revival of trade, so important a metal must again be largely in demand, and the immense stores of tin existing in Cornwall may then be worked to advantage. It is satisfactory to know that the Cornish miners are finding employment at home, instead of abroad. Nearly a thousand of these industrious men are now supplying the places vacated by the colliers on strike in Scotland, and many more are finding employ- ment on the railways. ‘hese will, therefore, be available as soon as an improved market renders it prudent to work the Cornish mines with greater activity. We have no discovery to chronicle this quarter in any of the mining districts of Great Britain or of the Continent. It was formerly a notion amongst miners that tin could only exist near the surface of the earth, and many mines were abandoned, because, as the miners said, “ tin never made in depth.” At length, energy dissolved this theory, and now the largest quantities of the finest tin are obtained from the deepest mines of Cornwall. A similar superstition prevails respecting the deposition of gold in quartz lodes. The gold miners will tell you that gold falls off in depth. ‘This hypothesis appears destined to share the fate of that relating to tin. Mr. A. Hayward, of Sutter Creek, Amadas Co., California, is working a quartz lode to the depth of 1,200 feet, not less than 300 feet below the sea level. The result is, in this instance, that - the quartz vein increases in width and value in proportion to depth. The quantity of gold obtained from this mine has been to the value of six or seven million dollars, and in the galleries already opened gold quartz is standing which is valued at, at least, two million dollars. MINERALOGY. The Rey. Samuel Haughton has published* his examination of a meteoric stone which was seen to fall at Dundrum, Co. Tipperary, * Royal Irish Academy, 1866. ‘Philosophical Magazine,’ No. 216, p. 260. Oh eet 124 Chronicles of Science. | Jan., Ireland, on the 12th August, 1865. This stone was given by the observer and finder, John Johnson, of Clonoulty, to Lord Hawarden, and presented by his lordship to the Geological Museum of ‘Trinity College. Professor Haughton has determined its composition to be :— per cent. — . Nick Tron >. ea ee Protosulphuret of Iron . 4°05 Chrome Iron . : iepair.O Mineral soluble in Mu- riatic Acid, probably ts) Chrysolith Minerals insoluble in } 40°77 Muriatic Acid 100-00 . There can be no doubt but that this is a true meteoric stone, its composition agrees so closely with that of others. The “statement by an eye-witness,” who says, “I heard a clap lke the shot out of a cannon, very quick and not like thunder; this was followed by a buzzing noise; which continued for about a quarter of an hour, when it came over our heads, and on looking up we saw an object falling down in a slanting direction,” &c., &c., 1s rendered of very uncertain value by the exaggerations contained in it. The “Colorado Meteorite,’ as it is called, which is stated to have been found in “ Russel Gulch, Feb. 18, 1863, by Mr. Otho Curtice,” weighs 29lbs. It has been examined by Professor J. Lawrence Smith, of Louisville, and its composition found to be >*— Lie : : : 90°61 Nickel . : 7°84 Cobalt . ‘78 Copper . a trace Phosphorus . : “02 99-25 Gay-Lussite has been found by Professor B. Silliman in great quantities at the Little Salt Lake, near Ragtown, Churchill Co., Nevada. These crystals have been examined by Mr. John M. Blake, who shows that in crystalline form these specimens differ in some respects from such as have been previously measured.t * «Silliman’s Americin Journal of Science and Arts,’ No. 125 p. 218. + Ibid., pp. 20, 21. ce Bie ee 5 1867. | | Mining. 125 F. Wobler, continuing his examination of Laurite, arrives at the conclusion that it is a native sulphate of ruthenium.* In the ‘American Journal of Science and Arts,’ Mr. Charles Upham Shepard continues his mineral notices. A new mineral, Hagemannite, so called—in obedience to the absurd fashion of naming minerals after some one who may have had something to do with the specimens in question — after Mr. G. Hagemann, chemist to the Natron Chemical Works, Alleghany Co., has been brought from Arksutfiord, Greenland. It appears to be a very complicated substance. Mr. Shepard says:—“'The deduction of a formula is difficult. The following is suggested :— 2 (Ca +- 2 Na + 4 Mg) Fl + (Al +4 Fe) 281 Fl + 2 HO” The notices of the discoveries of Cotunnite, Columbite, and Spodumene in new localities are unimportant. M. Edmond Becquerel has published a paper, “ On the Phospho- rescence of Hexagonal Blende.”{ The subject belongs to Physics proper, and it is therefore mentioned in this place for the purpose of recording it, and directing the attention of our readers to some optical phenomena of much beauty. , Mr. E. J. Chapman, of Toronto, has announced § the discovery of native lead on the north-west borders of Lake Superior. It will be remembered that in our last number we mentioned the discovery of this rare native metal in Australia. Mr. Chapman states that the lead of the Lake Superior district having been cut, presents the colour, the softness, and the ductility of the pure metal. It is not generally known that specimens of native lead were found some years since by Mr. Stephen Eddy, in the mines of Grassington, belonging to the Duke of Devonshire, in Yorkshire. The Secretary of the Imperial Society of Mineralogy, of St. Petersburg, announces that the Society will celebrate, on the 7th January, 1867, their fiftieth anniversary, and invites the learned of all countries to take part in this celebration. M. Fremy read on the 20th of October, in the Académie des Sciences of Paris, a note on “ Une méthode générale de cristallisa- tion.” This note was published in ‘Les Mondes,’ with but slight omissions, and from its importance we reproduce it from that periodical. || “T have thought,” says M. Fremy, “that if I could slowly effect the precipitations and decompositions which render bodies amorphous, because they are instantaneous, I should place myself in the same conditions as nature, and that I should obtain, in a * « Archives des Sciences ’ (Bibliothéque Universelle), vol. xxvi., No. 102, 146 +‘ The American Journal of Science and Arts,’ No. 125,-1866. t ‘Les Mondes,’ 29th Nov., 1866, p. 521. § ‘American Journal of Science,’ L’ Institut. 14th Nov., 1866, p. 368. \| ‘ Les Mondes,’ Ist Nov., 1866, p. 392., 126 Chronicles of Science. [ Jan., crystallized state, bodies which instantaneous precipitations ren- dered amorphous. For this purpose I first introduce two bodies which react on each other in liquids of different densities, containing eum, sugar, or gelatine. Then I separate them by beds or par- titions of porous bodies, such as wood, unglazed porcelain, &c., or by leaves of unsized paper, which in imbibing them, little by little, renders the decomposition slow, and nearly always produces crystallized bodies. The porous vessels allow the liquid which they contain to run out very slowly, and often produce beautiful cerystallizations, which are found in the interior of the vessels when the liquid has left them. JI have thus obtaimed in- soluble bodies in a crystallized state, and often of very perfect forms, such as sulphate of barytes, sulphate of strontian, carbonate of barytes, borate of barytes, chromate of barytes, magnesia, sulphur, &c. This method appears to me very generally applicable. I have tried to apply it to the alkaline silicates, by submitting them to the action of certain acids, in porous vessels, with the hope of obtaining quartz or crystallized silica, which is so common in nature. Slowly decomposing, they have formed white crystalline masses hard enough to scratch glass. I hoped to achieve the pro- duction of real quartz, but the crystals dissolved in the alkaline liquids, and they were highly hydrated. There were silicates of soda, containmg—silica, 68; soda, 5; water, 29. The proportions of silicate and water being the same as in §i10*,2HO. These experiments confirm the provisions of our illustrous confrere, M. Chevreul, who, to explain the presence of oxalate of lime in certain plants, supposed that a soluble oxalate slowly traversing the coating of a vegetable cell, or of a bundle of fibres, could react on a eal- careous salt, found in a cavity, and give birth to crystallized oxalate of lime. I believe I can say, in conclusion, that the method which I have published will permit all bodies which are found crystallized to be artificially reproduced, whether in the earth or in organic tissues, and consequently that it will afford us much useful know- ledge respecting their modes of production.” Minerals in Spain.—Atiention has again been drawn to the natural phosphate of lime, which exists in many parts of Spain. — The deposit which is now attracting attention is one stated to have been discovered by M. de Luna, near Merida, in the centre of the Estremadura. As far back as 1844, however, Dr. Daubeny, in com- pany with Captain Widdrington, explored this district. Dr. Daubeny then stated the composition of this phosphorite rock to be about 80 per cent. of triphosphate of lime, and 14 of fluoride of calcium. From that time until now, no use has been made of this ; but, probably, now that a railway is brought near he locality in which it exists, it may be found commercially valuable. M. de Luna has forwarded samples of this native phosphate to the Academy ee Bi lial 1867. ] Mining. 127 of Sciences, and he proposes to convert it into the acid phosphate of lime, at a low cost, by means of the sulphurous acid of Almaden. M. Chevreul has recently published a paper “On the Estremadura Phosphate.”* New Zealand Gold.—The total export of gold from the pro- vince of Otago since 1861, when this gold field was discovered, to the end of 1865, was 1,875,053 ounces, and from the commence- ment of this year to the latest return from the colony, 69,784 ounces have been exported. Many of the coals and coal-measure shales of New South Wales are now being actively worked for the production of petroleum, or kerosene, as they more generally term this oil in the colony. At Hartley nine retorts are in action, and they are producing 1,200 gallons a-week. The refining power now established is said to be equal to 10,000 gallons a-week. To produce this, 100 tons of the cannel coal found at Hartley is necessary ; but, we are told, a single acre of this coal will furnish mineral enough for a year’s supply at the rate of 100 tons a-week. MeraLLuray. We ought not to lose sight of the fact, that during the period of depression of our iron trade, there has been great activity in the iron works of Belgium. The production of pig-iron in the district of Charleroi has been, during this year, about 500,000 tons. Of this 10,000 tons have been exported, while 25,000 tons of pig-iron have been imported. Nearly all the Belgium pig-iron is now worked up in the country, and is exported only as malleable iron. Belgium, in 1865, exported 57,000 tons less, and imported 120,000 tons more, than in the preceding year. Barytes white (sulphate and carbonate of baryta) has been long used for the adulteration of whitelead; and, for this purpose, it is still employed to an extent which is disgraceful. It is now, how- ever, used for the enamel upon visiting cards, and on paper. Especially does it find a use in the manufacture of paper collars ; and we learn that twenty tons of sulphate of baryta are used per day in the paper-collar manufactories of New York city alone. H. Fleck continues his inquiry “On the Characteristics of various Kinds of Coal.’{ De Bergne has published an account of what he considers an improved blast furnace. Experience is, however, necessary before it can be pronounced to be an improve- ment. Messrs. Sparrow and Poole, of Ffrwd, in North Wales, have constructed a furnace with more permanent arrangements than * ¢Comptes Rendus,’ vol. Ixiii., p. 402. t* Dinglcr’s Polytechnisches Journal,’ vol. 181, p. 48. 128 Chronicles of Science. |Jan., usual for taking the gases from the top. The arrangements appear very complete. When the furnace is blown in we hope to describe it. “On the Dissociation of Gases in Metallurgical Furnaces,” by L. Cailletet, should be consulted. An improvement is said to have been made by Mr. Forster, at the well-known Lead Hills Mines, on the ore-hearth—or what is well known to lead smelters—as the Scotch furnace. The advan- tages are reported to be, that— 1st. The improved hearth can be worked continuously. The importance of this fact will be patent to every lead smelter, when he remembers that the ordinary mode of working with the Scotch furnace involves a separate lighting and heating every day,—the heating and fusion of the browse of roasted and agglomerated ore requiring an hour, at least, for each new operation. By using the improved hearth there is thus great economy both as to fuel and men’s time. 2nd. No peats are required in the new hearth, at least, that is the experience of Mr. Forster at Leadhills. 3rd. Since the improved hearth has got into regular working order, it has given a: return of lead four per cent. greater than is yielded by similar ore reduced in the old form of hearth. Mr. Nevin, the manager at Lead Hills, has furnished us with sufficient data to make the followmg contrast of the expense of obtaining a ton of lead : — In the Unimproved Hearth. In Forster’s Improved Hearth. s. d. $ d. DVAP OSes tp ws We ay ot of Wages «.. .:) 2. eee Coals, 2 ewt. at 82d. 15° | Coals, 1) cwt. at 83d, 2 ee Peats, 2 loads at 5d. 0 10 Peats, none °.. <~ ee Lime, 3 ewt. at 10d. 0 5 Lime, 4 cwt. at 10d. 0 £010 2 | ES ten Mr. Nevin thus argues as to the economical working of the improved hearth :—Suppose a smelt-mill to produce 2,000 tons of lead yearly, there would thus result in wages and fuel alone a clear annual saving of 2751. This large saving has been questioned by correspondents in the pages of a contemporary journal, but the objections urged have been fairly met, and we have no reason, at present, to doubt their correctness. Those who are interested in this metallurgical process, should consult a short paper by A. Habets,* “On the Smelting of Lead in the Raschette Furnace as used in the Upper Hartz.” * «Revue Universelle des Mines,’ vol. xix., p. 37. 1867. } Physics. 129 Mr. D. Kirkaldy has published some good practical remarks on the influence of repeated forging on ‘the strength of wrought- iron.* 11. PHYSICS. Licut.—The spectral analysis of the light of the stars has been followed up unremittingly by many observers. Amongst others, Father Secchi has published some generalizations: he divides the Stellar spectra into three types. The first and most dominant type is that exhibited by white stars, such as Sirius. Their characteristic is a black band in the green-blue, and a second band in the violet. Half the visible stars belong to this type. Two remarkable exceptions have been found, the stars y Cassiopeiz and 6 Lyre. These are perfectly complementary to the type, and instead of having a dark ray in the green, have a luminous band. Another modification of this type is presented by the constellation Orion (a excepted), which has no large bands, and in which the violet lines are very difficult to see. The second type consists of stars having coloured bands in the red and orange. ‘The most remarkable and typical star of this class is a Hercules, the spectrum of which has the appearance of a series of columns illuminated from one side ; the stereoscopic effect of the convexity of these bands, due to the shading, is so surprising, that it cannot be beheld without astonish- ment. The third type consists of stars giving fine lines: it includes Arcturus, Capella, Pollux, &c., and also our own sun. The author says that the spectra of these stars perfectly resemble that of the sun, with fine lines in the same places. In these stars may be seen the principal solar rays, B, D, 6, H, F, G, and a great many secondary rays. As.a proof of the existence of iron in the solar atmosphere, M. A. J. Angstrém has compared the solar spectrum with one formed by two iron electrodes, with a battery of 50 elements, and has found more than 460 rays corresponding to the lines of iron. Two observations which the author has made are of interest: one is the certain presence of manganese in the sun, proved by the coincidence of nearly thirty lines; and the other is the discovery of a new ray of hydrogen,, situated nearly half way between G and H, and which M. Angstrém calls h. An addition, which may prove important, has been made to our knowledge of the obscure subject of right- and left- handed polarization. , * ‘Deutsche Industriezeitung,’ No. 82. ‘ Organ fiir die Fortschritte des Bisén- bahnwesens,’ New Series, vol. lii., p. 178. VOL. IV. K q 130 Chronicles of Science. [ Jan., M. Gerney has discovered that a supersaturated solution of left-handed double tartrate of soda and ammonia does not crystallize . In contact with a fragment of the same salt right-handed, and vice versd. From an inactive supersaturated solution of double racemate of soda and ammonia, a fragment of right-handed crystal deter- mines only the precipitation of right-handed crystals; whilst a portion of the same liquid, m contact with a left-handed crystal, produces a deposit of the left-handed salt. This supplies a simple means of separating at will from the nae racemate of soda and ammonia, either of its two constituent salts. M. Niepce de Saint Victor is perseveringly continuing his experiments on the photographic reproduction of colours. He has now succeeded in preparing a silver plate, on which all the colours, _and even white and black, are capable of being impressed in the eamera. His sixth memoir, which has just been communicated to the Academy of Sciences, contains several improvements in detail, principally with the view to obtain good blacks. A memoir has been published by M. E. Reichert, on the different refractive powers of fluids, modified by thew chemical composition. It contains the results of experiments on solutions of common salt of different strengths, and the proportions of salt shown by optical means and by ordinary analysis agree very closely. An equally satisfactory result was obtained by solutions of sugar; but with alcohol and acetic acid, the differences in the refractive indices are only half as great. The refraction- and dispersion- equivalents of chlorine, bromine, and iodine, have been examined by Dr. Gladstone, and by him communicated to the British Association. The refraction-equivalent of the substance is the product of its atomic weight with its specific refractive index—that 1s, its refractive index minus one, divided by its density. Its dispersion-equivalent is the difference between the refraction-equivalents as calculated for the two extreme lines of the spectrum, A and H. From the determinations which Dr. Gladstone has made in con- junction with the Rev. T. P. Dale, it is seen that in each case the number for bromine lies between those for the other two. ‘The refraction-equivalents are, for chlorine 9-8, for bromine 15°5, and iodine 24:2, and the dispersion equivalents are, for chlorine 0°5, bromine 1°3, and iodine 2:6. Heat.—In experiments on radiant heat with the thermo-electric pile, M. P. Desains proposes the employment of a differential appara- tus, consisting essentially of a single source of heat, of two thermo- electric piles, of a double-wire galvanometer, and finally of a rheostat. The apparatus is so arranged that the equilibrium, once obtained, 1867. | Physics. 131 remains uniform, however the heat from the source varies; but if the smallest variation takes place im one of the radiations, the. needle quits the zero point. The author has applied this apparatus to the examination of the absorption of heat by transparent gases, and finds that it gives very delicate and certain indications. This may be the case, but we do not see that the arrangement described by M. Desains is superior to Wheatstone’s Bridge, the construction of which is peculiarly simple and easy, whilst the correct adjustment of a double wire differential galvanometer is a most difficult and uncertain operation. The chemistry of the galvanic battery is a subject which would seem to have become almost exhausted. M. Favre has, however, contributed some important experiments, in which he has examined the amount of heat set in motion during galvanic decompositions or combinations. The conclusions at which he arrives are, that when a body is decomposed by the battery, the constituent elements, in separating, absorb a larger amount of heat than they disengage again in combining under ordinary circumstances. Thus, in the nascent state, bodies possess an excess of heat, which they give up on becoming modified to the ordinary state. The author’s experi- ments reveal another fact,—that secondary actions take place in the battery, accompanied by a disengagement of heat, which is not turned to account in the current, and therefore he says that electro- magnetic machines cannot dispose of all the heat set in action in the battery. M. de Gernez has investigated the subject of the disengage- ment of gases from their supersaturated solutions (of the soda- water type) and has discovered the followimg facts:—Ist. Solid bodies, from which the gaseous bubbles are disengaged, lose their property after a certam time. 2nd. Prolonged soaking in water also removes this action from them, 3rd. Heat has the same action. 4th. Solid bodies, which have been in contact with alr, have no action on supersaturated gaseous solutions. 5th. Air and gases provoke the disengagement of dissolved gas. Exxcrricity.—Electricity, although the youngest of the sciences, has already produced such marvellous results that some knowledge of its principles must, in future, form part of a liberal education. ‘To impart this knowledge in a concise form has been the aim of Doctor Noad in his ‘Text Book of Electricity.* Of course, in a work of this sort, much originality is not expected, nor, indeed, would it be considered so desirable as a judicious selection, from acknowledged authorities, of those facts which form the groundwork of the science, and the truth of which has been * a ian raised. Explo- | Falls of Miscel- sions. | ‘roof. Sues laneoug, 1. Northumberland, Cumberland, and North Durham } Seca. keane eo been aes 92. South Durham 2 126,240,072 48 292 110 359 Peet aud Wast Wancasiire 093991, 879%) 238) 968 | 132) teas 4. ea and ea 70,442,000 | 169 | 358] 227) 216 5. Yorkshire, Derbyshire, and 89,616,315 | 340 | 238 130 79 Nottingham 6. Leicester and Warwick. . :! 60,980,319 52 228 be 150 7. North Stafford, Shropshire, 41,900,000 121 202 156 112 and Cheshire i < 8. South Staffordshire . one 76,483,405 | 126 | 745 | 319 | 112 9. Monmoutlishire, - Gloucester- ‘ 2 - ghire, and Somersetshire aude oe 96 | 102 10. South Wales... 64,951,136 | 412 530 | 123) 993 11. East District of Sealand ees 54,208,000 OTe aE 93 82 12. West District of Scotland . . 59,082,897 69 214 91 53 Motales- «3 «+ ..*. | St0,Gko, 952. 2,019 3,953 1,710 | 2,234 SumMMaARY FoR TEN YEARs. No. Per cent, Deaths from fire-damp explosions. . . . 2,019 20°36 Malis of roof and coal «ss «lant. goog 39°87 Shaft accidents . . . ° 1,710 17°24 Miscellaneous accidents in mines and above: SEROUING aes tes ©, >t, 0g sey Se 22°53 9,916 100 00 182 The Ventilation of Coal Mines. [ April, A close examination of these returns gives the followig mean annual average of miners killed, by each class of accident, in each inspector’s district. = Total in Explo- | Falls of |Accidents| Sundry aa sone: Roof. lin Shafts, Catises cach is 1. Northumberland, North Dur- ‘ ; : ; =a ham, and Cumberland. \ 30°1 | 38°0 | 12-1) 9875 ae 2. South Durham . sey | 652] 34-01 9:4 | 3o-o pumas 3. Lancashire N. and E. Division . aes P27 t 12°2 |. 10-3 | snes 4. Lancashire W. and North Wales 19-0 4) 134-38) 7198 ¥E;2 83:6 SB NGTIKSHITC ake (Sete tl eye 71-2 25°0 13°0 be 66°4 6. Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, ia A esenee . ; Leicestershire, Warwickshire \ | 24 22°1 10-4 14-1 —— 7. North Stafford and Cueshire . 9-0 20°0 | 22:0. 8-1 59°48 8. S. Stafford and Worcestershire . 12-4 | 75°3 | 313 10-1 | 128-1 9. Monmouthshire, Gloucester- Be | Magehs ee : : : shire, Somerset, and Devon \ 31-4 35°0 a tie a meSewih Wales. sis 4! 3°28 _ 256 | — 031 | — °002 | — | 0 = Glasgow | This table is to be read in the following manner :—100,000 lbs. of the Chelsea Company’s water contained in the month of February last 28°58 lbs. of solid impurity: the organic matter constituting a portion of this impurity contained 0°433 lb. of carbon. This solid impurity also contained 0°337 Ib. of nitrogen in the form of nitrates and nitrites, besides 0°004 lb. of ammonia. The above quantity of water as supplied by the Chelsea Company had been, after its descent to the earth as rain, contaminated with sewage or the manure of cultivated land equivalent to 2,420 lbs. of average London sewage. By gradual oxidation, partly in the pores in the soil, partly in the Thames and -its tributaries, and partly in the reservoirs, filters, and conduits of the Chelsea Water Company, this sewage contamination had been entirely converted into compara- tively innocuous imorganic compounds before its delivery to consumers. A glance at the table shows how vastly superior is the quality of the water of Loch Katrine as compared with that of the best at present supplied to London. 100,000 Ibs. of this water contain but 3°28 lbs. of solid impurity, of which only 0:031 Ib. is nitrogen in the form of nitrates and nitrites, and 0:002 lb. of ammonia, Further, Loch Katrine water exhibits no sewage contamination, either previous or present. The nitrogenous organic matter which has escaped the process of oxidation above described, and which therefore still exists in the water at the time the analysis is made, constitutes what may be appropriately termed the present sewage contamination of the water. 322 The Water Supply of London, | July, The amount of this contamination may be expressed by the number of parts of average filtered London sewage (of the strength above described), which, if contained in 100,000 parts of pure water, would contaminate the latter with the same amount of combined nitrogen. No contamination of this nature has yet been detected in the waters supplied to the metropolis, but the investigations for its discovery have only been made since February last. It will doubtless be consolatory to the consumers of Thames water to know that, although, according to Mr. Bateman, the population within the basin of the Thames above the points at which the water is with- drawn for the supply of London exceeds 1,000,000 persons, the drainage of some 600,000 of whom is poured into the river, the whole of this fecal matter is so completely oxidized before it reaches the water-cisterns of London as to defy the detection of any trace in its noxious or unoxidized condition. If the average flow of Thames water just above the pomt at which the London Companies with- draw their supply be taken at 800,000,000 of gallons daily, the drainage of 600,000 people ought to produce a sewage contamina- tion of 2,250 parts in 100,000. It could scarcely be expected that this calculated number should approximate very closely to that ob- tained by the actual analysis of Thames water, since the calculated number depends upon many contingencies, as for instance, upon the volume of water actually flowing past the points of withdrawal at the time the companies abstracted the water analyzed; and secondly, upon the greater or less retention of the fecal matters, in the sewers of the towns draining into theriver. It is interesting, however, to find that the sewage contamination of Thames water, as determined by analysis, does not differ much from that calculated according to the above data. ‘The analytical table given above shows that the average previous sewage contamination of the water delivered by the five companies drawing their supply from the Thames during the months of February and April, 1867, was 2,355 parts in 100,000 of water, the amount calculated from the number of persons draining into the river being, as just mentioned, 2,250 parts in 100,000 of water. As summer advances and aquatic vegetation becomes vigorous in the bed of the Thames and its tributaries, this coincidence of calculated and analytical results will probably be disturbed, as the water-plants can scarcely fail to with- draw an appreciable amount of nitrates and nitrites from the water, thus diminishing the quantity of combined nitrogen and consequently of previous sewage contamination as determined by analysis. The second important class of impurities contained in water used for domestic purposes consists of certain mineral salts which possess the power of decomposing soap. These substances are the hardening or soap-destroying constituents of water. From a purely sanitary point of view they are of less direct importance than the 1867. ] and the Cholera. 323 organic impurities ; still, by rendering efficient ablution and thorough cleanliness difficult of obtainment, they doubtless indirectly affect the health of communities supplied with waters in which they are present in considerable quantities. The chief hardening ingredients in potable waters are the salts of lime and magnesia. These salts decompose soap; forming curdy and insoluble compounds containing the fatty acids of the soap and the lime and magnesia of the salts. So long as this decomposition goes on the soap fails to produce a frothiness in the water, but when all the lime and magnesia salts have been decomposed by the action of the soap, the slightest further addition of the latter produces a lather when the water is agitated; but this lather is again destroyed by the addition of a further quantity of the hard water. Thus, the addition of hard water to a solution of soap—or the reverse of this operation —causes the production of the insoluble curdy matter above mentioned. Bearing this in mind, it is easy to understand the process of washing the skin with soap and hard water, which may be thus described :—First, the skin is wetted with the water, then soap is applied; the latter soon decomposes all the hardening salts contained in the small quantity of water with which the skin is covered, and there is then formed a strong solution of soap, which penetrates into the pores of the skin. This is the process which goes on whilst a lather is being produced in washing, but now the lather requires to be removed from the skin; how can this be done? Obviously only in one of two ways, wz. by wiping it off with a towel or by rinsing it away with water. In the former case, the pores of the skin are left filled with soap solution; in the latter, they become plugged up with the greasy curdy matter which results from the action of the hard water upon the soap solution occupying the pores of the cuticle. As the latter process of re- moving the lather is the one universally adopted, the operation of washing with soap and hard water is perfectly analogous to that used by the dyer or calico printer when he wishes to fix a pigment in the pores of any tissue. He first introduces into the tubes of the fibre of calico, for instance, a liquid containing one of the in- eredients necessary for the formation of the insoluble pigment, this is followed by another liquid containing the remaining necessary ingredients, the insoluble pigment is then produced within the very tubes of the cotton fibre, and is thus imprisoned in such a manner as to defy removal by subsequent washing. The process of ablution, therefore, in hard water is essentially one of dyeing the skin with the white insoluble greasy and curdy salts of the fatty acids contained in soap. ‘The pores of the skin are thus blocked up, and it is only because the insoluble pigment produced is white that such a repulsive operation is tolerated. To those, however, who have been accustomed to wash in soft water, the 324 The Water Supply of London, | July, abnormal condition of the skin thus induced is fora long time extremely unpleasant. Nevertheless, opinion is not quite unanimous as to the advan- tages of soft water over hard. Some persons consider hard water to be necessary for the supply of the calcareous matter of the bones, others believe soft water to be peculiarly hable to attack and dis- solve the lead of the pipes through which it is conveyed, or of the cisterns in which it is stored. An examination of the grounds upon which these opinions are based would completely refute them, but the limits of this article do not permit of such a digression, and I must therefore content myself with a mere allusion to one or two facts in connection with them. First, as to the necessity of hard water for the supply of the calcare- ous matter of bones. If it be assumed that a man drinks daily half a gallon of Thames water, he obtains from it 3% grains of lime chiefly in the form of chalk. This amounts to not quite 3 oz. per annum, which does not seem to be a very large contribution to bony matter. Now suppose the use of this water to be discontinued and that no part of 1b is replaced by bitter beer, which always contains far more lime in a given volume than Thames water; but we will assume that the individual consumes one-third of a pint of milk per day, he then receives in this quantity of milk more lime than his system can acquire from two quarts of Thames water. Then, as to soft water attackimg and dissolving lead; it is by no means true, as a general proposition, that soft water does attack and dissolve this metal. ‘The very soft water of Loch Ness, as supplied to Inverness, does not attack lead, as evidenced by the unimpaired condition of lead pipes through which that water flowed for six years: neither does the soft water of Ennerdale Lake, supplied to Whitehaven, attack lead. Even those soft waters which do attack the metal, such as those now supplied to Glasgow and Manchester, only do so when the surface of the lead is clean and bright. The action soon ceases, in fact as soon as the metal becomes tarnished the pipes are pro- tected, and no complaints of any symptoms of lead poisoning have for the past ten years been heard from these large cities. Lastly, a sample of very soft water taken from one of the principal streams from which it is proposed to supply London has no action eyen upon clean and bright lead. Notwithstanding the numerous re- searches made in connection with this subject, the causes of the attack of lead by water have not yet been completely elucidated ; it has, however, been established that the presence of oxygen and the comparative absence of carbonic acid in the dissolved gases are essential conditions to this action. Messrs. Graham, Miller, and Hofmann, in their report on the Metropolitan Waters in 1851, first showed that carbonic acid when dissolved in water was a complete pro- | tection against lead contamination, and from a series of experiments 1867. | and the Cholera. 325 recently made I find that 2 volumes of carbonic acid dissolved in 100 yolumes of water completely protect even distilled water from such contamination. Rain water as it descends to the earth dissolves atmospheric gases, and this solution is afterwards continued in brooks and rivers. Of the chief atmospheric gases, carbonic acid is by far the most soluble, 100 vclumes of pure water can dissolve 100 volumes of this gas; oxygen, on the other hand, only dissolves to the extent of 3 volumes in 100 volumes of water. Nevertheless, owing to the much larger proportion of oxygen than of carbonic acid in atmospheric air ( 500: 1), water takes up oxygen more rapidly than carbonic acid, and hence freshly fallen raim-water acts upon lead ; but when the water flows a great distance through an open conduit, the carbonic acid absorbed finally reaches the protecting proportion, and the action upon lead ceases, although the water retains its original softness. Hence there is no necessary connection between soft water and lead corrosion. ven distilled water left in contact with the air for some time loses its property of acting upon lead. The hardness of a water is expressed in parts of carbonate of lime, or of its equivalent of other hardening salts, contained in 100,000 parts of the water, and each part of carbonate of lime con- tained in this quantity of water is generally termed a degree of hardness. This quality of the water may also be more popularly though less accurately expressed by the number of parts of soap destroyed or wasied by 100,000 parts of the water when used for washing purposes. Hach degree of hardness indicates the destruc- tion of 12 parts of the best hard soap by 100,000 parts of water. The followmg table shows the hardness of the London and Loch Katrine waters, according to both these methods of expression :— | HARDNESS. Soar DESTROYED. Nanies of Companies. H February. | April. February. April. THAMES. Chelsea 2 Sela aes 16°2 17°7 194°4 212°4 West Middlesex . . 16°2 16°3 194°4 195°6 Southwark & Vauxhall 16°8 Ley 201°6 212-4 Grand Junction . . Mek a aA 205°2 212°4 Memicin 5 + lw. 16:0 17°74 192-0 212°4 OTHER SOURCES. Mew River. . « - 18°5 16°3 222°0 195°6 East London .. . 18°8 16°0 225°6 192-0 bl ee 23°1 21:1 277°2 253°2 South Essex .. . 21-1 | — Zda" 2 — Water from Loch Katrine as supplied | 3 = 3°6 _ Glasgow 326 The Water Supply of London, [ July, According to this table, the Chelsea company's water possessed, in February last 16-2 degrees of hardness, and 100,000 lbs. of it, when used for washing, destroyed or wasted 194°4 lbs. of soap; whilst Loch Katrine water had only 0:3 degree of hardness, and 100,000 lbs. of this water destroyed only 3:6 lbs. of soap before the detergent action of the latter came into play. Such is the chemical history of the water at present supplied to the metropolis, and it must be borne in mind that, grave as are its defects, the mode of delivery of this water to consumers is still more defective. That in a densely populated city, water should be delivered only once, and for a few minutes, in twenty-four hours, and not at all on Sundays, is a condition of things utterly incompatible with the supply of wholesome and palatable water. Even if the water of Loch Katrine itself were delivered in London, according to the system at present adopted by the metropolitan water companies, it would infallibly be rendered unfit for human consumption after twenty-four hours’ exposure to the vile atmosphere and sewer gases in which the water cisterns of London are systematically placed. The fundamental defects of our present water supply may be thus summed up :— 1. Great previous sewage contamination. 2. Liability to present sewage contamination. 3. Great hardness. 4. Intermittent supply. The waters from the sources of the Severn, and from the Cum- berland lakes have not yet been submitted to the process of investi- gation above indicated, and it is therefore impossible to compare them in all respects with the present metropolitan supply. The water of the Bala Lake, in North Wales, which may be regarded as similar to that which would be supplied by Mr. Bateman’s scheme, was examined by the late Dr. R. D. Thomson, and the waters of the Cumberland lakes have been more elaborately investigated by Pro- fessor Way. From the analyses of these chemists the following numbers are calculated :— Total solid git TARE) act, | eaudaiess. des moged 100,000 parts. Bala Lake . . 2°97 j Sys 13°2 Hawes Water . 5°70 2°°9 34:8 Ullswater .. . 594 3°°0 36-0 Thirlmere . . 5°16 ae | Da, A comparison of these numbers with those given in the previous tables exhibits the great superiority of the proposed waters over . those at present supplied to London, as regards total solid impurity and soap destroying ingredients; whilst it can scarcely be doubted 1867. | and the Cholera. 327 that water obtained from such sources will be as free from dele- terious organic contamination as that of Loch Katrine. In the event of a new source of water supply being at once determined upon, at least seven years must elapse before it can be rendered available to the metropolis ; it therefore becomes important to inquire how far it is possible in the interim to ameliorate our present supply. The first and most obvious improvement would be the substitution of the constant for the «intermittent system of delivery. With certain restrictions, all the metropolitan companies express their willingness to make this change, and with the unani- mity of opinion regarding its advisability, it is difficult to account for the delay in effecting it, unless it arise from the paltry cost involved in the alteration of present fittings, which would fall upon the landlords of small tenements. Most towns of importance in Great Britain have been long supplied with water on the constant system ; why then is this boon denied to London, where it is much more urgently required? Until this alteration is effected it is, for the bulk of the population, almost useless to improve the quality of the water. Where a supply for one or even two days has to be stored in a filthy butt, exposed to the foul atmosphere of a crowded court or alley, good and wholesome water can never reach the lips of the consumers. | The most formidable danger arising from the use of the present water supply is undoubtedly the hability to actual sewage contami- nation such as that which there is every reason to believe destroyed so many lives in the East of London last summer. The fearful import of such contamination is most graphically described by Dr. Farr, in the report of the Registrar General for the week ending July 28th, 1866. It is greatly to be wished that these reports which contain the weekly results of the great hygienic reactions of the community were more generally studied by the public, and especially by those who watch over the public health. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to find in the same space matter of greater or more immediate importance to a civilized nation, and it scarcely admits of doubt that by the prompt action rendered pos- sible by these reports, thousands of lives were saved last summer in the metropolis alone. Describing what he saw in one of his visits to the East of London during the height of the cholera epidemic, Dr. Farr says :—“ 'The mortality is overwhelming in some of the dis- tricts. In Poplar alone, 145; in Bow, 188 people died last week, including Dr. Ansell, the meritorious health officer, and Mr. Seeley, clerk to the Board of Works, whose name figures on the placards. The people are falling ill every hour; you see them of all ages, children and adults, lying about their beds like people under the influence of a deadly poison ; some acutely suffermg, nearly all con- scious of their fate and of all that is going on around them. Here 328 The Water Supply of London, [ July, the doctor is drawn in by the husband to see the wife now attacked ; there the husband lies in spasms; here is an old woman seated dead with eyes wide open; there lies a fine four-year old child, his curly head drooping in death, but his mother says the pulse is strong and he takes what she gives him. An older brother just recovered is running about. Several wards of the London Hospital are full of patients, many of them very young children, in all stages of the disease ; some dying, some well again and playing. The medical men have no rest, and with the Health Officers are nobly doing their duty; brave men ready to lay down their lives for their patients. The people themselves are most patient, most willing to help each other, the women always in front, and none shrinking danger. There is no desertion of children, husbands, wives, fathers, or mothers from fear.” This picture of misery, traced with such a high degree of probability by eminent medical authorities to the sewage pollution of water, suggests the inquiry whether or not anything can be done with regard to our present water supply to prevent such frightful accidents in future. How can we best protect ourselves against this noxious contamination? The answer is, there is no absolutely reliable protection. Filtration through animal charcoal is perhaps the best safeguard, but I have shown that this process fails to remove from water the matter which is believed to constitute cholera poison. Permanganate of potash is also an excellent purifier of water, but there is not the slightest evidence that this agent can destroy cholera poison. Boiling the water for a short time is no guarantee that its noxious qualities are destroyed, for even on the very probable supposition that cholera and other similar poisons are organic germs, we know that many such germs, especially those which are of a low type, retain their vitality after bemg boiled in water, or even after exposure to a temperature of 248° I’. for a con- siderable time. The late Dr. Lindley mentions the fact of raspberry seeds germinating after being boiled for jam, and as syrup boils ata higher temperature than water these seeds must have been exposed to a heat considerably higher than that of boiling water. Nearly twenty years ago a curious red fungus or mould (Oidewm aurantiacum) attacked the bread of Paris. M. Payen exposed pieces of bread, upon which spores of the fungus had been sown, for half-an-hour to a temperature of 248° F'. in tubes; the red fungus afterwards germinated, although its vitality was destroyed when the tempe- rature was raised to 284° F. I have incontrovertible evidence of the production of violent cramps and diarrhoea by the drinking of tea made from water which, previous to boiling, had become con- taminated with sewage. Nevertheless, whilst none of these methods can be relied upon for the destruction of noxious organic matter in water, I am far 1867. | Mr. Jukes and the Geological Society. 329 from wishing to discourage their use as measures of precaution. More especially would I recommend filtration through animal charcoal as a most undoubted and valuable means of greatly reducing the amount of organic matter in water. I find that water will readily pass through a stratum of animal charcoal three feet thick at the rate of 41,472 gallons per day per square foot, the oxidizable organic matter contained in the water bemg reduced to one half. Five hundred tons of animal charcoal would be an ample quantity through which thus to pass the whole of the present metropolitan water supply. This at 137. per ton would cost 6,500/. The charcoal would require to be heated to redness in retorts or ovens for a couple of hours every six months. It would last for two years and would then be worth nearly half its original cost as manure. With regard to the excessive hardness of the London waters, it does not appear that any practicable scheme of amelioration has yet been contrived. Some years ago a beautiful and very simple process of softening hard waters by the addition of lime was devised by Dr. Clark of Aberdeen; but although this process has repeatedly been tried by water companies, it has imvariably been again aban- doned, since, notwithstanding the cheapness of the material employed, the amount of carbonate of lime deposited by the London waters, when submitted to this treatment, was, in the case of such vast volumes of water, so enormous as to cause the process to be pronounced impracticable. It is to be feared therefore that we must for the present be content to block up the pores of our skins with the greasy curd of hard water, but it is very desirable that the other ameliorations of which I have spoken should be carried out at once, although they ought not to delay the introduction of a water supply free from sewage contamination, for until such a supply reaches the metropolis its inhabitants will continue liable to repetitions of the terrible slaughter which occurred last summer, from the effecis of which the east of London has not even yet recovered. It, MR. JUKES AND THE GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY.* Ir not unfrequently happens amongst large bodies of men whose affairs are conducted by a committee, council, or directorate, that the action of the executive will occasionally be disapproved of by some one or more individuals, who may even feel personally injured * * Additional Notes on the Grouping of the Rocks of North Devon-and West Somerset: with a Map and Section.’ By J. Beete Jukes, M.A., F.RS., &e. Preceded by an Introductory Statement. Printed for circulation among the Fellows of the Geological Society of London. Dublin: Webb & Son, 1867, pp. 37. VOL. IV. Z 530 Mr. Jukes and the Geological Society. [ July, thereby. Such differences are not unknown amongst scientific societies, and we now propose to (discuss one which has recently arisen between the council and a distinguished Fellow of one of the most prominent of the learned societies—the Geological Society of London. On March 7th of last year, Mr. J. B. Jukes, local director of the Geological Survey of Ireland, read before the Geological Society a paper ‘‘ On the Carboniferous Slate (or Devonian rocks) and the Old Red Sandstone of South Ireland and North Devon,’ which was published in due course in the Society’s ‘ Quarterly Journal,* oc- cupying fifty closely printed octavo pages. In this paper the author endeavoured to prove two points :—(1) that the Devonian rocks of North Devon are synchronous with the Carboniferous Slate of Ire- land; and (2) that “the Lynton beds are on the same general horizon as those of Baggy Point and Marwood,” although “there appears to be a regular ascending succession of rock-groups from Lynton to the latitude of Barnstaple,” which Mr. Jukes endeavoured to explain by the aid of a “concealed fault running nearly east and west through the centre of North Devon with a large downthrow to the north. In this way he split up the great mass of Devonian rocks of North Devon into alternate zones of Carboniferous Slate and Old Red Sandstone (considered as distinct from Devonian). Than this hypothesis it would be difficult to conceive a more startling heresy in British geology, and the reading of the paper was consequently followed by an animated debate, in which every speaker dissented from the view now for the first time expounded in England. Nevertheless the paper was published in full, for the idea was apparently new, and it is possible that future discoveries may lend it confirmation. Its author saw, however, that to con- vince his associates further evidence was necessary, and accordingly on the 7th of last November he read a second paper, the title of which is prefaced to this article. This paper, it appears, the council of the Society declined to publish, except m the form of an abstract without illustrations; and as this decision did not fall in with the views of the author, the council, at his request, returned to him his manuscript and illustrations, and published only the title of his paper in the ‘ Quarterly Journal.’ Mr. Jukes has therefore printed his second paper as a pamphlet, prefacing it with some observations on the action of the council (at which he felt very much aggrieved), and on the history of the subject, and has sent a copy to every Fellow of the Geological Society. Having thus placed our readers in possession of the essential facts, we can now discuss that part of Mr. Jukes’s preface relating to the action of the council, in which he strikes at the fundamental * Op. cit., vol. xxii., No. 87, August, 1866, pp. 320-371. + See also ‘ Quart. Journ. Science, No. XII. 1867. | Mr. Jukes and the Geological Society. 331 principle regulating the decisions of that body in regard to the pub- lication of papers in the Society’s journal. We must begin by observing that whatever may have been the practice of the council in former days, when it required some vigilance to ensure that the papers should treat strictly of questions of fact—such being the object for which the Society was originally founded—does not now concern us; and our author’s smart ob- servations on the subject are altogether irrelevant, although it is perfectly possible that Mr. Warburton and others may have been at times unreasonably autocratic. It will be as well if we now quote from Mr. Jukes, for the in- formation of our readers, what takes place after a paper has been read before the Society :— “The paper is, at the next meeting of the council, referred to some Fellow of the Society, who is supposed to have special know- ledge of the subjects treated of, and he ‘is requested to answer a printed list of questions which are sent with it. These questions, as well as I can recollect them, inquire whether there is anything personally offensive in the paper; whether there is anything superfluous, or absurd, or manifestly contrary to the principles of the science in it; whether it should be published 1m extenso or only in abstract; whether it should be accompanied with the illustra- tions, or whether any or all of the latter can be dispensed with; and generally, in fact, what is to be done with the paper. “If the referee have the requisite knowledge, and acts with jadgment and impartiality, and takes sufficient trouble to master the paper, of course the system would act in practice as well as it was meant to do theoretically.” Mr. Jukes further illustrates his position as follows :— “T have two or three times acted as referee, and the plan I adopted was to treat it very much as a matter of form, just to look over the paper to see if there was anything in it personally offensive or disrespectful to any one; any obvious lapsus calame which the author would wish to have his attention called to; or anything manifestly childish, such as attempts to reconcile geology with the Mosaic cosmogony ; and, if not, to recommend that it be printed as a matter of course.” According to these extracts the Society undertakes to print in their journal every paper accepted for reading, if it does not contain, m the opinion of the referee and the council, anything personally offensive, or superfluous, or absurd, or manifestly contrary to the principles of the science. If this be true Mr. Jukes has a right to complain, for it would seem, from the intrinsic evidence presented by his paper, that its rejection must rest on other grounds than these. There is, however, a common saying that one tale is always good until another is told, and Mr. Jukes’s tale would cer- z% 2 Do2 Mr. Jukes and the Geological Society. [ July, tainly have been good to all but a select few, had not a pro- minent member of the council of the Society (who avowed himself to be one of the referees) read to the assembled Fellows at a recent meeting the first question on the printed list to which Mr. Jukes has referred, as follows :— “Ts it desirable that the paper, as it stands, should be pub- lished in the ‘Quarterly Journal of the Society,’ as containing new facts, or new views of the bearing of admitted facts, or appa- rently well-founded corrections of important errors as to matters of fact?” It must be admitted that this gives the matter a different com- plexion, and by the light of this information it seems fairly a ques- tion whether the council were not justified in refusing to print more than an abstract of the paper. Unfortunately for Mr. Jukes, he cannot plead ignorance of the stipulations to be complied with, as he owns to having two or three times acted as referee, and must there- fore have had the questions addressed to him over and over again. That he did not discharge his duty more conscientiously is to be _ regretted in every way; had he done so, he would probably not have taken umbrage at the fate of his own paper. The proper course’ for him to have followed as referee, if he did not approve of the rules of the Society in respect to the publishing of papers, is manifestly, as was observed by his commentator, to have declined to act. ‘Then, remembering his experience as referee he would pro- bably not have selected the Society’s journal as a medium for the publication of his papers on North Devon, although he would thus have deprived hinself of the innocent excitement respecting his first paper, to which he acknowledges in the following paragraph :-— “As regards the paper just mentioned, I must confess that it was with some feeling of curiosity as to what would be done with it, that I sent it to the Geological Society of London, and after it was read I marked its progress through the council with some of the interest and amusement one feels in watching an uncertain experiment.” | It may be asked, why did Mr. Jukes feel any uncertainty as to the publication of his first paper? Fortunately, since that matter was decided, the Royal Geological Society of Ireland have published a number of their journal, or Echo would still have been compelled to answer, Why? ‘The opportune appearance of that publication a few months ago has, however, solved the mystery, and to this effect :—On May 10th, 1865, Mr. Jukes read a paper before that Society, entitled “Notes for a Comparison between the Rocks of the South-west of Ireland and those of North Devon and of Rhenish Prussia (in the neighbourhood of Coblentz),” and on December 8th, 1865, he read another, entitled “Further Notes on the Classifica- tion of the Rocks of North Devon;” and it appears to us that they 1867. | Mr. Jukes and the Geological Society. 333 contain the essence of his papers read before the Geological Society of London. ‘The council of the latter body were probably ignorant of the contents of these Irish papers, or the probability is that they would have saved the cost of fifty pages of their journal. In other words, Mr. Jukes’s first paper would have shared the fate of his second. The council of the Geological Society are in the habit, accord- ing to Mr. Jukes, of referring papers to some Fellow, who is sup- posed to have special knowledge of the subject; and he gives an instance in respect of his first paper, in which the council took the opinion of two gentlemen before coming to a decision. If the council act with such care and deliberation it seems that the theo- retical excellence of the referee system (admitted by Mr. Jukes) must be attained in practice. We have ourselves been unable to discover any important new facts in Mr. Jukes’s second paper, or any “apparently well-founded corrections of errors as to matters of fact.” ‘There is certainly propounded a new view of an admitted fact ; but as it is not supported. by evidence it could have been given quite as well in an abstract. Moreover, it is so purely hypothetical, that had it been enunciated by a young geologist, it would have been considered too “manifestly childish” for argument. ‘This view may be stated as follows:—Near Wiveliscombe an east and west fault was indicated long ago by Sir Henry De la Beche, stretching for a distance of not more than four miles, and probably less than three. Mr. Jukes’s new view, unsupported by evidence, is that this fault is continued for nearly thirty miles in a westerly direction. Contributors to the ‘Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society are very rarely given so ample a space as fifty pages for the enunciation and illustration of their views, and therefore Mr. Jukes seems a little unreasonable in complaining that considerable further Space was not granted for the publication of so feeble an addition to his evidence as that before us. Fellows of the Society who were present at the reading of this paper will remember how prevalent was the opinion that its author, so far from strengthening his case on that evening, had considerably damaged it, by resorting to so far-fetched an expedient as that we have just noticed. It is also incumbent upon the council of the Society to use the narrow limits of a yearly octavo volume. to the best advantage, and there can be no doubt that the time, thought, and trouble expended on the subject by the council as a body, and’ individually by the respective referees, have contributed in a large measure to obtaming for the Society’s journal the well-merited reputation which it enjoys both in England and on the Continent. Finally, after a careful examination of the evidence, we are unable to come to any other conclusions than the following :—(1) 334 Food as a Motive Power. (July, That Mr. Jukes, forgetting the Geological Society’s rules, has felt aggrieved at the refusal to publish in full a paper whose fate he would doubtless have predicted, had he remembered the Society’s regulations ;* and (2), that he has precipitately written and printed an attack on the council of the Society without first ascertaming that his recollection of the Society’s rules was sufficiently exact—a course which can only be compared to rushing into a law-suit without legal advice, on the strength of vague impressions, and with no real knowledge of facts.t IIL FOOD AS A MOTIVE POWER. By C. W. Hzaroy, Professor of Chemistry to Charing-Cross Hospital Medical School. No physiologist now doubts that the force exerted in and by an animal is derived from the combination of the oxygen absorbed in the lungs with the solid or liquid substances formed in the body from the food. Hence it follows that if the body remains un- changed in weight after a certain period of time, the force exerted in it during that period is accurately represented by the calorific value of the food, minus the calorific value of the excreta. If the body has increased in weight, a store of potential energy must have accumulated in it; whereas if it has diminished, some portion of the force developed must have been derived from the store provided by previous increase. To avoid unnecessary complexity, it is best to assume the first of these cases, that, namely, in which the food is exactly equal to the requirement of the body. Whatever intermediate conditions it may assume, there can be no doubt that the force developed in the body is mainly expressed in the final forms of Heat and Mechanical Work. It becomes, there- fore, a problem of the greatest importance both to physiology and to dietetics to determine the relation which these two great factors bear to each other and to the different constituents of human food. Much of the work effected by the muscles is afterwards converted, inside the body, into heat, while some of the heat, that, for instance, which is employed in evaporation, is reconverted into work; but . these conversions, although they present the gravest difficulties in quantitative investigations, do not affect the main principles which we have to discuss. The first problem obviously is to find from the day’s food, the * Vol. i., Part 2, 1866. + It speaks more for the impartiality of the council of the Geological Society that they refused a place to such an eminent geologist for his second paper, than that they granted it for his first against their convictions.—THE Eprrors. 1867. ] Food as a Motive Power. 335 total amount of force, the actual energy, which it is capable of pro- ducing when burnt in the body. The materials for this calculation haye been supplied by a series of most valuable experiments which haye recently been conducted by Dr. Frankland, who published his results in a lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, June 8, 1866. He selected some of the most important articles of food, and burnt one gramme of each of them ina vessel surrounded with water. He noted carefully the extent to which the water became heated ; from this it was easy to calculate the calorific value of the food, and from this its work-equivalent in metre-kilogrammes. In the case of nitrogenous foods, such as meat and bread, a certain portion always leaves the body without undergoing oxidation. The calorific yalue of this residue was determined by Frankland and deducted from that of the food, and we have therefore, for the first time, a trustworthy statement of the actual force-values of these substances. The following table contains a few of the most important figures. A great deal of the enormous differences perceived is due to the different quantities of water which the various substances contain ; but even when they are compared in the dry state, great differences are observed. Fats and oils are superior to all other substances in this respect :— Actual Energy | Weight and Cost of various articles required | of 1 gramme as to be oxidized in the body to raise 140 lbs. tieed Gs Fooo. | burnt in body. to height of 10,000 feet, -kilo- eight in lbs. é | fee ig vemiied. Price per lb. Cost, gi id, &. d. Cod-liver oil ace 3857 0°553 3.6 J 114 _ +) 5 a 3841 0°555 0 10 0 5s oo 3077 0°693 L6G 1 04 Cheshire cheese . . . 1846 1°156 0 10 0 114 See 1665 1:281 0. 23 0 34 . 2 kee 1550 1°377 16 0 22 O04 feeup Suear . : . 1418 1:505 0 6 0 EL = 910 2°345 0 2 0 42 5 23 604 3°532 Le, 3. 64 ees 2. ket 422 3'068 04 0 (of PEA ele 178 12-020 0 1 1 0} It is curious to compare with these figures the calorific value of coal. The burning of 1 gramme of coal yields an actual energy of 2,538 metre-kilogrammes, and we will assume its price to be 25s. per ton. Equal quantities of force can then be obtained by the burning of— Coal costing Is. Oatmeal AS 35s. Butter . 125s. or £6 Os. Lean beef ,, 425s. 21 5s. The food which is the cheapest enumerated as a force producer, is, 336 Food as a Motive Power. - [July, thirty-five times as expensive as coal, and it is therefore not won- derful that human labour cannot compete in economy with that of the steam-engine. Food is, indeed, as Donders remarks, a very dear form of fuel. We have now come to a question which is infinitely more complex than the first, and which embraces the most important of physiological problems. We may suppose ourselves acquainted with the composition and force-value of the food, and we have next to inquire what changes it undergoes and what are its functions in the organism. A complete discussion of this subject would be an elaborate treatise on physiology, and even so would unfortunately afford but a very imperfect answer to the questions. But a few points must be briefly glanced at, and they will serve as an intro- duction to some recently acquired theories and facts of great practical importance. In the first place it is essential to notice that all the food which plays any important part in the body is first converted into blood. ‘The processes of digestion, absorption, and sanguification have this for their object, and it 1s unnecessary to consider them in detail here. It is in the blood that our inquiry practically commences. That the blood consists of two parts, corpuscles and liquor-sanguinis, is familiar to everybody, and it has been clearly demonstrated that the corpuscles are the main agents in animal oxidation, taking up oxygen in the lungs and eiving it out again in the course of the circulation. Much of the oxidation so effected undoubtedly takes place in the blood, and to this oxidation is attributed by all physiologists a great part of the heat of the body. According to Liebig, it is non-nitrogenous sub- stances only, substances derived from the starch, fat, and sugar of the food, which are oxidized in this way, and no work, but only heat can result from the oxidation. ‘To the nitrogenous compounds of the blood, the albumen, fibrin, &c., he assigned the exclusive function of nourishing, or, as it were, repairing the solid tissues - which are undoubtedly subject to incessant disintegration and decay as a condition of their life. He accordingly divided the constituents of food into respiratory and plastic elements, or, to use a simpler nomenclature, into “ heat-givers” and “ flesh-formers.” This brilliant generalization has been adopted by the great majority of physio- logisis. There can be no doubt that nutritive matter does pass out through the thin walls of the capillaries and irrigate the neigh- bouring tissues. The cells, or elementary parts, of which a tissue consists, develop and grow at the expense of this nutritive fluid. When the cells have completed their term of life they decompose into simpler forms of matter, and pass back, together with the excess of the nutritive fluid, into the blood. This restoration to the blood is no doubt chiefly effected by the agency of the lymphatics, which take their origin, as recent anatomical research has shown, 1867. | Food as a Motive Power. Jor in the interspaces between the capillaries. In its passage through the lymphatic glands, all of the lymph that is susceptible of the process is reconverted into blood. Closely connected with Liebig’s food theory, is his theory of the origin of muscular work. The final result of the disintegration of muscular tissue is undoubtedly its oxidation; but Liebig assumed that this was the «mmediate result of it. He supposed, and it is still generally supposed by physiologists, that a portion of oxygen Separated from its combination in the blood and traversed the walls of the capillaries with the nutritive fluid, and that as fast as the new cells were built up by the one, the old ones were oxidized by the other; the oxidized and now lifeless products being carried back to the blood to be ultimately excreted from the body as capable of no further use. The force liberated in this oxidation was the force which contracted the muscle, and so did the work. Lastly, it was assumed by Liebig that inasmuch as the muscular tissue was formed from the flesh-formers of the food, and was almost identical in composition with them, the whole work of the body was derived from the flesh-formers, which were therefore a true measure of the amount of work which the body could accomplish. When muscle, or the flesh-formers of food, are oxidized in the body, their nitrogen is chiefly converted into a crystalline substance called urea, the ereat bulk, if not the whole, of which is excreted through the kidneys. Hence the amount of urea excreted has been adopted by Haughton,* and subsequently by Playfair,t as a measure of the amount of work effected by the organism. But these brilliant and beautiful theories encountered a certain amount of opposition even from the very first. Lawes and Gilbert, the well-known agricultural chemists, in describing some experi- ments on the fattening of cattle made twenty years ago, pointed out that the amount of urea which a pig excreted could be doubled merely by doubling the amount of nitrogen in its food, and this without any alteration in the quantity of work it did. Mayer, in a - work{ which will for ever remain a landmark in the history of science, combatted some portions of the theory with irresistible force, and more recently Voit in Germany and Dr. Edward Smith in Eng- land showed that the work of an animal could be enormously in- creased without any proportionate augmentation in the excretion of urea. ‘This, with the important observation of Lawes and Gilbert, proved conclusively that the amount of work done could not be measured by the urea excreted. The theory which Mayer supported with such ability and which had indeed, as Frankland points out, * «Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science,’ vol. xxviii. eé seq. + ‘On the Food of Man, in relation to his Useful Work.’ ‘Die Organische Bewegung in ihrem Zusammenhange mit dem Stoffwechsel. Heilbronn,’ 1845. 338 Food as a Motive Power. [ July, been foreshadowed by that wonderful genius Dr. Mayow, of Bath, nearly 200 years ago, now began to revive, and Traube went so far as to argue that the oxidation of muscle, far from being the sole cause of muscular work, contributed nothing whatever to it, but that the whole of the work was .done by the combustion of fats and hydrates of carbon (sugar, starch, &c.). Traube’s calculations have been shown by Professor Donders, of Utrecht, to be inconclusive, but the same view has been recently maintained by two Swiss savants, Fick and Wislicenus, who endeavoured to establish it by a very remarkable experiment.* After abstaining for some hours from all food containing nitrogen, they weighed themselves with their accoutrements, and set out at day-break to ascend a neighbouring mountain, the Faulhorn. They ascertained the quantity of nitrogen excreted during and directly after the ascent, and calculated from it the amount of muscle, or other substance of similar composition, which must have been decomposed in the body to yield it. This was easy enough, for nitrogen constitutes about 15 per cent. of each of these substances. After applying certain necessary corrections, they found that the nitrogen indicated about 37 grammes of the dry muscle of each observer. They then proceeded to calculate the amount of force which could be produced by the oxidation of this quantity of muscle. Frankland has since determined this experimentally in the same manner as he did the force-value of food, and I therefore give his figures as being more reliable. He finds that it is 68,376 metre-kilogrammes; more than this amount of work could not possibly have been effected by the burning in the body of 37 grammes of muscle. What then was the actual work accomplished by the two experimenters? The mountain was 1,956 metres high. Fick weighed 66 kilogrammes and Wislicenus 76 kilogrammes, and these weights were raised to the top of the mountain. ‘The work which each experimenter accomplished is therefore found by multiplying his weight by the height of the mountain. It is equal for :— Fick, to 129,096 metre-kilogrammes. Wislicenus, to 148,656 | The oxidation of muscle therefore will not account for one-half of the actual work done, and if allowance be made for the work done by the heart and lungs, and for the fact demonstrated by Haiden- hain, that the force developed is always at least double of that actually employed, the result of the experiment is even more striking. __ One part of Liebig’stheory, that, namely, which derives muscular work exclusively from muscular oxidation, must therefore be finally abandoned. This experiment has but supplied the finishing blow to 99 * ¢Philosophical Magazine,’ June, 1866 (Supplement). 1867. | Food as a Motive Power. 339 what was already untenable; for, even apart from the researches already mentioned, Donders had, in a masterly essay published in 1864,* proved its insufliciency. Fick and Wislicenus indeed feel themselves justified in adopting the hypothesis of Traube, but this is not a necessary result of their experiment. We have before us therefore two opposite views of the origin of muscular power. One has been already shown to be in its entirety untenable, but are we therefore to conclude, as Fick and Wislicenus have done, that the other is necessarily true? Most important con- - sequences hinge upon the answer to the question, for if the view so long accepted be incorrect, all our notions of dietetics must be revised. The first argument which is brought against the new hypothesis is founded upon common experience, which certainly seems to teach that a larger quantity of flesh-formers is necessary in the food when extra work is done. The superior strength of the British navvy is usually ascribed, not without probability, to the quantity of meat which he eats; and Donders sagaciously points to the case of the horse, which, as every one knows, may be fed upon grass when in idleness, but must be supplied with oats—a food richer in flesh- formers-—if hard work is expected of him. Without assigning too high a value to arguments of this kind, it must be admitted that they are not destitute of force, and that it is somewhat difficult to answer them upon Traube’s view. But more cogent arguments are not wanting. In the first place, it is not literally true that muscular work produces no alteration in the amount of nitrogen excreted; on the contrary, a small though irregular increase is always noted, a fact which has been confirmed within the present year by some well conducted experiments of Dr. Parkes’s.t Itis indeed difficult, as Donders remarks, to imagine how it could be otherwise in many cases, for some animals may be fed, as Pettenkoffer and Voit fed a dog, and Savory, rats, upon food containing nothing but flesh-formers. In such cases the extra-work being done at the expense of nitrogenous food, must be attended with increased excretion of nitrogen. Moreover, it has been shown by numerous experimenters that the disintegration of muscular tissue is always increased by muscular work. Creatin, creatinine, lactic acid, and sugar, all of them products of the decomposition of muscle, have been found to be present in more than the usual quantity in a muscle which has been repeatedly contracted. Very nearly the whole of these substances are oxidized in the body into carbonic acid, water, and urea. It is therefore argued that the oxidation of muscle is as likely to contribute to the motive power of the muscle * Translated in ‘ Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science,’ February and May, 1866. + ‘Proceedings of the Royal Society,’ Jan. 1867. 340 Food as a Motive Power. [July, as that of the so-called respiratory elements of the food; and I find it impossible to dissent from this view. Ranke, in his splendid essay,* has indeed made use of these facts in support of the theory of Liebig, but valuable as his researches are, they can hardly be said to have made out his case. He proved that some of the pro- ducts of the decomposition of muscle, and particularly lactic acid, had the power of hindering or even of arresting muscular movement. He found that the feeling of fatigue in an overworked muscle was mainly due to the accumulation of lactic acid in it; that it could be removed by washing out the lactic acid with water, and induced in a muscle which had been long at rest by the injection into it of a solution of lactic acid, or even of an aqueous decoction of a fatigued muscle! From these and numberless other experiments he argued that the amount of work done by an animal was nearly constant, unusual muscular exertion being always followed by a corresponding period of quiescence, which lasted until the products of disintegra- tion were removed from the muscles, or neutralized. But his expe- riments, although extremely ingenious, were necessarily only of a qualitative kind, and cannot therefore be put in opposition to the direct quantitative proofs alleged upon the other side. But there is a third view of this great question which was clearly propounded by Mayer, but which seems to have been unaccountably neglected by later physiologists. It appears to me to afford a means of reconciling many of the difficulties which beset the subject. It is founded upon a consideration of the function which the blood fulfils in the matter. When blood traverses the capillaries of a muscle, it becomes darkened in colour. A portion of its colouring matter is reduced to the purple state, and at the same time some of the corpuscles disappear. During muscular contrac- tion these changes are intensified, and the loosely combined oxygen of the colourmg matter may even, as Ludwig and Sczelkow have found, be reduced to one-third of the average amount present during rest. Hence, muscular contraction is attended with a more rapid consumption of the oxygen of the corpuscle. According to the current theories we are therefore compelled to suppose that on the stimulus of the motor nerve, oxygen leaves its combination in the corpuscle, passes through, without combining with the easily oxidiz- ible constituents of the liquor sanguinis, traverses the thin walls of the capillary in company with the outgoing nutritive fluid, and only exerts its force and produces oxidation when it is in contact with some comparatively distant muscle fibre. That this is the view usually taken by physiologists is shown by an incidental remark made by Dr. Bence Jones, in his address as President of the chemical section of the British Association at the last meeting. * Tetanus—Hine Physiologische Studie. Leipzig, 1865. 1867.] Food as a Motive Power. 341 Alluding to one of Graham’s recent discoveries, he said :—* The importance of this discovery in metallurgy, and its application to the physiology of respiration and of the passage of oxygen from the blood into the textures, must be apparent to all.” But nothing could be more unlikely, on chemical grounds, than such a mode of oxidation. Oxygen, when just liberated from combination, is usually more active in entering into new combinations,* and yet, here we are called upon to believe that a great portion of it leaves one combination without any assignable cause, and remains for a time in a free state, although present in the same solution with matters for which it has a great affinity. That the oxygen of the colouring matter is capable of combining directly with some of the nitrogenous compounds of the blood, is evident from an experiment of Stokes’s, in which a solution of blood was found to reduce itself when preserved in a closed vessel. The experiment further proves that the oxidizing power of the blood is not necessarily dependent upon nerve-action, although it may, very probably, be stimulated by it. Mayer saw this difficulty in the current theory of tissue-oxida- tion, and met it by placing the seat of all oxidation in the blood, and by assigning to the corpuscles the office of effecting directly the whole of it. Both heat and muscular work derive their source, according to him, from blood-oxidation, some portion of the oxida- tion yielding work, the remainder heat. He says, “The muscle produces mechanical work at the expense of the chemical action expended in its capillary vessels.” Claude Bernard seems to have adopted a similar view, and expresses it occasionally with great clearness. The following pas- sage occurs in his celebrated ‘ Legons sur les Liquides de l’Or- ganisme :’ |— “Tl est infiniment probable que l’acide carbonique du sang veineux résulte d’une oxydation qui s’est effectuée dans le globule sanguine lui-méme. lLorsque le sang traverse les capillaires, il y aurait entre lui et les tissus non échange de gaz, mais peut-étre échange de liquides. Par suite des conditions nouvelles que créerait cet échange, l’oxygene du globule serait en partie employé a oxyder le carbone du globule lui-méme.” This therefore is the third, and it appears to me the only tenable hypothesis of the source of muscular power. I shall speak of it as Mayer’s hypothesis. ‘The blood is the seat of all oxidation, and therefore the originator of all force in the body. Some part of this force is evolved in the form of muscular work, the greater part of * It is, however, right to add, that oxygen is probably held in cruorine, in what Kekulé calls ‘* molecular combination,’ since it has been shown that car- bonic oxide displaces from it its own volume of oxygen. In this case the liberated * oxygen would not be more than usually active. ¢ Vol. i., 342. 342 Food as a Motive Power. | Jquy, the remainder in that of heat. How it comes about that oxidation inside a capillary is converted into muscular movement outside, we do not know with certainty. The conversion is effected under the con- trol of the nervous system, and we may therefore venture to suppose that some of the force set free during blood-oxidation may, through the agency of the nerves, take the form of electric currents, which are the direct agents in the muscular work. This, however, is little better than a guess, and as such is entitled to very little reliance. The function of the nerves is the most obscure of all physiological problems, and the difficulty which it presents in this particular hypothesis is not greater than that which enshrouds all others on the subject. The establishment of Mayer’s hypothesis would of course render meaningless the controversy between the followers of Liebig and those of Traube, for as both fats and carbohydrates on the one side, and the products of muscle metamorphosis on the other, are oxidized in the blood, both may equally be supposed to be originators of mus- cular power. It becomes therefore a matter of the utmost import- ance to test Mayer’s view by every means we possess. I think it is possible, by an extension of one of his own lines of argument, to approach very near to a demonstration of its truth. He pointed out that the fluid which passed out from the blood through the walls of the capillaries was afterwards returned to the blood through the lym- phatics, and that the quantity of this exudate could therefore be measured by the quantity of lymph. In this way he calculated that not one per cent. of the blood left the blood vessels in the course of the circulation, and he therefore inferred that not less than 99-100ths of the total oxidation of the body must be affected inside the blood vessels. But this argument is not entirely satisfac- tory, for it might be objected that the exudate, small though it was in amount, carried with it a sufficient quantity of oxygen for the oxidation, and therefore for the work of the muscles. I have there- fore suggested another, which appears to me much more conyincing. I purposely exaggerate every element of the calculation, in order as far as possible to overstate the case against me. The first thing to be done is to estimate the extreme quantity of fluid which can be supposed to exude through the walls of the blood- vessels in twenty-four hours. We have better data for this purpose than Mayer possessed. Bidder and Schmidt estimate the quantity of lymph and chyle together daily added to the blood at 283 lbs. Of this 64 Ibs. is chyle, which comes from the food, and may be left out of the calculation. But I will assume the quantity of lymph alone to be 30 Ibs. It may be objected that some of the exudate may return directly to the capillaries without traversing the lymphatic system. If this be the case, the quantity so returned could not be - large, as the blood flows at a considerable pressure—a pressure 1867. ] Food as a Motive Power. 343 which would tend to prevent such a return. Nevertheless, I will, on this supposition, double the amount already given, and take it at 60lbs. A large proportion of this would arise from glands and other parts which do little or no muscular work; but this I neglect. Finally, it may be urged that some portion of the exudate may escape as perspiration without returning to the blood at all. I therefore add 6 lbs. to obviate this source of error, and thus get a total daily exudate of 66 lbs. or 30 kilogrammes, an amount which I think every physiologist will admit is an extreme overstatement. How much oxygen can possibly be supposed to pass out in solution in this 80 kilogrammes of exudate? Berzelius found that the serum of blood would not dissolve more oxygen than water would. This would give as the quantity of oxygen exuded in 24 hours, less than 14 grammes; but I will assume that the exudate will dissolve 20 times as much oxygen as this, in fact, that it will absorb more than the moist corpuscles of the blood of the portal vein, which are superior to all others in this respect. The estimate is so extravagant that it is almost absurd to make it. It gives, as the daily exudate of oxygen through the muscles, 25°74 grammes. If the work of the muscles is done by oxidation outside the walls of the capillaries, it must all be done by this quantity of oxygen, and it is easy to show that the quantity is entirely insuffi- cient for the purpose, whether it were employed in the oxidation of muscle or of fat. 25°74 grammes of oxygen would oxidize 17°31 grammes of muscle, and thus yield a force of 31,210 metre-kilogrammes, or 8:87 erammes of fat, and thus yield a force 34,070 metre-kilogrammes., To compare with this I will give an extremely low estimate of the work accomplished in the body in 24 hours, omitting doubtful items :— Metre-kilogrammes, Work of the heart (Donders) . ; - 70,000 Work of the lungs. - ° ‘ - 10,000 Work of the muscles - : . - 20,000 100,000 The force actually generated to effect this work must, as Haiden- hain has shown, be at least double the above quantity, so that even upon this extravagant calculation, the oxygen, which may be sup- posed to pass out from the capillaries to the muscular tissues, can only account for about one-sixth of the work done by the muscles. The establishment of Mayer's hypothesis would unfortunately not help us much in the solution of the practical question, What kind of food is most suitable for the man who does hard work ? Both flesh-formers and heat-givers are available for the purpose, and provided the former are sufficient to repair the daily waste of the tissues, it is possibly immaterial which is employed. Even this, 344 Inght and Darkness. (July, however, is not certain, and as we are still ignorant of the exact relation which tissue disintegration bears to work, we cannot as yet pretend to determine @ priori the quantity of flesh-formers neces- sary under conditions of work. The practical solution which expe- rience has provided for the problem must for the present rule our dietary scales, although it can hardly be doubted that a more scien- tific knowledge upon the subject will before long be gained. IV. LIGHT AND DARKNESS. Wrinstow on Licut.*—Jouns on THE BuiInp.7 REGARDING the nature of Light, there have been, and perhaps may still be said to be, two distinct theories extant. The older view conceives of light as a form of matter, infinitely diffused, but still matter, which is itself projected from the light-emitting body, and falls upon the surrounding objects; the newer theory treats light as a force, and necessitates the belief in an interplanetary Ether, also a form of matter infinitely attenuated, but capable of being agitated. in waves by the luminous force. The latter or undulatory theory of light, which makes it to be a mode of motion, is now almost com- pletely established, and although the human mind cannot yet form a proper conception of the interplanetary ether, the medium acted upon, still that may be said also to be one of the acknowledged facts of physical science. _ Around this subject cluster many eminent reputations; that of Newton stands out the most prominent; it was he who first analyzed a ray, and showed it to be far more complicated than it appeared to be without the intervention of the prism. The elder Herschel and Ritter revealed the character of the ron-luminous but calorific, and chemical, or as Robert Hunt has called them, the Actinic Rays. Stokes, Hunt, Locke, Joule, Balfour Stewart, Tyndall, and many others, have added to our knowledge of the nature and effect of light; and yet that knowledge is but in its infancy. ; Wonderful as are the operations of ight upon inanimate nature, operations which have caused it to be employed in photography to perpetuate the memory of the living and to recall most vividly the history of the past; still more wonderful is its influence upon living forms, whether in the animal or plant world. * ¢Tight—its Influence on Lifeand Health.’ By Forbes Winslow, M.D., D.C.L., Oxon. Longmans. + ‘Blind People: their Works and Ways, with Sketches of the Lives of Some Famous Blind Men.” By Rev. B. G. Johns, M.A., Chaplain of the Blind School, St. George’s Fields. Illustrated. John Murray. 1867. | Light and Darkness. 345 Its absence or presence causes marked modifications, not only in the colours of plants, but in their growth. It attracts vege- table forms or parts of them in the most extraordinary manner, and with recurring regularity. A.wonderful sight, well known to microscopists, is that of the little volvox-globator, gathered in a green mass towards the light when some water containing these exquisite forms is exposed to its influence. very child has watched the sunflower as its great round face is turned, as though by some machinery within, and follows the orb of day in its course through the heavens; and does not the gastronomic epicure well know that his asparagus, if carefully bedded up and kept in darkness, will not have the green hue which it assumes as soon as its head peeps above the soil ? And as to men and animals, we have only to look at the stunted creatures of the dark and cold regions of the world; or at those who are bred underground or in the dismal courts of large cities in our own temperate zone, to be satisfied that with light we have robust, strong, and well-developed bodies; and without it, the reverse of these qualities. As we have already stated, the undulatory theory of light is now the accepted theory ; and although the nature of the interplanetary ether which fills all space is a matter of individual conception, yet the presence of some such medium must be recognized along with the dynamic theory. And when we come to consider the nature of those material forms and organizations which must be permeated by that infinitely attenuated form of matter before light can penetrate them, and compare some of the transparent solids with fiuids or gases which are only partially translucent, we become still more puzzled to understand the character of the medium upon which the force acts that we term light. The arrangement of the atoms which exclude it from one portion of our precious organ of sight, and concentrate it in another, are truly marvellous, and sad indeed is the fate of the creature in whom the natural order of the paris is so disturbed, that whilst all is bright, heavenly, smiling light without, there is nought but gloom and darkness within. Dr. Winslow tells us but little worth remembering, and almost nothing that is new, concerning the physiological effect of Light, and sums up his information upon that portion of the subject with which we should have supposed him to be the best acquainted (namely, the influence of light wpon the insane), with the admission that he knows little or nothing about it, and in these words, “I freely admit that placing but little faith in what has been recorded or said on the subject, I have not kept any systematic register as to the effect of different phases of the moon on the insane.”* Of the modern theories of light we take him to be ignorant, for : * P, 233. VOL. IV. Dts 346 ; Light and Darkness. [July, whilst we have to wade through page after page of valueless gossip as to what men in semi-civilized ages believed concerning its nature and influences, we are told in a brief sentence that “it would be irrelevant to enter into the discussion of the varied theories of light that have been propounded.”* With the science of Zoology, too, the author seems to be but little better acquainted, and nothing is more annoying than to find, that as soon as he approaches a portion of his subject at all likely to be interesting, he dismisses it with some passing remark, which shows that he has never given the question a serious thought or is unable to deal with it from recent information. Indeed, it would have been better for the author's reputation if he had left this work unpublished ; and before he sits down again and attempts to deal with a subject of such vast importance, we should recommend him to keep a diary of his personal observations, which would be sure to be interesting and valuable, stead of putting together a mass of useless information, which commences with nothing and ends as it begins. But of Mr. Johns’s book we can speak in a widely different tone. He tells us honestly what is the real effect of darkness upon the minds of those who are deprived of sight. very line he has printed is suggestive and full of meaning, and to many a seeing reader, his story of the blind, their works and ways, will give fresh light and impart new sympathies. Some persons may be disposed to think that the honest estimate which he gives us of the mental and moral qualities of the blind, _might to some extent withdraw public sympathy from them, but that will by no means be the case. He shows indeed that they are apt through neglect or indulgence to become selfish, suspicious, and irreverent; that a human being born blind can never attain the mental standard which he would reach if he had received all his senses; but these facts (which apply equally to the deaf and dumb) in no-way lessen the responsibility of those to whose care the blind are entrusted; quite the reverse; if it has pleased Providence to deprive them of a certain sense, and place them in a position of inferiority in that respect, it becomes the duty of those who can see, to use every possible expedient for supplying the place of the missing sense, and to keep the patient clear of those quick- sands, to which the loss of eyesight exposes him. The author’s account of the progress of a blind boy under instruction is deeply interesting. When he first enters the Asylum or School,— “Tt is all so utterly new and strange to him, that for the first day or two he is entirely dependent upon some pupil’s or teacher’s hand to get as far as the school-room, the chapel, dining-room, or Pek ahs 1867. ] Light and Darkness. 347 basket-shop, all of which are widely apart, but first impressions with the blind are all in all, and within the week the chances are that out of his 80 blind fellow-pupils he has chosen one as a com- panion and probably his friend, and for several years to come, who, if need be, conveys him across the open yard to any special point ; to the dormitory or through the more intricate navigation of stair- ease leading to the band-room. In a month all the plain sailing is fairly mastered. He can find his way from the dining-room to the basket-shop, and down that shop 150 yards long, just to the very site of his own box, on which he sits to split the withies for basket-work. He knows his own box, too, from Smith’s and Brown’s on either side of him. In a year he will know probably his own tools from theirs by some little flaw or feature, not patent to the eye of the looker-on ; in a couple of years he will know the handle of the door to music-room, No. 5 from that of No. 6; he will run quickly with a half-finished basket in his hand from the workshop, across a wide yard, exactly to the very door-step of the open shed in which is a tank for soaking his willow-work.”* Of his touch, the author says :—‘‘ By it he knows his own clothes and almost all the property he possesses: his tools, box, bed, hat, fiddle, cupboard, seat in chapel, school-room, and workshop ; by it he reads his chapter in St. John and Robinson Crusoe; he plays chess or dominoes, works a sum in long division, or writes a letter home to his mother, which she can read with her eyes and he with his fingers. By the help of touch he weaves a rug of coloured wools, embracing every variety of scroll-work or of those peculiar flowers and fruits which grow only on carpet-land ; or fringes with . delicate green and red; a door-mat for a lady’s boudoir; by touch he sees any curiosity, such as a lamp from the Pyramids, or a scrap of mineral which you describe to him, and which, having once handled, he always speaks of as having seen. He thinks he can read a good deal of your character by touch when you shake hands with him ; and when he has heard you talk for a few minutes he will make a good guess at your age, temper, ability, and stature. “Saunderson” (a blind mathematician whose history the author gives in another chapter) “at times guessed even more than this. He had been sitting one day and pleasantly chatting with some visitors for an hour, when one of them wished the company good morning and lett the room. ‘ What white teeth that lady has,’ said the sarcastic pro- fessor. ‘ How can you possibly tell that?’ said a friend. ‘ Because,’ . was the ready answer, ‘for the last half-hour she has done nothing but laugh,’ ”} The author describes with equal vivacity and effect the various employments of the blind. How they work arithmetic; emboss letters; weave; play chess; write poetry; the latter he believes * P. 9 and 10, 7 P. tPand 12. 2a 2 348 Light and Darkness. — [Suly, that those born blind can never do with full effect, for their con- ceptions of external nature must be erroneous, and he shows that their verses are rather high-flown than poetical. As regards the infidelity of Saunderson, the blind mathematician ; we think that the author, who is an orthodox clergyman, takes an erroneous view of it. There are many considerations which have not occurred to him, and he judges not only the blind mathematician, but also other blind people somewhat incorrectly in this respect. In the first place, if the mathematician had seen he might have been just as great a sceptic; we know mathematicians who require mathematical proofs of everything. Now Saunderson did believe in the “ God of Newton.”* Again, he tells ust that he “fell into excess in matters of drnk;” and was naturally morose and sarcastic. Should he then judge other blind people by such a standard, or at- tribute Saunderson’s scepticism to his blindness? Is he aware that in his description of the habits and character of the blind, he is himself sometimes a little hard? He must see great contrasts, too ; a trust far more implicit than those can have who see as well as think ; and which presents in greater contrast the scepticism which he believes to be exaggerated by physical darkness. But these are trifling faults in his admirable book. We quite agree with the author concerning the form of embossed type to be employed. It should “ resemble as nearly as possible the type in use amongst seeing men, that the blind scholar in learning to read may have every possible help from the remembrance of letters he may once have seen, but which now his fingers must feel for him, or from any one who can read an ordinary book, or if need be, that a friend may read to him.t The words must be correctly spelt in full” (not phonetically written, as in some systems in use among the blind), ‘“ that when he learns to write, others may read his written words;” and all should be clear and well defined, that his hardened fingers may easily trace the letters.§ The author cites some wonderful instances of retentive memory among the blind :—“ Miss Walker, who had mastered five languages and knew all the Psalms and New Testament by heart,” and a young man now in the school in St. George’s Fields, “who can repeat not only the whole of the 150 prayer-book psalms, and a large number of metrical psalms and hymns, as well as a considerable amount of modern poetry, including Goldsmith’s ‘Deserted Village,’ but—in- credible as it may seem—the whole of Milton’s ‘ Paradise Lost,’ with marginal notes and a biography.| | In addition to a large amount of valuable statistical information, the author gives us some useful hints as to the causes of blindness, * P53. + P. 178. + There appears to be some clerical error here. 117. | P. 65. 1867. | Light and Darkness. 349 and we can well believe that “two of its stanchest allies” are “typhus and scarlet fever.” Here comes another piercing cry on behalf of the poor which reaches to our inmost souls; a cry for pure air; pure water; light; roomy and cleanly dwellings; and a blow at that great curse of our day, the gin-shop! Ask, What is the cause of deafness? and you will hear, Scarlet fever and typhus. Whence arises blindness? again, “Scarlet fever and typhus.” Epilepsy? “Typhus.” Insanity ? “'Typhus.” Ask again, Whence comes scarlet fever and typhus? and the answers are, “ Drunkenness; overcrowding; filth; impure water; impure air!” When will men turn their earnest thoughts to “reform bills” for the cure of these evils ? Mr. Johns gives some short but interesting biographies of blind men ; of Huber, the well-known blind naturalist; Metcalf, the road- maker ; Stanley, the musician ; Saunderson, the mathematician. He also tells some humorous anecdotes of blind tramps and beggars ; and gives a poetical account of a visit of Mendelssohn to the Blind School at Zurich :— “He was there in the hot summer of 1842 to rest and recruit his overtaxed brain, and though besieged by a crowd of eager musicians and amateurs, would accept of no invitation. But hearmg that the pupils of the Blind School were most anxious, as they said, to see him, in their favour he made an exception. He spoke to the sightless assembly in kindest words; he listened to their songs and choruses, and score in hand, to some even of thelr own com- positions, showing clearly his interest and pleasure. Seeing a cor- rection on the score, and finding it to be the blind musician’s own work, ‘It is right, he kindly said, ‘and makes the passage more correct, but it was better and more striking before; take care that your corrections are improvements—a cultivated ear wants no rules, but is its own rule and measure.’ And then the great musician asked permission to sit down at their piano, and wandered away into one of those wild and tender strains of speaking melody for which he was so famous. His silent, wrapt audience listened so intently to the ‘song without words,’ that a pin-fall would have broken the stillness. One by one, over the eager faces, crept the air of deep, quiet joy, until in the midst of the great flood of mingling harmonies, a voice came to them out of the very chorus they had just been singing. Then their enthusiasm knew no bounds. The great master had carried them away at his will, to heights of joy and triumphant praise before unknown; he had whispered to them of sorrow, and the cloudy ways of life, in words of soft unbroken tenderness ; and now he stirred their inmost depths by a strain of their own weaving, into which he poured a new tide of living song, new grace, and new meaning. No words could tell what they felt ; they could have pressed him to their very hearts for joy. This was 350 The Systematic Study of Annelids. 3 [ July, not long before the great musician’s death ; but he still lives in the Blind School at Zurich, and there still remains, as a precious relic, the master’s chair in which he sat.”* With this extract we close Mr. Johns’s book; and we must admit that having opened it with a critic’s eye, and with the reviewer's thoughts, as we advanced in its perusal we were more and more sorely tempted to “cut it up,” and to transfer the rich and fertile “ cuttings” bodily into the pages of this Journal. But that would not have been fair to the author, and we hope that the lengthy extracts which we have been led to insert, along with the excellent illustrations, which we can not give, will do something towards securing for the author that large circle of readers to which his honest, truthful, and poetical descriptions of the works and ways of the blind are justly entitled. VY. THE SYSTEMATIC STUDY OT ANNELIDS. . Johnston: Catalogue of Worms (Brit. Mus.), 1865. . Kinberg: Hugenies Resa (Aproditea), 1857. Schmarda: Neue wirbellose Thiere. 1861. Ehlers: Die Borstenwiirmer (1st Part), 1864. Malmeren: Nordiska Hafs-Annulater, 1865. . De Quatrefages: Annélides et Géphyriens, 1865. . Malmgren: Annulata Polycheta Spetsbergix, Gronlandiz, Islandie, et Scandinaviz, 1867. THERE can be little doubt that human knowledge and science have hitherto presented, and will continue to present, the same order of evolution as other progressive phenomena. We trace it from the simple to the complex, from the general to the special; but most markedly and distinctly has it progressed from the comprehension of plain and obvious facts and appearances, to that of less plain and less obvious phenomena. Small though the illustration may be, yet it is worth remarking that the various phases through which the study of systematic zoology has passed, furnish a very clear instance of this progress. Omitting the classification of Aristotle— which was far in advance of the philosophy of the contemporaries or disciples of that marvellous man—we must start with Linnzeus, as the father of modern Zoology. Of invertebrate animals, he only dis- tinguished two great groups, his Insecta and his Vermes, the latter being a heterogeneous assemblage of all the creatures whose characters were less obvious than those of the former. Cuvier separated the Molluscs and Ringed-worms from this group when he gave to the world his fourfold division of the animal kingdom; but these same ~ * P. 99 to 101. : “ID OH De 1867. | The Systematic Study of Annelrds. 351 Ringed-worms and his Radiata were obscure groups, and the former have up to the latest years been badly treated. Whilst Linné’s In- secta have been everywhere studied and ardently collected, whilst shell collectors and conchologists flourish in every small town and village, and over thirty pounds is not unfrequently given for some rare Cyprza, but few men are to be found who would hunt out worms from their secret retreats, or keep a collection of their beautiful forms preserved in spirit. Linné himself knew the characteristics of but very few worms, and only made five genera of Annelids (properly so called), making thus a much smaller advance upon his predecessors than in the case of Insects and Molluscs. The reason of this is to be found in the general obscurity sur- rounding these animals; not only are they obscure in their habits, hiding deep in sand and mud, lurking under stones or in the cracks of rocks, but the differences which separate them specifically and generically from one another are not at all obvious, nearly all con- forming to two or three types of general shape and appearance, whilst many are minute and fragile. Add to this that they can only be preserved in spirits or similar fluids, and the list of diffi- culties is complete. By some of the authors, the title of whose works we have placed at the head of this article, the microscope has been used most successfully in finding sure characters by which many species can be distinguished ; and under the auspices of MM. Kinberg, Malmgren, and Ehlers, the study of Annelids is assuming a character of certainty and definiteness which cannot fail to attract new workers. Nothing can be more beautiful of its sort than a collection of Annelids preserved in spirits, many having the most gorgeous hues and most graceful forms; surely it will not be long before we have numerous collectors and devotees of worms, who will of course call themselves Annelidologists or Scolecologists, or by some other equally euphonious title. We wish here briefly to point out the structures which are made use of in arranging Annelids and determining their species by M. Malmgren and his colleagues, leaving aside the general anatomy and physiology of the group, m which there is very much yet to be learnt and done. The term “Annelids” does not convey to the mind of every naturalist the same meaning ; and it is as well, perhaps, to settle upon some one of the limitations of the group given by various writers. Cuvier’s Annelids included the marine bristle - bearing worms, the earth and fresh-water worms, and the leeches. Lamarck, Savigny, and others included with these that curious group of animals connecting the Worms and Hchinoderms—the Gephyrea. Dr. Johnston, again, embraces in his group of Annelids the soft, ciliated, ringless ‘Turbellaria, whilst MM. Van Beneden and Gervais turn out the Leeches and admit the Gephyrea. For the 302 The Systematic Study of Annelids. [July, ‘student of species and their general superficial relations, there can be no doubt that Ehlers’ group of Cheetopoda, embracing the marine and fresh-water bristle-bearing worms (Borstenwirmer), the Poly- cheeta and the Oligocheta of Grube—to the exclusion of Leeches, Gephyriens, Turbellarians, and such-like doubtful orders—forms a very convenient and well-limited field of work. Understanding thus, then, the term Annelids, let us see what striking characteristics they present in common. In the first place, the body is composed of a series of more or less similar rings, from which in all, a single or double series of horny bristles or hooklets is developed on each side of the body. In the marine Chetopods a soft appendage, or “foot,” is also developed on each side of most of the rings, and three or perhaps more of these rings coalesce to form a head, which in many cases is very highly organized. In the earth and fresh-water Cheetopods, on the other hand, no foot is ever developed, and the head consequently has a quite simple form, . destitute of any tactile or sensory appendages. The modifications of the head and feet (in those species possessing them) and the form of the bristles or setze, which require a microscope of high power for their examination, are the characters which are available for generic, specific, and other divisions. It would be impossible here to run through the whole group of Chetopods, which embraces now many hundreds of species; we may, however, take one or two ex- amples from Dr. Malmgren’s last published work. The genus Aphrodita, into which Linné threw all the scale- bearing Annelids he knew, has been gradually broken up into nearly thirty genera, grouped in four families. We have selected two common species belonging to the same family, Polynoina, but to different genera, for illustration: the one is the Lepidonotus squa- matus, the other the Harmothoé imbricata; they are both about an inch-and-a-half in length, and frequent the same habitats, viz. the under-surfaces of rocks and stones within tide-mark. ‘These two forms and the species allied to each were, till the observations of Kinbere, kept in one genus, Lepidonotus, as defined by Leach. In Figs. 1 and 2 the heads of these two worms are drawn very care- fully on an enlarged scale. In. each there is a more or less bifid cephalic lobe, carrying two pairs of eyes, and connected with a median tentacle, pt., a pair of antenne, a., a pair of palpi P., and two pairs of tentacular or peristomial cirri, p.c. These parts and their bases are all disposed around the cephalic lobe, and form the head; but in Lepidonotus, the antenne arise from the tips of the cephalic lobe, whilst in Harmothoé they spring from the base of the median tentacle. A further very concise difference is exhibited by the sete fixed in the soft feet, which are broader and more deeply serrated — in one than the other (Figs. 5, 6, 9,10). The foot differs in each a little also in the proportion of its parts. It is an example of 1867. | The Systematic Study of Annelids. — 303 that sort of foot which ig divisible into two branches, a noto- podium and a neuropodium (Figs. 7 and 8, née. nre.), each of these two parts carrying a cylindrical appendage or cirrus and its bunch of sete. The notopodial cirri in the two figures differ considerably, resembling the peristomial cirri: they are smooth in Lepidonotus, but carry short papillose hairs in Harmothoé. The group to which the Polynoina belong is remarkable for having flat scale-like bodies covering the back, placed in pairs on the alternate rings, or, as in the Sigalionina, on nearly every ring. The scales are in many species very beautiful objects, and furnish very important means of distinguishing forms. In the genus Lepidonotus there are only twelve pairs, and these adhere firmly to their attachment ; in Harmothoé there are fifteen, or sometimes, twenty pairs, which very readily slip off from the body. In Figs. 3, 4, the scales of the forms we are noticing are drawn. Those of H. imbricata ex- hibit the greatest variation in colour, being brown, black, purple, yellow, or mottled with these colours. Let us glance now at another very different-looking group of Annelids. ‘The Nereids are long snake-like worms, often attaining alength of ten or twelve inches. In the plate, the head of Nerevs pelagica and some of its sete and a foot are drawn (Figs. 11, 12, 13), the parts homologous with those of the Polynoina just described are similarly lettered. The very characteristic form of the sete is of great value in grouping the species of this family as well as the lobation of the feet. The suppression or modification of the parts of the foot and their homologues attached to the head, constitute the essential differences of the various tribes of marine worms. In some, the rings immediately succeeding the head differ from the most posterior in the form and character of their appendages; in most of these the appendages of the head are curiously modified so as to form long filamentous branchie, Fig. 15, and sometimes also in tubicolous species an “operculum ” which closes the tube in which they live. The greater or less develop- ment of a thoracic region has thus led to the division of marine Chzetopods into two principal groups, the Errant and the Sedentary, the latter group comprising those in which the thoracic region ig present; a third group is sometimes distinguished which bear a superficial resemblance to the earth-worms, and have been, by some writers, associated with the Sedentary, by others with the Errant forms. The modifications of the foot and its appendages are the most remarkable in the Errant group, whilst the head exhibits the greatest peculiarities in the Sedentariz. In Phyllodoce (an errant genus) the notopodial cirrus has the form of a large leaf-shaped appendage; the rings forming ‘the animal being very numerous, there are often more than a hundred pairs of the appendages, fre- quently brilliantly coloured, with which the animal rows itself 854 The Systematic Study of Annelids. [July, through the water. In Hunice, Nerine, and Arenicola branchial filaments are developed in connection with the foot, in which the red fluid of the worm circulates. In Syllis the cirri are very long and moniliform, attaining in a kindred genus, Guttiola, a length considerably greater than that of the worm’s body, to which they seem attached like so many Gorgon’s locks. In Polyopthalmus an eye is developed on each foot. The further modification of these parts leads to very numerous minor generic divisions, all resting mainly upon differences in the form of the appendages and sete of the foot, and only to be discovered by attentive and careful examin- ation with the microscope. Various forms of sete are drawn in Figs. 14, 16, 17, 18, belonging respectively to Sabellaria, Praxilla, Leprea, and Leucodore, and all equally characteristic of the genera and species to which they belong. The Oligocheeta (fresh-water worms) have not received even as much attention as the Polycheta (the marine), and indeed this 1s not surprising, for without the use of a microscope applied to the sete, it is impossible to distinguish some of the species with any certainty. Much has yet to be done with this group of Annelids; for it has not at present been touched upon by Kinberg, Ehlers, or Malmgren. The sete are fewer in number in this group (whence its name) than in the one we first looked at, and there are no appen- dages in the form of feet; hence the setz become of still greater importance to the zoologist. In some species (T'ubifex) the sete are hair-like bodies; in others they are stout and short (Lumbricus, Phreoryctes), Fig. 20,21; in others again they have a bifid apex (Chetogaster), Fig. 24 ; or this sort of seta may be associated with other hair-like ones (Clitellio, &c.), Figs. 22 and 23 ; in Ctenodrilus the sete are pectinated, Fig.25. There are many species of Oligocheta, though the group is far less numerous than the Polycheta. They are to be found in moist earth, in the ooze of streams and rivers, and in sandy soils also. Some writers contend that no Oligocheta are marine, whilst it is cer- tain that no Polychzeta are fresh-water or terrestrial. , The geographical distribution of Chzetopods is a matter of which very little is known, Schmarda’s and Kinberg’s works being the principal sources of information, whilst M. de Quatrefage’s volumes contain figures and descriptions of many foreign species. It appears that very many genera are cosmopolitan and apparently some spe- cies; but on this matter we must hope for sounder mformation when we have students of Annelids as ardent and numerous as our entomologists, ornithologists, and other specialists. The study of the development and anatomy of the Chetopods does not belong to the specialist, and whilst it no doubt has a higher importance than the mere recognition of specific differences, cannot supersede such work. There are many men whose minds are so 1867. | ‘The Systematic Study of Annelids. BOD moulded that the power of investigating anatomical and embryolo- gical structures does not belong to them, whilst they may possess the most acute perception of specific differences of form and exhibit great patience and skill in the collection and arrangement of speci- mens. There are other men who have no sympathy with the accu- mulators of species, and see but little value in such work, devoting themselves rather to anatomical and physiological researches. There is work for both classes of zoologists, both are valuable labourers ; for men combining the powers of the two are few and far between. It is to the first class that we look for an extended knowledge of the Annelida; we believe we have shown that there is a wide but well-defined field of study in the Chaetopodous Annelids—and trust that some fresh workers may be induced to enter on it. One word remains to be said with regard to each of the books in particular, the names of which stand at the head of this article. We must warn intending “scolecologists” against the ‘ British Museum Catalogue of Worms,’ which is very far indeed behind its time, and will be of but little use.. It would be unjust to blame Dr. Baird for this, whose name stands as editor. The work is really the old notes accumulated during many years by Dr. Johnston, and was almost in its present condition ten years since, when it was quite up to the time. Grube’s researches on, and classification of, Annelida, have since become everywhere recognized, and now the Catalogue can only be found useful as furnishing a list of localities and some few observations on habits, colour, &c., by that very excellent observer, the late Dr. Johnston. Kinberg’s work on the Aphrodztea, collected by the exploring ship ‘ Hugénie,’ is of great value, since it is written in Latin, con- tains the definitions of many new genera and species, and is well illustrated. Schmarda’s work contains descriptions and coloured illustrations of a great number of species from all parts of the world. Khlers’ Borstenwiirmer promises to be a most complete and valuable work as far as the characters of genera are concerned. The large, finely drawn plates are among the most beautiful we have seen. ‘The work is, however, chiefly interesting to the anatomist. In 1865, A. J. Malmgren, one of the indefatigable Scandinavian zoologists who number amongst them Sars, Loven, Steenstrup, Lill- jeborg, Kroyer, and Kinberg, published the first part of a work on the North Sea Annelids (5), which will be of the greatest value to the English Student. The descriptions, localities, and such matters are given in Latin, and hence ignorance of the Swedish tongue need not deter any one from using the book. The part already issued contains the species belonging to the Aphroditacea, Polynoinia, Acoetea, Sigalionina, Phyllodocea, Nephthydea, and Lycoridea, illustrated with detailed drawings of the heads, setae, feet, and other 356 The Systematic Siudy of Annelids. [July, appendages, executed with great care. We have also received from Dr. Malmgren an illustrated Catalogue of the northern Annelids in the Stockholm Museum, in which many additional species are figured, and some valuable remarks on the species in the British Museum collection examined by him, are given. The synonymy of species, which is always a troublesome matter, is unusually per- plexing in the Annelids, and Dr. Malmgren has devoted. great pains and research to setting iton a right basis. The brilliantly illustrated volumes published by M. de Quatre- fages in 1865 will be found very useful. They contain most excel- lent chapters on the anatomy and general natural history of the class, and descriptions of many species. The absence of figures of many “of the new species renders them rather obscure. M. de Quatrefages has not consented to the minute generic divisions of some of his contemporaries, and indeed we venture to think Dr. Malmgren has carried this method of arrangement a little too far ; in the family Polynoina, the genera proposed by Kinberg seem to us sufficiently mmute—they were six in number; but Dr. Malm- gren is not content with less than seventeen. A work on the British Annelids and Turbellarians is promised by the Ray Society. Dr. McIntosh is the gentleman who has undertaken this gigantic task, and he really needs all the help that can be given to him by local and other naturalists. Specimens and coloured drawings from life are the only way in which this help can be given, and we trust that Dr. McIntosh may not long have to grapple with the Annelids single-handed., EXPLANATION OF THE PLATE. Fig. 1. Head of Lepidonotus squamatus, after Kinberg; JL. cephalic lobe; pt. prostomial tentacle; a. antenne; P. palpi; p.c. peristomial cirri. Fig. 2. Head of Harmothoé imbricata, after Malmgren ; letters as in Fig. 1. 3. Elytron of Lepidonotus squamatus. 4, Elytron of Harmothoé imbricata. 5. Notopodial seta of L. squamatus. Fig. 6. Neuropodial ,, 7. Foot and appendages of Ti squamatus. ntc. notopodial cirrus; mre. neu- ropodial cirrus ; s. setee. 8..Foot of H. imbricata ; letters as in Fig. 7, . 9. Notopodial seta of HL. imbricata. Fig. 10. Neuropodial seta ,, Fig. 11. Notopodial seta of Nereis ‘plagica (after Malmgren). Fig. 12. Head of Nereis pelagica ; letters as in Fig. 1. Fig. 13. Foot of N. pelagica ; letters as in Fig. 7. Fig. 14. Seta of Sabellaria spinulosa (Malmgren). Fig. 15. Head of Chone Duneri (Malmgren). Fig. 16. Seta of Prazxilla gracilis (Malmgren). Fig. 17. Seta of Leprea textrix (Malmgren), Fig. 18. Seta of Leucodore ciliata. Fig. 19. Head of Clitellio arenarius. Fig. 20. Seta of Phreoryctes Menkianus. Fig. 21. Seta of wmbricus terrestris. tt o. SS SSSA SSS ware ly uU SSS ON ne Te SSR S a Q SS SSSSSSSSSSS|SSS SSSOSSSSs peter wane as Nes, aish 1867.] | On the Application of Sewage to the Soil. BOT Fic a3, {Seta of Cliteltio Fig. 24. Seta of Chetogaster vermicularis. Fig. 25. Seta of Ctenodrilus pardalis. : N.B—The figures are enlarged to different scales; the sete are very highly magnified. VI. ON THE APPLICATION OF SEWAGE TO THE SOIL. By nature man is improvident ; in the midst of plenty he is wasteful and inconsiderate; and it is perhaps one of the chief blessings of civilization, that it brings with it conditions calculated to reform this defect in his character. , Where food is plentiful, and the surface of the earth thinly populated, men think little of economy in regard to the products of the soil, and rarely reflect upon the necessity of providing either for their own future wants or for those of their posterity. But in those countries where the land is valuable, the population crowded, and where men are dependent for the supply of their wants upon the industry and productions of neighbouring states, their sense of foresight is quickened, and they cease to think of to-day only, and seek to penetrate into and provide for the future. In our last number we drew attention to a movement which has for its object the provision of improved dwellings for the artisan class in our large towns, and we then expressed the view that legislation on that subject is of far greater importance to the well-being of the community, than any enactment in connection with the enfranchise- ment of the lower classes ;* and now it becomes our duty promi- nently to direct attention to another national reform which will, we feel confident, be regarded at no very distant period,as equalling if not exceeding in importance either of those to which reference has been made ; namely, the utilization of sewage, especially in our large towns. — Our readers little dream how wide and numerous are the rami- fications of this question. ‘The successful execution of the scheme will save innumerable lives, will conduce to the comfort, add to the means of support, and cheapen the food of the poorest as well as of the richer classes. Without such a reform, our cities would soon become (what - portions of them are already) centres of pestilence ; meat and bread would be enhanced in value even more rapidly than they are at present ; waste lands would remain waste lands for ever, and whilst we should neglect, as now, the most useful fertilizing agent that we possess, casting it into the sea as an alternative to prevent its pol- luting our rivers and destroying the valuable stores of fish which * «The Artizans’ and Labourers’ Dwellings Bill:” Quarterly Journal of Science,’ No. xiii., p. 215. 358 On the Application of Sewage to the Soil. [July, they contain, we should still be obliged to import at an enormous cost similar materials from foreign lands, which are becoming rapidly exhausted by the constant drain upon them. Certain principles are now well established with respect to this great question, and these may be enumerated as follows :— First, in regard to its sanitary aspect. The present system of disposing of the refuse of our large towns by removing it in a dry (or we should rather say, moist) and solid condition is unhealthy and difficult, and with an increasing population it will become more so from year to year. Great care will be necessary in effecting the change from the “dry” to the “ wet” system, for it has been shown beyond a doubt, that the larger the amount of fecal matter discharged into the sewers, the greater will be the difficulty in preventing the escape of noxious gases; and it was recently shown by an opponent of the new system, that an imperfect construction of the water-closet or of its connection with the sewers, might even lead to the pollution of the drinking-water supplied to families through the suction or passage of gases from one set of pipes to the other. To obviate these difficulties two conditions are necessary ; care- fully constructed appliances for receiving, carrying away, and storing (when not required for immediate use) the sewage to be utilized, and a large and constant water-supply. It would be wasting our own time and that of our readers, to discuss the various minor objections which have been raised against the new system, either by persons interested in some patent, or by those who have hobbies of their own to ride. The fiat has gone forth, that the old system of defecation shall cease; it is troublesome, noisome, degrading (very degrading to those labourers who are employed upon it), and barbarous; and it kills its hundreds annually in our large towns. Just as we have plainly stated the sanitary difficulties as well as the advantages of the new system, so we will now, with equal frankness, detail its commercial and economic benefits and refer likewise to its difficulties. The immediate and undeniable advan- tages which have already arisen, and will continue to result from the application of sewage to the soil are, the recovery of waste lands and an increase in the area of pasture land, and with it a larger supply of meat, butter, and cheese. To these advantages we see at present no limit even in Great Britain. It is merely a question of steam-power and iron-piping—and there is not a sandy common, foreshore, or plain, which may not be converted into a smiling meadow, yielding repeated crops of succulent grasses for the nourishment of innumerable herds of cattle. Of this fact there are proofs enough in the operations which have already been carried on for a century on the Craigentinny Mawdesi. 1al of Science NOX + Jour Rafter ly jarter] aks WEL \ MAP. SKE ECH \ LIVERPOOL SEWAGE UTILISATION SCHEME. Lathom Bickerstatf tte ~ PCLrany West Derby AY VAAN YN \ \ \ SENN dst He Zs \\ SAR SSS NOY fs 4 SS \ K Wa SEN NUON \ yh f Y “2 Br i 2b S , YN > We , LV IIL \ LQ Y pr Ze \ Nia \ \ \ ~ \ \\ Wek STEIN Sa VN \\ \ \ eA Na " EASA \ a2 Np CCN EN \ NO CONN Oe NS SOND ES, : / \ \ \ Say \ . VES ’ LSS SUNNY Baa NSS MA Cay py WITS OVS WOE NT AQ AUT, Y . NES ‘ SVN NA SARNIA NCA ER (cy NUS SRG SAN NESTOR SIRI SES NC SANT hag NS ASAE Say WAS N ON NE EAS 4 SPN .ANNSNY UEN Hanhart Gly. ~ 1867. ] On the Application of Sewage to the Sorl. 359 Meadows below Edinburgh, and which yield 30 or 40 tons of grass per acre; some parts of these meadows have been recently reclaimed from the sea-shore; near Rugby, where Mr. Lawes found the produce of the soil to be im direct proportion to the quantity of sewage applied; at Mr. Marriage’s farm of 300 acres near Croydon, which is almost wholly under sewage and Italian rye-grass (this seems to be the plant to which it has been applied with the sreatest success), and where 30 or 40 tons of grass per acre were mown in 1864; upon sea-land below Shoeburyness, where rye-grass having been sown, and manured with sewage, at once became fertile and yielded heavy crops; and the case recently reported in a letter from the secretary of the Metropolitan Sewage Company to the ‘Times,’ which deserves special notice. . The work was done upon “the Lodge Farm” near Barking, and is thus described by Mr. Morgan, the secretary :-— “ Notwithstanding the previously severe weather, a crop of Italian rye-grass was cut in the early part of April and weighed 9 tons per acre The same plot was cut a second time on the 15th May, the crop weighing 12 tons per acre. On May 4 a crop was taken from the adjoining piece of land which weighed 18 tons per acre. There are some 70 acres of land under irrigation, which, it is expected, will cut six times during the year.” Now, it must be quite clear, that with meat, butter, cheese, and milk constantly increasing in value, the enormous additions to our pasture areas which are sure to result from the reclamation of waste lands, cannot fail to be of great public benefit; indeed this new source of supply, coupled with the increasing consumption, by cattle, of artificial food (such as linseed-cake, rape-cake, cotton-cake, and palm-nut meal) will, we hope, in time, arrest the upward tendency in the value of those indispensable human requirements. The obstacles to be contended against by the promoters of this great scheme are few, the chief one being that which accompanies all new undertakings, namely, prejudice. Fortunately, however, the diffusion of knowledge amongst the farming community spreads almost as rapidly as in every other class; and whilst such men as Messrs. Lawes, Gilbert, J. Chalmers Morton, J. F. Bateman, and Mr. Robert Neilson, form the front rank, led on by so enthusiastic, but at the same time so judicious a captain as Lord Robert Montague, there is little fear for the ultimate success of the undertaking. The most recent development of the scheme (briefly referred to in our number of last January*) is the one represented in the accompanying plan for utilizing the sewage of Liverpool. This gigantic and philanthropic undertaking will fulfil all the con- ditions named in the early part of this essay. It will relieve the vast and unhealthy town of Liverpool of one of its chief sources of * «Journal of Science,’ No. xiii. Agricultural Chronicle. 360 On the Application of Sewage to the Sort. [ July, disease ; will provide for the conveyance of the right thing to the right place—will reclaim whole tracts of sand, on which nothing now thrives but broom and rushes, into rich and fruitful meadows ; and will set an example that is sure to be followed by other large communities. From the circular which we have received, it would appear that the promoters of the scheme (and it is already a company incorpc- rated by Act of Parliament) intend to proceed cautiously. At first they mean to collect the sewage, which will become richer and richer every year, in consequence of the changes taking place in the system of defecation at Liverpool, and having first raised it by steam power just outside of the town, to convey it through a system of pipes into the townships of Bootle, Linacre, Litherland, Orrell, Great Crosby, Little Crosby, Ince Blundell, and Altcar, comprising an area of between 18,000 and 20,000 acres, to which the sewage may be profitably applied. “The engineers of the company estimate the cost of delivering 300,000 gallons of sewage daily as far as Little Crosby, and placing it within the reach of the farmers of about 5,000 acres, at about 12,0002. If, however, it was deemed advisable to supply the entire area comprised in the above-named townships, the quantity re- quired would be on the average one million gallons per diem, the cost of which would be about 28,0007.” “If a branch pipe were carried up towards Maghull, the cost would be increased to 36,0002, and the area would be about 26,000 acres. These would comprise the whole of the engineering expenses, but it will be for the sub- scribers to the company to determine the extent to which the under- taking should be carried at its commencement. “In the township of Little Crosby, about 2,000 acres of land belong to Major Blundell, who is favourable to the scheme, and has offered to place at the disposal of the company a considerable area intersected by the Liverpool and Southport Railway, on which Sewage may be used in order to show the effects produced by its application. ‘The works are designed so as to supply the farmers in the district with such quantities as they may require.” The chief promoters of the gigantic undertaking are Lord Robert Montague, Mr. Bateman, C.E., Serjeant Wheeler, LL.D., E. K. Muspratt, Esq., the Borough Engineer, the Water Engineer of Liverpool; the corporation aids the scheme by supplying the sewage, appoints two of its members as Directors of the Company, and, we believe, will participate in the profits when they attain a certain sum. | But it is not on account of any anticipated commercial advan- tages which may accrue that we recommend the public to encourage this great movement (and we refer of course not to one particular scheme, but to the National undertaking). Ever since this Periodical 1867. ] The Progress of Science Abroad. 361 was commenced we have watched it closely, and its development will be found noted from time to time in our Agricultural and Chemical Chronicles. But now it ceases to be an experimental, and becomes a practical National movement, which deserves and will command the sanction and support of every sanitarian, of every agriculturist, and perhaps, before long, of too many needy speculators. Out of evil cometh good, and if the next mania should be for “ Utilization of Sewage Company’s Shares,” and it should even ruin a few here and there, the ultimate result of the periodical attack, should it manifest itself under this aspect, would be beneficial to the great mass of the population. Let us, however, trust that no such means will be resorted to for pushing the national enterprise; let us rather hope that a growing sense of responsibility on the part of the guardians of health in our large towns, and the anxiety to utilize every foot of land and every blade of grass will contribute to bring about so desirable a change as that now commencing in our sanitary and agricultural arrangements. It is hardly necessary to add, that the movement will be watched by us in the future, as it has been in the past, with earnest anxiety for its success, and that whenever or wherever any new development may present itself, it will always be hailed with satisfaction and encouraged to the utmost of our limited powers. Vil. THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE ABROAD. 1. Sesion Publica, Aniversario vigesimo-septimo del Instituto Médico Valenciano. Valencia: Imprenta de D. José M. Garin. 2. Geology and Agriculture. By EH. St. John Fairman, F.GS., F.R.G.S., &. - Florence: printed by G. Barbera. 3. Haperimental Investigations connected with the Supply of Water from the Hooghly to Calcutta. By David Waldie, Esq., F.C.S. From the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. 4. Intercolonial Exhibition of 1866—Mining and Mineral Sta- — tastics. By R. Brough Smyth, F.G.8. Lond., &. Melbourne: Blundell & Ford. 5. The American Naturalist—a Popular Illustrated Magazine of Natural History. Salem: Essex Institute (Tribner & Co., London). Ffow apt we all are to confine our observations on every subject to the limited sphere in which we are daily accustomed to move. The artist rarely troubles himself about the productions of any pencil but his own, or that of his immediate neighbour; seldom does the littératewr of one country watch and make himself ac- VOL. Iv. 2 8B 362 The Progress of Science Abroad. [ July, quainted with the poetry and drama of neighbouring nations who use a different tongue, unless perchance one or two brilliant gems should have been translated and set in the formal frame of his native jeweller. And so too it is with science. There are busy hands at work in every part of the world gathering up nature's treasures, and thoughtful brains poring over her secrets and attempting to unravel her mysteries ; but how little do the men of one land know what those in another are about ? Such of our readers as are accustomed to glance over the list of publications which are forwarded to us for review, must have been surprised from time to time on reading the titles of books and essays which reach us from far distant lands; but all we can do, in the majority of cases, is to acknowledge their receipt, or transfer some novelty from their pages to our Chronicles of Science. Let us, however, to-day, drink a little deeper of these foreign draughts ; let us, for curiosity’s sake, glance cursorily over a few of the a ale which have just reached us from various parts of the world. : Here we have, first of all, an odd-looking pamphlet, innocent of thread or paste, folded in a remarkable sheet of pink paper for a cover, and printed on rough dark-coloured paper. It is called ‘Sesion Publica, Aniversario vigésimo-séptimo del Instituto Médico Valenciano ;’ then comes a device composed of sundry skulls, stills, books, and a bust, but the engraving of which is so primitive, that we cannot make out whether it is mtended for Galen or Aiscu- lapius ; and on opening the pamphlet we find it to be the ‘ Discurso Inaugural pronunciado el dia 31 de Marzo’ de 1867, by “ D. Nor- verto de Arcas Benitez,” Licentiate of the Faculty of Pharmacy, &c., to the Medical Institute of Valencia. It runs on to nearly ninety pages, treats of almost everything material and immaterial, and whilst its orthodoxy is undoubted, it does not convey anything either new or interesting ; in fact, it is essentially Spanish in its character, and, as will be seen from the following statements, per- mits no biological heresy :— “1*, Que el instinto y la inteligencia son espicificamente difer- entes. “2°, Que por el instinto, el animal se mueve sin conocimiento de causa.”"* “Que no hay voluntad ni facultades sino en el hombre, como Ilevo probado, y por lo tanto almo.”f | He believes instinct and intelligence to be specifically different ; and as to instinct, the animal moves without consciousness; he believes that he has proved that man alone has a will, and pro- ceeds then to show that his soul is immaterial. What say you to that, Shade of Lamarck ? and you, oh! Huxley? believer im the imperceptible transition from “ blind force to conscious intellect and * P59. + P. 62. 1867. | The Progress of Science Abroad. 363 will!” Read Don (or Doctor, we don’t know which) Norverto de Areas Benitez, and forsake the errors of your ways. We confess that we are not much flattered by the very small influence that the ‘Quarterly Journal of Science’ seems to have exercised on the blue blood of the Valentian savant. From Valencia to Pisa is no great step; and thence we receive, “with the author’s compliments,” another little pink pamphlet (this time beautifully printed in English, by G. Barbera, Florence), on “Geology and Agriculture,” by E. St. John Fairman, F.GS., F.R.G-S., &., whose object in publishing his essay appears to be to induce the Italian Government “to help by every means in its power the people to supply the expenses necessary for carrying on the business of the country.”* “Agriculture,” he says, “is more attended to in Piedmont than in any other part of Italy; but although Sardinia abounds in mountains, mining is little practised, and the mineral wealth of the country, notwithstanding that it is believed to be great, has never been ascertained. In those parts of Htaly where the principal occupation of the people is agriculture, it is allowed on all hands that it is not skilfully conducted.” + “The Government, aided by men of science, should give their atten- tion to this.” We must now wing our flight to Australia, but on the way let us take a glance at what is doing in India. David Waldie, Esq., F.C.8., &., sends us a paper reprinted from the ‘Journal of the Asiatic Society ’ of Bengal, describing his “ Experimental Investigations connected with the Supply of Water from the Hooghly to Calcutta.” “ The subject has been under the consideration of the municipal authorities of Calcutta, who, as is well known, have organized a scheme for the supply of the town from the River Hooghly, for the carrying out of which arrangements are now in progress; tf and Mr. Waldie has arrived at the conclusion that ‘‘as regards its organic constituents, the Hooghly water taken near Calcutta 1s at least as pure as any of the waters supplied to London ;” “ during the hot season it is mixed with sea-water under the influence of the tides, and thereby rendered brackish ; this can be avoided by taking the supply of water from further up the river.”§ Well, we sup- pose in the matter of beverages the good people of Calcutta cannot afford to be over particular; but to us the testimony in favour of the Hooghly water seems to be at least questionable. The ‘ Geological Survey of India’ send us some more of their magnificent publications, but those we must leave to our Chronicler, and continuing our flight, we will settle down for a moment or two at— Melbourne, whence Mr. R. Brough Smyth, F.G.8., sends us * Pd, + P.6. i P.1. § Pp. e ie B 364 The Progress of Science Abroad. [July, some mining statistics of the Colony of Victoria. The progress of mining in the Colony is indicated in the following extract, and the pamphlet contains an exhaustive description of what is doing in the various mining districts :— “In the prefatory Essay on Mining i the Colony of Victoria, which was published with the Catalogue of the Victorian Exhibition in 1861, it was stated that the labours of the miners were confined - almost exclusively to the working of, and the extraction of gold from, the auriferous rocks. It was observed that the extraordinary richness of the goldfields, absorbing nearly all the available labour in the country, had to some extent prevented the exploration of the deposits of tin, antimony, iron ore, and coal; and a hope was expressed that in a short time other minerals and metals as well as gold would attract the attention of the capitalist, and that new fields would be explored and fresh sources of industry opened up to the intelligent miner, which would afford employment to a great number of persons. ‘i’his hope has not been disappointed. Whilst the yield of gold per annum has not fallen off, if we make proper allowance for the reduction in the number of miners, other minerals have been eagerly sought for, and large areas of country have been prospected, and in some parts thoroughly explored. “From St. Arnaud we have obtained silver; from Beechworth and the heads of the Latrobe, fresh supplies of tin; from the River Thompson, in Gipps Land, copper; from Heathcote, large quan- tities of antimony; from Cape Paterson, coal; from Lal Lal, near Ballarat, lignite ; from Omeo, bismuth ; from Yackandandah, molyb- denite ; from Pleasant Creek, the Upper Yarra, and other localities, manganese; from Bulla and Dunolly, clays suitable for the manu- facture of the finer kinds of porcelain ; from Castlemaine, magnesite ; from Maldon, Castlemaine, and Meredith, roofing slates; and from Beechworth, diamonds. | “Tf all these are not fully represented in the tables, it is no less certain that they occur; and that in due time they will add greatly to the wealth of the country. Gold mining, however, con- tinues to be profitable ; and it is not probable that experienced miners will forsake the search for gold, in order to engage in other mining operations which do not offer sure prospects of success, so long as rich quartz reefs and auriferous alluvions lie neglected.” Commending the industry of Mr. Smyth, we once more flap our wings, and sailing through the sky for many a weary day, we alight at length at the door of the ‘ Essex Institute,’ Salem, Mass. The directors must not be offended with us for enlightening our readers as to where Salem is, inasmuch as they set us the example, by informing the readers of their new and beautiful journal, ‘The American Naturalist,’ that it may be obtained from Messrs. Tribner & Co., London, England. 1867. | The Progress of Science Abroad. — 365, It is a beautiful periodical, and as we read its introduction, we have great hopes of its permanent success. It ends thus :— “ The editorial responsibility seems great, and nothing but the boundless wealth of nature spread out before us, the untiring good will of our scientific friends m contributing to our pages, and the promise of the kindly appreciation of the public, can be an excuse for our appearance, and for any apparent presumption in our bearing.” Whether or not the little cut is meant to represent the “ appear- ance” of the Editor, we are at a loss to explain; but we do hope that it is not intended to illustrate the mode of progression of the scientific world in America, or we should have to recommend our friends to exchange with the ‘ Instituto Medico Valenciano,’ rather than with us. But as we have said, it is a beautiful periodical. The first two parts contain some valuable and well-illustrated papers. Amongst these we commend to the general reader (in No. 1) Mr. W. T. Brigham’s visit to the volcano of Kilauea, Hawaiian Islands, in 1864-65 :— “ Boston could easily be accommodated within this crater, and Vesuvius would not much more than fill it.”* “Ags we were sitting on the brink, a shrill shriek broke through the night air. We could see the black walls of the crater all around us, and between us and the pathway leading out, a line of watchfires, and I was quite as much impressed as my natives with the direful stories they had been telling me. The shriek was repeated, and it was evidently the utterance of a human being in great agony. Light- ing the lantern we had brought for any emergency, we went slowly towards the place, until the shriek was uttered at our very feet. We hastily examined the cracks and called, but there was no answer, and all was still. We looked everywhere, finding no one, and turned to go back, thinking some poor kanaka, venturing down in the dark, had fallen into some crack, and at last died. “We had gone but a few rods when the shriek was repeated. The natives clung to me in mortal terror, but I insisted on going back, and placing the lantern on a rock, we sat down to await developments; it seemed as though the question, ‘Are there any oy eae 366 The Progress of Science Abroad. | July, spirits present?’ was quite superfluous. We sat more than five minutes in silence, and I could feel the poor fellows tremble as they sat close up to me. Then the shriek was repeated, but we saw the spirit that made it—a jet of steam—and my boys were encouraged.”* The crater may be correctly depicted in the plate, but it is not well executed. On technical subjects we have beautifully illustrated papers on “The Land Snails of New England,” by E. 8. Morse (Nos. 1 & 2); “The Moss Animals or Polyzoa,” by A. Hyatt (No. 2); “The American Silkworm,” by L. Trouvelet; also, “The Fossil Reptiles of New Jersey,” by Prof. H. D. Cope (No. 1); “ Winter Notes of an Ornithologist,” by J. A. Allen (No. 1); and “'The Fertilization of Flowering Plants.” The leading men of science in America are amongst the contri- butors to the ‘ American Naturalist, and it is in every way worthy of the great nation which it is intended to interest and instruct. And now we must close this brief notice of a few of the pam- phlets and periodicals which find their way to us from every quarter of the globe. The motley collection may have induced us to smile a little over their appearance, but not the less do we value their contents. They betoken a growing spirit of research all over the world ; and the very delivery of an Inaugural Address in Valencia, and the publication of a charming popular periodical on Natural History in Salem, Mass., are evidences of the spread of scientific knowledge ; of an increasing taste for the study of nature and her laws ; and we should feel grateful to Providence, that, through this interchange of thoughts between nation and nation, between mind and mind, we are permitted to obtain a glimpse of an ever unfolding, ever spreading Wisdom, destined one day to illuminate the whole world. ae Ey ca 1867. | | ( 367 ) CHRONICLES OF SCIENCE. 1, AGRICULTURE. THE Cattle Plague is still one of the leading agricultural topics. Its reappearance in the London cowhouses within the past few weeks, after so long an interval, has startled us all; and Agricul- tural Societies, believing that it is the result of an imported poison, are urging upon Government the need of altogether forbidding the landing of live cattle from the continent, or at least of killing all fat stock at the port of debarkation, allowing milch cattle and other stock in “ store” condition to leave only after a sufficiently long quarantine. During the last weeks of May the disease, which had since January altogether left the metropolis, reappeared in many cowhouses in the east and north of London; and in several cases large herds have been swept away ; the virulence of the attack being just as great as ever. No fewer than sixty cows in one herd of ninety-five were taken in three days from the first detection of a symptom, and the whole were then slaughtered; and the same fate has overtaken several other stocks. The whole of the cattle grazing on Wormwood Scrubs, for example, have been thus disposed of: and it is to be hoped that the severity of the measures which have been adopted may hinder the further extension of the malady. No attempt at cure has hitherto succeeded. Mr. H. Dixon, who has ag large and particular acquaintance with English herds as any man, relates in the current number of the English Agricultural Society’s journal the few examples known to him of any attempt to deal with the disease. His evidence amounts to little more than that isolation has saved many a herd that was in danger, and that remedies have done hardly anything whatever. Thus, Mr. Davies, of Cheshire, had saved his herd for some months by using chlorine gas constantly in the houses, and hyposulphite of soda in the water given to the cattle; sawdust, too, was used as litter, being more cleanly than straw ; but whether the safety of the stock was due to mere isolation or to this disinfection of their houses and this medi- cation of their food cannot be certainly declared. It was not, however, until they had been turned out to the pasture field that they were attacked, and then many of them died. An iodine ointment rubbed on the chest and acting as a counter-irritant, served in two or three eases to give relief when applied early enough; but in only nine cases out of thirty-six did the patient recover. Mr. Aylmer, of Norfolk, 368 Ohrdutckde a aie. a tried chloroform: of ninety head, five died before treatment, six were not attacked, and no fewer than forty-one recovered. Full-grown beasts had an ounce of chloroform administered to them each time, calves a quarter of an ounce, and others in proportion to their age. A saturated handkerchief was simply put in a bag, which was hung close under the nostrils and tied by a string behind the poll. Five to seven minutes was generally enough to produce insensibility, and the cattle were kept under its influence for periods of from half-an-hour to two hours. Seven or eight doses generally effected a cure; and they seem to have been administered twice a day. . The immediate effect was to sweeten the breath of the animal, the inflammation and fever were reduced, and unless these returned within the day, the case was hopeful. The result of all was that in July, the disease having appeared in April, “Mr. Aylmer found himself with a clean bill of health and with upwards of 50 per cent. of those which had been treated alive and well in their stalls.” Notwithstanding, however, the few examples of treatment which seem, like this one, to have afforded some encouragement, it is still almost universally admitted that our only preventive is to be found in isolation, and our only hope of safety in immediate slaughter. : The journal of the English Agricultural Society contains in its current number a large mass of very valuable information on the subject of steam cultivation. It has been long admitted that a tool drawn across the land and stirring the soil or ploughing it to its full depth, without trampling it and poaching it as horses do when they are the power employed, must be greatly improved in its efficiency as a tillage implement. Experience has perfectly estab- lished this wherever the thing has been put to the test on clay land; and many a clay-land farm which could not formerly be cultivated except during short intervals of suitable weather, and then only by a staff of horses which must be kept all through the year for the purpose, has since been a standing advertisment of the superiority of that cultivation by steam power, which could be thus rapidly accomplished during the short intervals when alone clay land ought to be touched, and which at the same time imvolved comparatively little expense when the tools employed lay idle. It was, however, still generally feared that the cost of steam cultiva- tion was excessive, and either beyond the means of ordinary English farmers or so much in excess of the ordinary experience of horse tillage as to be dearly bought. The large number of instances col- lected by the Society's commissioners has now sufliciently cleared up whatever was debatable on the subject. They were instructed to investigate not only the depth and character of steam tillage and the improvements it effected in soil and subsoil, but also the detail of the expenditure incurred—the annual expenses connected with 1867. | Agriculture. 369 | it in tear and wear and breakages, and all the other drawbacks to the system. And the conclusion arrived at is for the most part extremely encouraging and will no doubt promote the adoption of all the rival plans of carrying out steam cultivation under the various circumstances appropriate to each. On light soil as well as heavy, the advantage of prompter, cheaper, and more thorough work done by steam power has been perfectly demonstrated. Since the publication of the report the subject has received pro- longed discussion at an unusually full meeting of the Agricultural Society; and it was declared that the advantage of steam cul- tivation amounted on average soils to at least eight bushels per acre in the produce of the grain crops—that arable culture is by means of it annually becoming both cheaper and better—that the drainage of clay soils is facilitated —that while the direct system of traction adopted by Messrs. Fowler and Co. is the best for large fields and large farms, yet the cheaper round-about-system with a stationed engine and windlass is perfectly satisfactory —that even when coals cost 20s. a ton, the power obtained from 6d. worth of them is equal to the day’s labour of a horse—and that the system wherever it is adopted is improving all the classes interested in agriculture, and is thus establishing on a more satisfactory basis the relations amongst landlord, tenant, and labourer. The revelations made in a recent Blue Book, of the abuses to which the gang system of employing children in the field has given rise, have excited an interest during the past quarter. In recently enclosed districts, the cottage accommodation is especially deficient. Labourers live in widely separated villages, and the labour of boys and girls in the fields being needed on arable land, they have to walk many miles to and from their work, and, bemg employed at particular seasons on different farms from their parents, and thus collected in bodies under gang-masters, they are liable to all the risks which association with the vicious among themselves and subjection to an unfit foreman sometimes entail upon them. So much feeling has been excited on the subject, that it is probable some legislation may ensue, limiting the age at which girls and boys shall be employed in this way, as well as the distance from their home beyond which they shall not be allowed to work. The condition of the agricultural labourers which has thus been forced upon our attention by a Royal Commission, is also being urged on public notice by themselves. At Gawcott, in Buckinghamshire, there has been a strike amongst them for higher wages, apparently a perfectly spontaneous act, which has, we believe, resulted in the men out of work being gradually drafted off to other districts at better paid employment ; and at Halberton, in Devonshire, the same process has been going on, organized and carried out by the clergyman of the parish, to the great annoyance of the employers. 370 Chronicles of Science. | July, Though, however, in these two cases, the process has obtruded itself on public attention, it must not be supposed that it is only here that it has been in operation. Almost everywhere the gradual rise of wages in agricultural districts is in progress. Young men refuse employment at the current rate, and go elsewhere for work, and employers are forced to pay a larger sum to their successors. In this way, we may hope that the improved condition of the labouring class will gradually extend, and better cottages and greater comforts will be offered to retain the hands that farmers need. In some few instances, attempts have been made to introduce the co-operative system into agriculture. Labourers have been offered a share in the profits of the business; the capital of the employer recelving a fixed annual sum as interest, the labour of the work- man recelving a fixed weekly sum as wages, and the surplus, if any, being divided according to a proportion mutually agreed upon between the two. This system is less likely to gain ground in farming (where so many risks are run, and where the surplus may be sometimes large and sometimes less than nothing) than it is in trade or manufacture, where the risks being less, the returns are much more uniform. Any attempt, however, to attach to one another the various classes interested in agriculture is praiseworthy, whether it be organized in this way or, better still, be the fruit of personal relationship and friendship between the employers and their workmen, and their families one by one. : The subject of emigration, hitherto discussed chiefly in con- nection with an over-population of the labouring class, has during the past quarter been the subject of a lecture before the London Farmers’ Club, in connection rather with our surplus numbers in the class of agricultural employers. And the Rev. G. Smythies has thus pomted out to farmers and their families the opening that exists in the United States, in Canada, at the Cape, in Australia, and in the countries adjoming the River Plate—the opportunities for a prosperous agricultural career, where a smaller capital with the necessary industry and skill will suffice to produce a better income than can be obtained from farming here. A work by Mr. Latham, for many years resident near Buenos Ayres, in which the agricultural advantages of that neighbourhood have been impartially related, has been lately published by Messrs. Longman, and it is significant of the overflowmg numbers in the upper agricultural class, that the whole edition has met with an immediate sale. Among the agricultural publications of the past quarter, we must not forget the volume by Dr. Sellar and Mr. H. Stephens, of Edinburgh, on “ Physiology at the Farm in aid of Rearing and Feeding Live Stock” (Blackwoods), which well deserves to be widely studied by the farmer, as a clear and satisfactory exposition of the Physiology and Chemistry of nutrition, and a description of the 1867. | Agriculture. - ome methods by which agriculturists may turn the information thus given, to account in practice. The Proceedings of the Society of Arts must not be forgotten in our Chronicle. At Mr. Harry Chester’s suggestion, an energetic Food Committee of that body has been employed in collecting and dis- seminating information on the importation, marketing, preservation, cookery, &c., of all kinds of meat—on the nature of the milk trade by which London is supplied, and on the supply of milk in country districts—also on the economical possibilities of the flour manufac- ture. A very useful mass of facts has been thus collected, which must ultimately exert good influence on the various departments of the trade in food. Professor John Wilson, of Edinburgh, has called attention, through this committee, to M. Mouriés’ plan of dealing with wheat, by which only the outer cuticle of the grain, contaiming nothing that is digestible as food, is removed. ‘The bran, which is at present taken from the flour, contains no less than 15 per cent. of useful nitrogenous ingredients, and is itself 15 per cent. of the whole grain. The cuticle which M. Mouriés removes is only 4 per cent. of the wheat, and it is not only worthless as food but, owing to its absorbent nature, it is absolutely mischievous, by increasing the difficulty of storing and keeping the grain. The decorticated grain will pack closer, keep better, and yield a larger quantity of more nutritious flour than the whole wheat dealt with as it is by the ordinary English miller. Yet another matter connected with the Society of Arts has to be reported. It has offered a handsome prize for the best account of harvest process in this and other countries :—“ Whereby cut corn may be protected from rain in the field; whereby standing corn may, in wet seasons, be cut and carried, for drying by artificial process; whereby corn so harvested may be dried by means of ven- tilation, hot air, or other methods, with suggestions for the storage both in the ear and after thrashing; and whereby corn, sprouted, or otherwise injured, by wet, may be best treated for grinding or feeding purposes.” The whole must be supplemented by a state- ment of the practical results, and of the actual cost of each system described; and authenticated estimates must be given of any process proposed for adoption, based upon existing, possibly incom- plete, experiments. | The probability of drying grass artificially, except at an expense which will make the process unprofitable, is not very great; never- theless, it seems that if the data of the books can be realized in practice, the thing is possible, and, if so, the smaller quantity of water contained in ripe grain, and the greater value of the remainder when the water has been dried off and the crop is ready for storage or for market, should make the artificial process of drying grain crops quite successful. It is probable that 100,000,000 372 Chronicles of Science. | July, erains of water must be driven off from grass to make two tons of hay, or to dry a fair grain crop off four acres of land. To carry this quantity off in vapour will need 10,000,000 cubic feet of dry air, at an ordinary summer temperature; but if the air were heated artificially to 212°, and the water were thus converted into steam at the boiling point, not more than 400,000 cubic feet would be needed to carry it away. Or, supposing that the air was heated u to nearly 212° and could be removed saturated before it had cooled down below 140° in the process—thus carrying off a full load of water at that temperature, then about 1,000,000 cubic feet would be required to make ready for the rick two tons (say 8/. worth) of hay, or five acres (say 50. worth) of a wheat crop. We are told in books that 1 lb. of coal will boil off 6 lbs. of water, and if so, we ought to be able with one ton of coal to heat (sufficiently) enough of air to carry off the water which exists in the quantities of grass and corn respectively which have been named. It is to be hoped that the prize offered by the Society of Arts may elicit the results of © some satisfactory experiments in connection with this subject. Among the principal agricultural facts of the past quarter are the extraordinary prices which have been commanded by pure bred short-horn cattle. Mr. Betts’s small herd of “ Grand Duchesses ”— thirteen cows, bulls, and calves—descended from cows of the late Kirkleavington herd bred by Mr. Bates from “ Young Duchess,” a cow bought at Charles Colling’s sale in 1810, have realized at a sale by auction 5,759/. 5s., or 443/. a piece. Other families of pure short-horn blood have fetched from 1302. to 560/. a piece at the sales of Mr. C. L. Betts, near Aylesford, Kent, and of Mr. D. MacIntosh, near Romford, Essex. Sixty-three animals of all ages at the former sale made 180/. 19s. each, and fifty-seven animals of all ages at the latter sale made 116/. a piece; and thus Mr. Strafford the auctioneer, sold on two successive days 120 animals of all ages, for 18,0002. or 1502. a piece. An important lecture by Dr. Voelcker before the English Agri- cultural Society, on the relations of food and manure, throws light on the economics of an important branch of farm practice. The various food constituents were declared to succeed one another in the order of value according to the following list:— 1. Ready-made fat, 2.e. oil. 2. Starch, sugar, pectin. 3. Young cellular fibre. 4, Albumen, gluten, casein, &e. 5. - Mineral matter. 6. Woody matters, which are of little or no value. But the money value of purchased food depends not only on the actual nutritiveness of the material, but also on the value of the fertilizing matters which pass through the animal into the manure. 1867. | Archxology and Ethnology. 373 Dr. Voelcker estimates that rape cake yields in the manure 41. worth of ingredients for every ton consumed ; cotton cake no less than 5/. 6s. worth per ton of matter in the excrement ; linseed cake al. 15s. per ton; beans and peas about 3/.; while other feeding substances possess but little worth as regards their fertilizing value. Rice meal, for example, yields but 1/. per ton to the dungheap, and molasses hardly anything at all. It is plain that facts of this kind must for the future materially affect the judgment which will guide the choice of purchased food by the farmer. We have to report that the English Agricultural Society has at length resolved upon confining within professional limits those educational efforts which its charter binds it to make. Hitherto the small contribution made by it in this direction has gone merely towards the granting of prizes to country boys who pass the best examination in branches of general education before the University examiners. Hereafter whatever it may grant will be devoted to the reward of professional studies alone; and some stimulus may thus be given to the work of professional agricultural education, which it has hitherto almost entirely ignored. We must not close our record without a word upon the Paris Exhibition, to which we had anticipated devoting a large share of our space. The grand programme put forth by the Commissioners has almost entirely failed so far as agriculture is concerned. The periodical exhibition of live stock and of implements at work, which was part of the original scheme, has not been carried out ‘as intended. ‘The display is confined to a mere show of imple- ments by the agricultural machinists of this and other countries, and there is no particular novelty calling for remark. We can only report that in the agricultural department a very small con- tribution is made to that wonderful general effect which is now commanding such universal admiration. 2. ARCHMOLOGY AND ETHNOLOGY. We have this quarter to notice a most exhaustive treatise on ancient writing, by Professor J. R. Stephens, of Copenhagen, entitled “The Old Northern Runic Monuments of Scandinavia and England.” Although published in Denmark it is written in the English lan- guage, a fact which seems highly flattering to us asa scientific nation. Runes, according to Professor Stephens, “appear at the close of the Roman period, and were employed by the ‘ Barbarians’ who over- turned the Roman and Keltic systems.” ‘The Kelts “brought with them their Ogham staves and the Romans their alphabet, so the ‘ Bar- barians’ brought with them these their native characters.” Runic 314 , Chronicles of Science. [July, writing, therefore, belongs to arather later period than that usually termed Pre-historic—to which we usually confine ourselves; but, as will be seen presently, inscriptions have recently been found on cromlechs, which may have some light thrown on them by a study of Runic lore; therefore we have thought it right to call attention to this masterly publication. Respecting the Oghamic inscriptions, to which we shall have further occasion to refer, Professor Stephens remarks, “ First and earliest, in my opinion, are the monuments bearing the Ogham-marks. Some 300 of these pillar-stones have been found in Ireland, which country bears the same relation in this respect to the other Keltic lands as Sweden does to the Northern as to the Runes. The great mass of the Ogham stones is in Ireland, the great mass of the Runic stones is in Sweden.” Thus, we suppose, the Irish Kelts were at one time the most civilized people in Europe. As an example of their writing we have reproduced a figure (Plate, Fig. 4) of an Ogham stone from Dunbel, Kilkenny, the characters on which have been interpreted to mean “Sacred stone of Eochaidhe of the Excavations.” The student must consult Professor Stephens’s work to be able to appreciate its importance and interest, and to learn what light Runic writings throw on doubtful points of history and tradition; but some idea of the difficulties which the author has surmounted may be gained by our stating that he has tabulated and correlated upwards of fifty distinct Runic alphabets. : In the ‘ Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy,* which has been published during the past quarter, are some important archzo- logical papers by Mr. E. A. Conwell. The first is an abstract of his account of an “ Examination of the ancient Sepulchral Cairns on the Loughcrew Hills, County of Meath (Part 1),” which gives just sufficient details to excite curiosity and interest. These cairns are thirty in number and vary considerably in form, dimensions, and completeness. Of some, very few stones are left, those missing having been apparently quarried away within a comparatively recent period. ‘Taking the one marked H as being of perhaps the greatest interest, we find that its remains are between five and six feet in height and eighteen yards in diameter. The covering of the interior chambers has disappeared, with the exception of about half a dozen large overlapping flags, which are still to be seen in their places over the western and northern crypts, and give a good ex- ample of the mode of roofing. The plan is cruciform, the central chamber being a rude octagon. From the passages and crypts the author collected several hundred portions of human bones and skulls, fourteen separate teeth, and eight portions of jaws with teeth remaining. He also obtained a remarkable collection of bone im- plements (4,884 pieces); beads of amber, glass, and bronze; with *- Vol. ix., part 4. ce = :? a 1s _ = Aas le 7 ’ ie “ oi A 3 t e me _ i 7 1 { Ral ita ». Ad 1 > a a \ if i ‘ 2h ] . , 7 4 fa * - ‘ is, © by 4 < ——— . 5 . s . : : i iis a . . a £5 io" ae . * Zi ‘ s: 4 4 ; ‘ e €: : = y ‘ = bir, 5! : Py en ‘ y i | rd + 1 - = 7 3 i ie “! a OA + j a i ‘ Vd a ; , ; = 1 cay F * i an, E Yj F t ‘ = a , i * we ~ . a be, e ' ‘ ° ‘ 3) reer ow Quarterly Journal of Scienee N? XV. * 2m. pez, vette eat eh el 1867.] Archexology and Ethnology. 375 rings and a few tools of iron. In this cairn are five inscribed stones. Several of the cairns contain inscribed stones, and the author gives a classified list of the characters on them, to the number of 1,393 separate devices, or many times more than had been previously supposed to exist in Ireland. Mr. Conwell does not indicate the age of these cairns, nor the nature of the inscriptions, except in recording the occurrence, amongst the latter, of “ nearly 300 single straight lines, some of which may probably be Oghamic.”* Passing by a paper on an obelisk on Tarra Hill, supposed to be the “Lia Fail,” or “Stone of Destiny,” on which the Irish kings were formerly crowned, we come to an important memoir by the same author “On an inscribed Cromleac near Rathkenny, Co.Meath.” The inscribed stone exhibits on its upper surface a most interesting series of lines, consisting of upwards of ninety separate characters (see Plate, Fig. 1), still showing “the original clean and smooth cutting—tfor the most part in a triangularly shaped hollowed Lne— some to the depth of nearly a quarter of an inch.” On the under side seven circles are cut (see Plate, Fig. 2), and as many more are visible on the opposite face of an upright stone against which it leans. The sculpturing of the circles is rude, and bears a strong contrast to that of the lines. On the same surface of the slab as the latter are upwards of 300 depressions or cup-shaped hollows, which are probably the result of weathering and not artificial (see Plate, Fig. 1). Mr. Conwell does not attempt to give the meaning of the inscription, nor does he hint at the style of writing to which it may possibly belong. We may remark, however, that in the prevalence of simple lines it has an Oghamic affinity, while a few characters have a somewhat Runic appearance. To show that this is not the only example of such an inscription, Mr. Conwell has re- produced a tracing of one on a cromleac near Macroom, County Cork; and as we have copied this figure also (Plate, Fig. 3), our readers will perceive the striking similarity of the two inscriptions. The Royal Irish Academy has also published { a valuable memoir by Capt. Meadows Taylor “On Cairns, Cromlechs, Kistvaens, and other Celtic, Druidical, or Scythian monuments in the Dekhan.” It would occupy a Chronicle to describe these remains, so we must content ourselves with recording the author’s summary of his dis- coveries. These are, “(1) Cromlechs, or open monuments, with and without circles of stones, containing no remains; (2) Kistvaens, with and without circular perforations in a side-slab, and with and without covering slabs, containing human ashes, bones, and broken pottery; (8) Cairns and barrows, with single, double, and treble circles of rocks and stones, containing cists and skeletons, with traces of human sacrifice, pottery, arms, &c.; others with cinerary urns * For an example of an Oghamic inscription, see Plate, Fig. 4. + Trans. Roy. Irish Acad., vol. xxiv., part 5. 376 Chronicles of Science. | July, interred in them without cists; (4) Rock-temples, with circles of stones round them; (5) Lines of rocks placed to mark boundaries for cairns; (6) Square and diagonal platforms of rocks enclosing cairns; (7) The great parallelogram and place of cremation at Shahpoor.” These embrace nearly all the known forms of Druidical or Scythian remains, and the author therefore concludes that they establish the identity of the great Aryan nomadic tribes of the east with those of the west. The almost perfect similarity of the monu- ments of worship and sepulture in the two regions is evidently too remarkable to be doubted. Indeed, Capt. Taylor, in a subsequent paper on “A Group of Ancient Cairns on Twizell Moor, in Northumberland,” points out that these agree in very minute points with those he had previously described as occurring in India. These two papers are worthy of careful study by the philologist as well as the antiquary, for if the remarkable similarity between the Cairns and Cromlechs of England and those of India really bear the inter- pretation suggested by the author, the existence of the people termed Aryan by the philologist is no longer a mere theory, pour servir, but is an historical truth. In Part IV. of the ‘ Reliquiz Aquitanice’ is a discussion by the late Mr. Christy on the antiquity of the Reindeer-period in Southern France,—a question of considerable difficulty with regard to dates, but comparatively easy if the object be merely “ to indicate its place in the series of observed facts in relation to ancient man.” Mr. Christy is doubtless correct in stating that it is “of higher antiquity than the Kjékkenméddings of Denmark and the Lacus- trine dwellings of Switzerland, and very certainly than the whole group of so-called Celtic and Cromlech remains.” His other con- clusion “that, so far, nothing in the investigation of the works of uncivilized or primitive man, either of ancient or modern times, appears to necessitate a change in the old cherished idea of the Unity of the Human Race,” will probably be called in question by many. Indeed, it is not by any means an accepted principle that a simi- larity of design in certain of man’s works is any sure indication of unity of origin. ‘Therefore, although it is probable that the con- clusion is true, it is neither confirmed nor controverted by the evidence here brought forward. x Amongst the specimens figured in this part are two hollowed pebbles of granite, the use of which is very doubtful, unless they were mortars, and there are difficulties in the way of even this interpretation. The ‘ Anthropological Review’ for April contains several articles of considerable interest, including the commencement of two of a general character, which will well repay perusal, namely, Dr. Broca on Anthropology, and Prof. Carl Vogt on “The Primitive Period of the Human Species.” There is also a paper by Dr. 1867.] Archxology and Ethnology. 377 Robert H. Collyer on “The Fossil Human Jaw from Suffolk,” in which the author quotes the opiions of several eminent osteolo- gists as to the age of this famous “ Coprolite Jaw.” Mr. Busk, who has most carefully examined it, states that “though not of the portentous antiquity it would have claimed, had it been cotemporary of Hlephas meridionalis, the ‘coprolite jaw’ fairly claims a con- siderable age.” The beds at Foxhall, near Ipswich, from which the jaw was said to have been obtained, belong to the coprolite-yielding Red Crag, and are of the age of Hlephas meridionalis, so clearly Mr. Busk thinks it is of posterior date. Mr. Collyer, however, observes that “when he | Mr. Busk] says the coprolite jaw is of very great antiquity he admits the whole question.” The ‘Journal of the Anthropological Society’ contains an in- teresting paper by Lieut.-Col. Lane Fox, entitled “A Description of certain Piles found near London Wall and Southwark, possibly _ the remains of Pile Buildings.” The bones found with the piles at London Wall belong chiefly to domestic animals, but mixed, according to Mr. Carter Blake, with a cave-species of goat (Capra pyrenaica) and with two extinct species of ox, viz. Bos longifrons and os trochoceros. The works of art associated with them were, curiously enough, partly Roman, and partly of a ruder construction, namely, “handles and points of bone,” which, in the opinion of Professor Owen and: Mr. Blake, “may possibly have been formed with fiint;” but Col. Lane Fox has been unable to ascertain that they were found at a lower level than the Roman remains, or that any flint implements have been found in the place. Still, to whatever period this mixture of remains may belong, the occurrence of traces of pile-dwellings in the valley of the Thames is a fact of very high interest. There is also a paper by the Rev. Dunbar Heath “On the Way in which Large Bodies of Mute Men would acquire Language from Small Bodies of Speaking Men.” Almost simultaneously with the discovery of pile-dwellings in London has appeared the announcement of the finding of flint implements, associated with the remains of living and extinct species of mammals, in Paris. Amongst the mammals are Hlephas primi- gemus, Lilephas antiquus. Rhinoceros tichorhinus, Hippopotamus amphibius, Bos primigenius, Bos tawrus, Cervus Canadensis, Cervus elaphus, &c. Further details are given in two papers in the last number of the ‘Bulletin de la Société Géologique de France,’* namely, “Recherches archéologiques et paléontologiques faites dans Vinterieur de Paris,” by M. Reboux; and “Sur les instruments humains et les ogsements d’animaux trouvés par MM. Martin et Reboux dans le terrain quaternaire de Paris,” by M. Albert Gaudry. * Vol) -xxtvis Ney 2t VOL. IV. 2c 378 Chronicles of Science. | July, The last volume of the Transactions of the Ethnological Society contains so large a number of papers that we can notice only a selection from them. In Mr. Crawford’s paper “On the Physical and Mental Characteristics of the European and Asiatic Races of Man,” the author arrives at the conclusion that between these races “there is a broad innate difference, physical, intellectual, and moral; and that such difference has existed from the earliest authentic records and is most probably coeval with the first creation of man.” ‘The same author has a paper on the History of Written Language, in which he brings forward his theoretical views on the subject, some of which appear scarcely in unison with facts. He endeavours to show that written characters were used in Asia long before they were in Europe; and he states that in the time of Julius Cesar our ancestors were “as illiterate as are now the negroes of Ashantee, or as were the cannibals of New Zealand when Cook first described them.” His argument appears to be that in Asia ~ every nation has its own written alphabet, and sometimes more than one, except where that of some other nation has superseded the original one, while in Europe the Greek and Roman characters are in universal use. Indeed, he states that “no race from the Euxine to the Atlantic, or from Greece to Scandinavia, has ever invented an alphabet.” Does not Mr. Crawford know that the Roman alphabet superseded the Runic in Scandinavia and England, that the Ogham staves of Ireland are still older, and that other phonetic writings have been discovered whose age and meaning are as yet unknown ? Sir John Lubbock and Mr. Frederick Lubbock, in a paper “Qn the true Assignation of the Bronze Weapons, &c., found im Northern and Western Europe,’ defend with considerable success the antiquity of the weapons of the Bronze age, in contravention of Mr. Wright’s theory that they are of Roman origin. Mr. Wright has a paper “On the Intercourse of the Romans with Ireland,’ in which he shows that authentic discoveries of Roman coins have been made in five Irish counties, and all, with one exception, in the province of Ulster. Professor Steenstrup and — Sir John Lubbock describe the Flint Implements recently dis- covered near Pressigny-le-Grande ; Mr. Crawford has three papers “On the History and Migration of Cultivated Plants in reference to Ethnology ;” and Mr. R. Dunn contributes an article entitled “ Archeology and Ethnology: remarks on some of the bearings of Archeology upon certain Kthnological Problems and Researches ;” but these and some other papers of interest we have no space to discuss. A noteworthy paper by Dr. Faudel, “Sur la découverte d’ossements fossiles humains dans le lehm de la vallée du Rhin a Keuisheim, pres Colmar (Haut Rhin),” has been published this 1867. ] Astronomy. 379 year in the Bulletin of the Colmar Natural History Society. The human bones consist of a frontal and a right parietal, almost entire, belonging to the same skull; and they were found associated with remains of the Bison, Hlephas primigenius, &e., in the Lehm or Loess of the valley of the Upper Rhine. From their discovery the author infers that man existed in Alsace prior to those changes which, coming after the deposition of the diluvium, gave to the country its present outline. An International Congress for Anthropology and Prehistoric Archeology is announced to be held in Paris, under the Presidency of M. Lartét, from the 17th to the 28th of August inclusive. EXPLANATION OF THE PLATE, Fig. 1. Inscribed slab of a cromlech near Rathkenny, Co. Meath; copied from the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. ix., plate 12. Fig. 2. Side-view of the inscribed cromlech near Rathkenny, Co. Meath, showing the inscribed circles on the under surface of the inclined slab (Fig. 1), copied from the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, vol. ix., plate 11, Fig. 4. Fig. 3. Tracing of an inscription on a cromlech at Macroom, Co. Cork, copied from the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, vel. ix., plate 11, Fig. 3. Fig. 4. Ogham Stone from Dunbel, Kilkenny, copied from Professor Stephens’s *Runic Monuments, part 1, p. 57. 3.—ASTRONOMY. (Including the Proceedings of the Royal Astronomical Society.) OBpsERVATION of the meteor-shower of last November, and a careful ‘discussion of the phenomena, have resulted in one of the most interesting discoveries which has for many years been effected by astronomers. In our last Chronicle we pointed out that the want of observations determining the velocity with which the meteors travelled, left us, apparently, no choice but to select the most probable period of revolution, out of several which accounted for the observed recurrence of maximum displays. For reasons there discussed, astronomers selected a period falling short of one year by one-33rd part. The most natural explanation of the well-marked period of 33} years—the supposition, namely, that this interval is the true period in which meteors complete a revolution around the sun—was looked on as far less probable. The objections to this view are:—(i) The @ priore improbability that an orbit of such eccentricity as the supposition implies, should intersect the earth’s orbit; (ii) the further improbabuility that the intersection should fall so near the perihelion of the meteor’s orbit as to account for the position of the radiant-point ; and (11) the difficulty of con- ceiving that an orbit of such extent should be so plentifully 202 380 Chronicles of Science. [July, bestrewn with meteors as to give a yearly recurrence of showers besides the great displays occurring at intervals of 331 years. Leverrier, however, calculated the orbit on the supposition of a period of 334 years. It is easily shown that the orbit has a mean distance exceeding that of Saturn; and that, owing to its eccen- tricity, its aphelion extends beyond the orbit of Uranus. But the difficulty lay in deciding between this orbit and that adopted provisionally by Professor Newton, and supported by the strongly-expressed opinion of Sir John Herschel. There was but one phenomenon available for the decision of this question—but the consideration of this phenomenon brought the question imme- diately into the class of the abstrusest mathematical problems. On examining the dates upon which the shower appeared in former years, it is seen that these dates fall later and later in the year at each successive recurrence. Thus in the year 902 a.p., when the earliest recorded shower took place, it occurred on Oct. 12th o.s., or Oct. 17th n.s., four weeks earlier than the present date of the shower. ‘This corresponds to an annual displacement of the node of the meteor’s orbit by 102’°6, with respect to the equinox, or by 52’°4 with respect to the fixed stars. Now it is possible to caleu- late the secular motion of the node for an orbit of given period, though the problem has peculiar difficulties, either when Professor Newton’s assumed period is taken, or when the eccentric orbit corresponding to the period of 334 years is considered. Professor Adams has calculated the nodal motion for both cases. In the first case he obtained an annual retrogression of only 21” instead of 52-4, In the latter he ‘obtained a retrogression of 28’ in 332 years, or about 50’"5 in one year, a result according so closely (considering the circumstances) with observation, as ‘to leave no doubt that 33°25 years is the true period of the meteoric orbit. A result yet more interesting appears to flow from Adams’s researches. When the orbit of the meteors is calculated, it appears that its elements agree in the most remarkable manner with those of a periodic comet discovered in January, 1866. The following table exhibits this agreement :— November Meteors. Comet I., 1866. Period : : - Wiesel ea Seca 33°18 years. Mean distance . 5 - 10:°3402 10°3248 Eccentricity ; : of. ODOT ae : - « 079954 Perihelion distance : L 098554 : “ 0 9765 Inclination . 5 oS. 467 : oh dag S Slt Longitude of node ; Ole eS hake j es (OLS 26° Longitude of perihelion © AOU NO ee : = 60° 28’ Direction of motion . Retrograde 4 . Retrograde. Close as the ee eee appears, it would be yet closer if we assumed (as we are free to do) that the period of the meteors is 33°18 years instead of 334, a professedly rough approximation. Singularly enough this particular comet is the only one which 1867. | Astronomy. 381 has been satisfactorily subjected to spectrum-analysis. Mr. Huggins found that the nucleus was gaseous, and that the coma was either composed of (finely divided) matter in a state of incandescence, or shone by reflected hight. The comet had no visible tail. Signor Schiaparelli had before noticed that if we suppose the August meteors to describe a very eccentric orbit (as their great velocity entitles us to do), the elements of their orbit, calculated from the observed position of their radiant point, agree very closely with those of the orbit of Comet IL, 1862. The following table exhibits the resemblance between the orbits :— August Meteors. Comet II., 1862, Perihelion distance 0°9643" . . 0°9626 Tnclination cueaenes fe ENN Bee ; OOS 25! Longitude of perihelion - 343° 287. : - 844° 41’ Longitude of node : « 138° 16°". : © ABT 277 Direction of motion . - Retrograde : . Retrograde. The period of this comet, which it will be remembered was a large and in other respects remarkable one, has been calculated by Dr. Oppolzer to be about 142 years, and the orbit extends into space far beyond that of Neptune. | Dr. Edmund Weise, of Vienna, has pointed out the coincidence of many other observed meteor-tracks with cometic orbits. We conclude the discussion of this interesting subject with his sketch of the process by which the whole orbit of a comet is conceived to be strewn with meteoric bodies, not following each other in one path, but dispersed many thousands, perhaps many millions, of miles on every side of the central track. If we consider, he says, the circum- stances under which a comet approaches the sun, we shall see that individual particles must be repelled to a distance where, “ collect- ing under the original laws of aggregation around new centres of gravity, they will revolve about the sun in orbits closely resembling that of the parent-comet. In the case of periodical comets, these dispersed aggregations will gradually collect along the whole orbit, and if the comet’s orbit intersect, or approach very near to the earth’s orbit, the phenomenon of periodic showers will be produced at the annual passage of the earth through the point of inter- section.” Mr. Stone has detected a small error in Leverrier’s deter- mination of the Solar Parallax. The error lies in the numerical work. Leyerrier’s method is (in theory at least) very beautiful, and is little known. The earth has an orbital motion around the common centre of gravity of the moon and earth; the diameter of this orbit bemg about 6,000 miles. In Leverrier’s method the earth’s motion in this small orbit is taken advantage of to deter- mine the sun’s distance. The size of this subsidiary orbit being determined from the estimated mass of the moon, and the dis- placement of the sun due to the carth’s excursions in her monthly 582 Chronicles of Science. (July, orbit being determined from a careful examination of a long series of observations, the ratio of the sun’s distance to the moon’s is determined by a simple calculation. Owing to a mistake in the numerical work, Leverrier took the moon’s mass at sz*szth instead of sr'zsth of the earth’s. The effect of the correction is to reduce the solar parallax from 8'"95 to 8-91, corresponding to an increase of upwards of 400,000 miles in the sun’s estimated distance. The weak point of the method clearly lies in the great variation result- ing from a very small change in the estimated value of the moon’s mass. On this account the observations made use of are better fitted for the solution of the inverse problem, the determination of the moon’s mass from the earth’s parallactic inequality; and, in- deed, Delambre has already made use of this method for the pur- pose named. The corrected estimate of the sun’s distance, by Leverrier’s mode, agrees with Hansen’s determination from the moon’s paral- lactic inequality. Mr. Stone, who had obtained the value 8'-94 for the solar parallax from observations of Mars, has lately deduced the value 8’°85 (with a possible error of 0'-056) from the Green- wich lunar observations made near the epoch of maximum lunar parallactic inequality. It is to be noticed that when Mr. Stone speaks of the last-named inequality as corresponding to the earth’s parallactic inequality, he must be understood as speaking merely of nominal correspondence, the two inequalities being quite distinct in character. During the late opposition of Mars, Mr. Huggins made several observations of the planet’s spectrum. As in former observations, eroups of lines were seen in the blue and indigo, but it was not found possible to measure these so as to determine whether they are solar or due to the planet’s atmosphere. Again, also, many marked lines were seen in the red. On February 14, faint lines were seen near D, and were judged by Mr. Huggins to be due to absorption by the planet’s atmosphere, as, although similar to lines seen in the solar spectrum when the sun is low, Mars was not low enough for the production of the lines, which were not seen in the moon’s spectrum though she was lower than Mars. The spectrum of the darker portions of the disc was less brilliant than that from the lighter part, indicating equality of absorption, and that the colour of the darker parts is nearly, if not quite, neutral. Mr. Huggins concludes that the ruddy colour of Mars is not due to its atmosphere, but to the materials of the planet’s body ; and he remarks that the polar regions show no colour, though the light from them traverses a greater depth of atmosphere than that from the central parts of the disc. This evidence seems conclusive ; but Mr. Huggins quotes, as additional evidence, the views of Dr. Zoellner respecting (i) peculiarities in the rate at which the 1867. | Astronomy. 383 brightness of Mars varies with varying phase, and (ii) the greater brightness of the disc near the limb. Zollner ascribes these peculiarities to the slope of elevations on the surface of Mars. Mr. Huggins accepts this view as probable, adding that “it is im- portant to remark in this connection that the darker portions of the dise gradually disappear, and the coloured portions lose their distinctive ruddy tint as they approach the limb.” This cir- cumstance appears to prove, however, that a considerable por- tion of the light from the limb has been reflected betore reaching the planet’s surface. If Zollner’s supposed mountain- slopes (whose angle he determines at 76°!) existed, we should find brighter colours as well as brighter light near the limb, unless we supposed all the mouwntain-tops coloured and their deélivities white. On every hand we receive confirmation of Dr. Schmidt’s dis- covery of the disappearance of the lunar crater Linné. After a careful discussion of the evidence, Schmidt comes to the conclusion that the change which has actually taken place corresponds—only on a greatly magnified scale—to the changes produced by mud- volcanoes on our own earth. He conceives that the whole of the internal part of the crater has been filled up by erupted matter, which has further overflowed, so as to obliterate under gently- sloping declivities the once steep outer walls of this vast crater. The matter within the crater seems to have cooled since Schmidt, Secchi, and other observers have detected a minute depression nearly in the middle of the light spot which now marks the place of the crater. If we remember that the crater was described by Lohrman, Beer and Madler, and others, as “ very large” (nearly six miles across) and “ very deep,” we must recognize the fact that lunar volcanic activity is far from being extinguished. The eclipse of the sun on March 6th, like most partial eclipses, presented no features deserving of special comment. The occur- rence of a severe snow-storm in the upper regions of the air durmg the progress of the eclipse (accidentally discovered by Mr. Browning while changing the focus of his telescope), is so far notéworthy, as it confirms the opinion expressed by many astro- nomers, that although the total eclipse of August, 1868, occurs at a season when in certain parts of India traversed by the shadow fine weather is ordinarily expected, yet unfavourable changes may take place in the weather during the actual progress of the eclipse, and through causes corresponding temporarily to those which produce the regular breaking up of the fine season. We trust this antici- pation will not be verified, and that astronomers. will successfully avail themselves of one of the most favourable opportunities that could ever be afforded of determining the real nature of the red protuberances, and other phenomena visible in a total eclipse. We have to note an error in our last Chronicle. The deter- 384 ‘Chronicles of Scvence. [ July, | mination of the epoch (850,000 years ago) at which the earth’s orbit attained the greatest eccentricity it has had during the past million years is due to the labours of Mr. Croll, who has calculated a table exhibiting the eccentricity, position of perihelion, &c., of the earth’s orbit during the above-named interval. We remind our readers that on the 21st of August, Jupiter will be without visible satellites from 10h. 4m. p.m. to 11h. 49m. p.m. The hours of disappearance and re-appearance of the several satellites were given in our last. On August 9th, 10th, and 11th, the St. Lawrence meteor- shower may be looked for. Unlike the November star-shower, the August shooting-stars appear almost as frequently before as after midnight, the radiant-pomt being above the horizon throughout the night. On April 3rd, M. Tempel detected a telescopic comet. PROCEEDINGS OF THE AsTRONOMICAL SOCIETY. Mr. Tennant has computed the path of the moon’s shadow, August, 1868, across the peninsula of India. The central line passes from near Viziadroog, on the western coast, to near Masuli- patam on the eastern, the duration’ of total obscuration being 5m. 12s. at the first place, and 5m. 45s. at the second. Mr. Brothers succeeded in taking twenty photographs of the sun during the eclipse of March 6th. Mr. Browning’s observation of the eclipse is noteworthy on account of the application of a novel method of viewmg the sun. A disc of glass having plane and parallel sides was inserted in the open end of a reflecting telescope. The outer side of the disc was coated with a thin film of pure silver, by Liebig’s process. This delicate metallic film refiected nearly the whole of the heat, and the greater portion of the ight of the sun’s rays, its transparency being sufficient, however, to enable enough light to pass through it into the telescope to render very small markings on the sun’s surface plainly discernible. 3 Mr. Stone discusses the possibility of a change in the position of the earth’s axis, owing to “frictional action connected with the phenomena of the tides.” After a careful examination of two hypotheses, between which the truth in all probability lies, he arrives at the conclusion that the frictional action of the tides “is not available as an explanation of those secular changes of climate which geologists have shown to have taken place on our earth.” Mr. Joynson presents the results of observations of the planet Mars during the late opposition. He considers that there is a permanent dark band extending all round the planet, with only one narrow break in it. But this description is far from presenting the 1867. | Astronomy. . 385 real complexity of the arrangement of continents and oceans on the southern hemisphere, with which Mr. Phillips's chart and Mr. Dawes’s admirable (and consistent) views have familiarized us. We have an account of a meteor-shower seen at “ noon, under a cloudless sky,” in Australia, October 25, 1866. One part of the description is not intelligible; we are told that “during (? after) the whole display the sky was filled with a phosphorescence so strong that it gave considerable light to the earth. A river at some distance, which in the clearest moonless nights is invisible from here, glistened quite brightly, even when scarce a star was to be seen through the clouds,”——the hour being noon, and the sky cloudless ! Mr. Masters sends an account of the November meteor-shower as seen at Kishnagur, Bengal. He determined for the radiant- oint a position very near that assigned by observers in England. he apex of the Zodiacal light appeared to be some degrees south of the radiant-point. M. Hoek, in a letter to Mr. De la Rue, discusses the question of solar spots. Taking the mass of a planet and the inverse cube of its distance as the measure of the planet’s influence in raising waves of disturbance on the sun, he assigns to Mercury, Venus, the Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, effects proportional to the numbers 12, 24, 10, 0, 25, and 7, respectively. This estimate is undoubtedly more correct than that referred to m our last Chronicle. Sir John Herschel has presented to the Royal Astronomical Society a series of MS. charts, containing the estimated magnitudes of nearly all the stars visible to the naked eye in both hemispheres. The labours of Professor Argelander in the same direction, having been given to the world while Herschel’s work was in progress, he was induced to relinquish a task of great labour, and henceforth only of secondary interest. But a large amount of labour having been bestowed on the subject, Sir John considered, and all interested in stellar observation must agree with him, that it would be a pity that the charts should not be preserved. : Mr. Stone has investigated the question of the sun’s motion in space by a new and very simple method, founded, however, on views already arrived at on this question. He arrives at the con- clusion that there is decisive evidence of the sun’s motion, but that the effects of parallactic displacement arising from this motion are on the average much smaller than the independent proper motions of the stars. | Mr. Chambers has compiled a catalogue of temporary stars. Many of the objects included in this catalogue were doubtless comets. We commend Mr. Dawes’s paper on the micrometrical measure- ments of double stars to the careful study of the telescopic observer. 386 Chronicles of Scrence. [ July, Mr. Cleveland Abbe presents a paper on the distribution of Nebule. He finds evidence that clusters and planetary nebulee belong to the Via Lactea, while other nebule form imdependent systems, of which the Nubecule are members. It does not appear to have occurred to those who have dealt with this subject, that the marked absence of nebulz from the zone of the Via Lactea affords as striking evidence of a close relation between the nebular and sidereal systems, as the contrary phenomenon of aggregation along that zone would have afforded. Mr. Kincaid describes an instrument called a metrochrome, for detecting changes of star-colours. Such changes have only been certainly noted, as yet, in the case of Sirius and 95 Herculis. They are very difficult to detect, since observers differ greatly in their estimate of colour. Spectrum analysis requires “ superlatively fine” weather, and is also for other reasons surrounded by great and numerous difficulties, which render its application almost im- practicable. The great difficulty, so far as other methods are concerned, lies in the selection-of a standard of reference. A painted scale, like that given by Admiral Smyth, is objectionable on account of the opacity of its colour; and is further not sufli- ciently reproducible. Precious stones are beyond the reach of most observers. It has been suggested by Mr. Proctor that the illumi- nation of a minute white disc in the focus of a positive eye-piece, “through differently coloured glasses placed on a rotating disc,” is a method which might be employed with advantage. Mr. Kincaid prefers the use of chemical solutions (a method suggested by Mr. Huggins). He uses a rotating drum with six equidistant openings, three of which are so constructed as to admit flat-sided stoppered bottles containing differently coloured chemical solutions; the other three openings transmit the normal light of the lantern. By wholly or partially covering one or more of the former openings, and by communicating a rapid rotation to the drum, it will be possible to reproduce the light of a particular star. This light thrown into the telescope produces the image of an artificial star. 4. BOTANY, VEGETABLE MORPHOLOGY, AND PHYSIOLGY. AmericA.— Origin of the Canadian Flora.—Dr. Dawson, of Montreal, has published in the ‘Canadian Naturalist’ a list of some species of plants he has found in the well-known deposit of Leda- clay at Green’s Creek, on the Ottaway, from which he has been able to arrive at a satisfactory estimate of the climate prevailing there at the time of their deposit. Among the species are, Drosera 1867. | Botany and Vegetable Physiology. 387 rotundifolia, L., Potentilla canadensis, L., Populus balsamefera, L., Potamogeton pusillus, L., and Perfolcatus, L., and others. From the list, it appears that the plants found are a selection of the most hardy species from the present Canadian flora. Dr. Dawson shows that this cannot have been an accidental selection, nor due to the river bringing refuse from more northern latitudes. Hence we must infer refrigeration, and that there was such an amount of re- frigeration as these plants seem to indicate ig borne out further by what would necessarily occur were the land again submerged to the extent that it was at the time of the deposition of the Leda-clay. A climate like that of the Labrador coast would be the result. Austratia.— Culture of Fruit Trees.— Dr. George Bennett publishes an interesting account, in the ‘Journal of Botany’ for April, of the extensive orangeries and other fruit-gardens near Paramatta, New South Wales. Oranges, Lemons, Apples, Pears, Loquats, Apricots, Peaches, and superior varieties of Grapes are erown in great profusion, both for export and home consumption, and exhibit a most striking instance of the success attendant on well-directed efforts at acclimatization. The orange, apple, and lemon trees of Mr. Pye, of Paramatta, are grown in a soil consisting of a very poor sandy loam, from which crop out all over the region, large sandstone rocks, the trees being planted around and between them. In the Azores many of the orange gardens are formed in places where there is often not a greater depth of soil than 18 or 20 inches above the shattered volcanic ash. In New South Wales the orange trees frequently give three crops in the year, the fruit of each crop differing considerably in form and size, but all being of excellent flavour. Oranges frequently remain on the tree over fifteen months, and when gathered are in excellent condition. The largest trees grown in this orangery were over 35 feet in height and about the same diameter, such a size being very remarkable. In an orangery in which there were about 70 trees to the acre, Dr. Bennett states that ten on the average yielded 550 dozen oranges in one year. The wholesale price at which they are sold is from 7d. to 8d. a dozen, anything over 2d. per dozen remunerating the grower. The greater number are exported to Tasmania, Melbourne, and New Zealand. Dr. Bennett also expresses his belief that the thin-skinned pipless oranges which are sometimes called the “St. Michael’s oranges,” are only the result of age and careful cultiva- tion of the tree which produces them; it appears that they cannot be got from seedlings or young cuttings. Wax models of some of the fruit and photographs of the trees in these Australian orangeries have been sent to the Paris Exhibition, where it is believed they as compare very favourably with those of the Northern Hemi- sphere. | Edible and Poisonous Plants of the order Apocynacee.—Dr. 388 : Chronicles of Science. ie Bennett describes an edible plant, Alstonia edulis, found in New Caledonia—the natural order to which the Tanghina Poison-tree of Madagascar belongs—as also the Strychnos, or Nux vomica, and the Oleander ; the same order, on the other hand, includes the useful Hya Hya, or Milk-tree, of Demerara (Tabernzmontana), the Cream- fruit-tree of Sierra Leone (Rouwpellia), and many others. The Alstonia edulis is a climbing plant, the fruit-pods of which are much used in New Caledonia both by natives and Europeans as an esculent vegetable. Another species of Alstonia, which is of con- siderable use dietetically, is the A. constricta. It is the Bitter Bark- tree of the colonists, and was supposed at one time to have the properties of Quinine. It really, however, more closely resembles Quassia, and is used as a tonic and for preparing “ bitters.” Dr. Bennett directs attention to the desirability of cultivating both these plants with a view to their economic applications. Mr. J. F. Wilcox has sent samples of the bark, wood, and decoction of Alstonia constricta to the Paris Exhibition. Enetann.—The Colowring Matters of Plants.—Though this is hardly the place in which to notice the optical arrangements and working of Mr. Sorby’s spectroscope, we may draw attention to some of the results which he has obtained from its use im investi- gating vegetable colours. Ata late meeting of the Royal Society, he described a new method for registering, by means of an inter- ference spectrum, the position and character of the absorption bands obtained in a spectrum by the interposition of a coloured solution between the spectroscope and source of light. He has also “made use of the action of sulphite of soda, citric acid, ammonia, and other reagents for separating or modifying these solutions, and has been able to distinguish above 100 distinct colouring matters. The blue of one flower is not the blue of another, nor are all pinks, greens, and yellows of the same component parts. Two or even more separable colouring matters unite in many cases to give a petal its particular tint and often one of these is peculiar to the plant. The most remarkable fact which Mr. Sorby appears to have elicited is that (in all probability) the absorption bands of any single colouring matter occur at equal distances in the spectrum (allowing for dispersion) and hence that we may infer the presence of more than one colouring matter in a solution which gives absorp- tion bands disposed at unequal intervals. Alleged New British Heath.—Dr. Hance writes in the ‘ Journal of Botany ’ for June, that fifteen years since he gathered in South Devon, near Newton Abbot, an Erica, which at the time he con- sidered to be EH. mediterranea, the rare species which grows in Ireland. He now, however, considers the species to be H. carnea. This last species is found in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Italy, Dalmatia, Hungary, and Greece—not in France—whilst EF. medi- — -1867.] Botany and Vegetable Physiology. 389 terranea is met with in Ireland, France, Spain, and Portugal. Whether the species be the Irish or Swiss species, its occurrence in Devonshire is sufficiently remarkable, and should cause careful search in the locality, which Dr. Hance expressly states was quite wild and distant from cultivated land. At the same time very great importance cannot be attached to an identification resting on a solitary specimen gathered so long since, and which may have oc- curred under circumstances which would explain the matter, but which have now escaped Dr. Hance’s recollection. Double-flowered Ranuneulus.—Dr. Maxwell Masters describes a case of double-flower in Ranunculus ficaria, the chief interest of which resides in the structure of the carpels and ovules. The carpels were open, and the ovules sprang from the inner surfaces of these carpellary leaves like little buds. The occurrence of two ovules instead of one, in these monstrous fruits, is noteworthy, as also the fact of their originating neither from the margins of the carpellary leaf, nor from a prolonged axis, but from its inner sur- face. The rarity with which perfect seeds of Ranunculus ficaria are formed is to be attributed to the deficiency of pollen in the anthers of these flowers. Ranunculus auricomus is frequently sterile, and other plants of the order exhibit a frequent tendency to the unisexual form. A. bulbosus has not been recorded with unisexual flowers, but Dr. Masters recently met with a luxuriant specimen of this species in which every flower was fertilized, although there were no perfect stamens in the flowers. Babington’s Manual of Botany.—A. sixth edition of this work, so highly valued by every English critical botanist, has just been published. Fifteen plants are admitted into the manual as genuine additions to the British Flora, while five species are recognized as certainly naturalized foreign species. Nearly all of these species haye been recorded, and some of them figured, as they were dis- covered in Dr. Seeman’s very excellent journal of Botany. It has been remarked that the comforts and duties of a University chair too often divert its occupier from those labours which were the stepping-stones to the honourable position. This assuredly is not the case with Professor Babington, nor do we know of any chair at either of the English Universities of which so unpleasant an assertion could be maintained with truth. New Lichens from Cader Idris.—The Reverend W. A. Leighton, in the June number of the ‘ Annals,’ describes a licheno- logical tour in the neighbourhood of Dolgelly. Cader Idris appears to be a wonderfully productive locality in the way of lichens and mosses, the only disadvantage it presents to the collector bemg that which befel Mr. Leighton—that of losing the path on the mountain in misty weather while absorbed in the search for speci- mens. By his excursion Mr. Leighton has added to our British 390 Chromicles of Science. [J uly, | Flora a score of new lichens, of which six are entirely new to © lichenology, and also a new species of Spheerta—thus proving that our Welsh mountains, if thoroughly searched, would yield an abundant harvest of good, rare, and novel lichens, and probably many novelties in other natural orders. Dr. Fraser, who accom- panied Mr. Leighton, adds a list of more than fifty species of mosses, which he found near Dolgelly, chiefly on Cader Idris. Protophyta.—While botanists generally and students of Diato- macez especially must feel the loss of so ardent an observer as the late Dr. Greville, it is gratifying to find that others are coming for- ward in his especial field of research. In the last number of the ‘Microscopical Journal,’ Dr. Lauder Lindsay describes some new species of Diatomaceze and Desmidiacee from New Zealand, and makes some valuable remarks upon the distribution of the Proto- ~ phyta, and their representatives im New Zealand. The Rey. Hugene ~ O’Meara, in the same journal, describes eleven new and several rare forms of Diatomaceze which were dredged on the west coast of ~ Treland, by Dr. E. Perceval Wright, of Dublin. The gathering is chiefly. interesting on account of the number and rarity of the known species and the large percentage of new species. France.—Spontaneous Movements in Colocasia.—M. Lecoq communicates to the ‘Comptes Rendus’ a notice of some extraordi- nary vibrations which he has observed to occur regularly in the leaves of the Colocasia esculenta. The movements were sufficiently violent to set small belis ringing which were attached to the plant, and thus indicated to M. Lecoq the time of the phenomenon. The vibrations were from 100 to 120 a minute. The plant was kept in a hothouse, and was quite free from draughts or currents of air, which could produce the agitations observed. M. C. Musset pub- lished some observations on this plant some time since; he did not observe the movements of the leaves, but noted that durig preefo- hation the sap was projected from the leaves to a distance of several centimetres through two orifices, in the form of stomata, situated at the apex of the leaf. Highty-five drops were projected in the minute. The most probable explanation of the movements offered by M. Lecog is that im his plant, for some reason or other, since he did not observe any projection of sap, the terminal orifices were inactive, and that the projecting force was thus converted into a vibrating force. Germany.—The Function of Chlorophyll in the Chemistry of Plant Life-—Dr. Ferdinand Cohn, of Breslau, in a paper “On the Phycochromacez and Floridex,” m the January number of the ‘Archiv fiir Mikroskopische Anatomie, describes at some length the colouring matters of various low forms of Algze. He shows that the colourmg matter in all—red, blue, green, yellow, or brown—contains Chlorophyll, or a closely-allied body, and main- 1867. | Botany and Vegetable Physiology. 391 tains that Chlorophyll (or some closely-allied modification thereof) is contained in all growing plants, as the principal actor in the pro- cess of assimilation, acting perhaps. in a manner analogous to that which the oxygen-carrying constituents of blood exhibit in animals. Dr. Cohn has also recently shown elsewhere that the presence or absence of Chlorophyll in the lowest forms of Plants and Animals has a very important bearing on their direction of motion. They always move towards the light, and if variously coloured lhght be used, towards the highly refractive actimic rays in preference to the thermal red ones. Dr. Cohn believes that the decomposition of carbonic acid and the evolution of oxygen through the Chlorophyll, under the influ- ence of light, offer a fair explanation of some of the movements of these minute coloured organisms. A fragment of chalk coated over one half with a resinous cement and placed in dilute acid is projected with the coated surface foremost, by the evolution of carbonic acid from the ex- posed extremity. In a similar manner, Dr. Cohn supposes that the chemical action induced by the action of light on the chlorophyll ageregated at one part of such bodies, as the Oscillarix or Huglenz may give rise to those axial rotations which frequently become apparent as longitudinal motion. Dr. Cohn also mentions certain Oscidlariz, namely, the genus Beggiatoa, which, probably by the decomposition of sulphates, develop free hydrogen-sulphide in the water in which they thrive. Since this group of alge alone can flourish in hot and strongly saline solutions, he suggests that it is probable that- the first organisms which were present in the primordial sea which covered the earth, and was of very high temperature, if we may reason upon the inductions of geologists, were Oscillariz or rather Chroococcacee. The Situation of the Alkaloids in the Bark of the Cinchone.— Any facts relating to the sources or supply of Quinine must have considerable interest. Some years since M. Wigand tried to demonstrate that the alkaloids of the Cinchonas are developed in the liber. He observed that thin sections of the bark soaked in cochineal became stained more strongly in that layer which is known as liber, than in that part of the bark called paren- chyma; and from this he concluded that quinine was more abundantly present in the liber than in the parenchyma, acting asa mordant. M. Carl Miller, having failed to confirm M. Wigand’s observations, has adopted a different method of examination. He by a very ingenious process separates the liber and parenchyma, and then analyses the two separately. He finds that the parenchyma contains 9°876 per cent. of quinine, whilst the liber only contains 2°462 per cent. It appears also that the quinine is the more abundant in proportion as the bark is more developed, which would lead one to 392 ‘Chronicles of Science. [July, suppos¢ that the production of quinine is in relation with the formation of the liber. This consideration has naturally led M. Miller to inquire at what period and in what region of the bark the first appearance of the quinine takes place, and he proposes to take up this question as soon as he can procure a sufficient number of living Cinchona-plants. Fungi-spores.—Protessor Karsten has published some observa- tions on the stylospores of Sphariz. Sphceriz were found in the opened anthers of Fuschia splendens, which when placed in water, gave exit to a white tortuous thread, which quickly broke up in the water, into innumerable simple oval vesicles. These vesicles when moistened with dilute solution of iodine acquired, like starch, a beautiful violet colour, and when preserved in glycerine, disappeared in a little time. This is probably the first known example of a starch-reaction in the spores of Fungi, as which (and indeed, as stylospores) the corpuscles noted must be regarded, and although a similar reaction of the spores was observed by Currey in the Lichens, and in the plant named Amylospora tremelloides by that botanist, it is nevertheless worthy of notice as certainly a very rare occurrence among these plants. 5, CHEMISTRY. (Including the Proceedings of the Chemical Society.) In recording recent discoveries and progress in Chemistry, we may_ in the first place mention two facts which have, however, as much relation to physics as chemistry. The first is a new determination of the density of ozone, by M. Soret. We have already recorded* the conclusion to which M. Soret was led by his former experi- ments, vzz. that the density of ozone was one-and-a-half times that of oxygen, or 1°658. This conclusion he has recently confirmed, by determining the rate of diffusion of ozonized oxygen, which was found to correspond exactly with the rate required by Graham’s well-known law. We have in several numbers referred to the invaluable labours of M. Berthelot on the Hydrocarbons, and not long sincet to his important paper on the action of heat on these bodies. His more recent experiments have been devoted to the oxidation of hydro- carbons, and have yielded interesting results. Acetylene, C, H,, only differs from oxalic acid by wanting eight atoms of oxygen. M. Berthelot finds that these can be added directly; and thus, seeing that he has already formed acetylene by the direct union of its * Vol. iii., p. 264. + Page 78. -_ a - e " - Pr* 1867.} Chemistry. 3938 elements, we have oxalic acid built up by the successive combination of its constituent elements. In order to produce oxalic acid in this way, gaseous acetylene is shaken up with a strongly alkaline solution of permanganate of potash, added gradually as long as the solution is decolorized, and taking care to keep the fask cool. When the operation is ended, the solution is filtered from the binoxide of manganese. The oxalic acid will be found in combination with the potash, and may be separated by means known to every chemist. Formic and carbonic acids are produced at the same time as oxalic acid, no doubt, M. Berthelot states, by the splittmg up of some nascent oxalic acid. Several other hydrocarbons were experimented with in the same way. Ethylene gave the same products as acetylene. Allylene gaye maloniec, acetic, and:carbonic acids. Amylene gave oxalic, and a mixture of several others, probably pyrotartaric, succinic, and malonic acids. Styrolene yielded benzoic and carbonic acids. M. Berthelot has also succeeded in forming toluol synthetically. The formula of toluol, C,, Hs, indicates the addition of marsh gas to benzo! with the elimination of two atoms of hydrogen. — — —_ —_—— Toluol. Marsh Gas. Benzol. The excessive heat required to effect the direct combination of these bodies was fatal to the existence of toluol, and a product of its condensation, anthracene, was obtained. By bringing them together in the nascent state, however, the desired combination was effected, and toluene formed. This was done by submitting a mixture of acetate and benzoate of soda and lime to distillation. Besides toluol some other hydrocarbons were produced, which M. Berthelot regards as higher homologues of toluol. An important paper “On new Hydrocarbons obtained synthe- tically” has been published by Fittig & Bigot. For this we must refer the reader to the original, or the translation indicated below.* The researches of Mr. P. Griess “On a new Series of Organic Compounds, in which Hydrogen is replaced by Nitrogen,” have led him to the discovery of a highly explosive series of salts, one of which he proposes as a substitute for fulminating mercury. This is the chromate or chlorochromate of diazobenzol. According to the French patent, it is prepared in the following way:—One equivalent of hydrochlorate of aniline is mixed with two equivalents of hydrochloric acid, and to these one equivalent of nitrite of soda in strong solution is very gradually added. The mixture is left to itself so long as any nitrogen is disengaged. In this way diazo- benzol is produced. To precipitate the salt named above, a con- centrated solution of one equivalent of bichromate of potash in one * © Ann, der Chem. u. Pharmn,’ Bd. exli., p. 160. ‘ ‘ihe Laboratory,’ vol.i., p. 121. VOL. IV. 2D | 394. Chronicles of Science. [J uly, \ equivalent of hydrochloric acid is added. It is unnecessary to say il that the precipitate must be collected and dried with the greatest HI precaution, since its explosive force is said to surpass that of fulmin- ating mercury. , While on the subject of explosive compounds we notice Mr. | Abel’s paper on the “Stability of Gun Cotton,” read at the meeting a of the Royal Society on April 4.* One objection brought against i the use of gun cotton is its hability to spontaneous changes, some- Me times resulting in explosion, and in other cases rendering the cotton useless. ‘This, as was stated by Mr. Crookes in an article in our Hi first volume,j is simply the result of imperfect manufacture; an it opinion which the experiments of Mr. Abel confirm. Tri-nitro- | cellulose, or perfect gun cotton, is not liable to any spontaneous i | change; “but the best manufactured article may contain some i organic nitrogenized impurities of comparatively unstable pro- i perties, which have been formed by the action of nitric acid upon Ht foreign matters retained by the cotton fibre, and which are not com- pletely removed by the process of purification”—that is boiling the raw cotton in a solution of caustic alkali. It is these impurities— | not usually amounting to more than two per cent.—which are i] prone to change when gun cotton is stored in the dry state. I The first result of the change is the production of a little free i acid, and if the change be allowed to proceed it goes on to the com- HT plete destruction of the cellulose products. But the experiments of H| Mr. Abel show that the change may be arrested at the primary | stage, and the stability of the material ensured for ever. ‘This re- | sult is obtained at once by uniformly distributing through the ) | cotton a solution of carbonate of soda. One per cent. of carbonate of soda, Mr. Abel has found, will afford to the material the power | of resisting any serious change, even when exposed to such tem- peratures as would cause the decomposition of pure and perfect gun | cotton without this protection. Water perfectly protects gun cotton from alteration. Actual immersion is not necessary ; if only damp to the touch it undergoes not the slightest change, and may be closely packed in large quan- tities without risk. The safety from explosion Mr. Abel cou- rageously illustrated by taking two or three pounds of damp cotton in his hand, and plunging a red-hot poker into it. Thus gun cotton damped with a proper amount of carbonate of soda solution | may be transported without risk to any part of the world, and may 1 then be easily dried for use; and it is a curious fact that while raw : cotton requires a temperature of not less than 240° F. to drive off | all moisture, gun-cotton becomes perfectly dry at about 180° F.— | the heat required to explode being 300°. * ‘Proceedings of Royal Society,’ vol. xv., p. 417. t ‘Quarterly Journal of Science,’ vol. i., p. 407. 1867. | Chemistry. 395 Gun cotton is however hygroscopic, and on this account has been found uncertain when made into cartridges. A sportsman, for ex- ample, would make good shooting in the early part of a damp day, bad in the middle, and worse in the afternoon. This objection to the use of gun cotton, so much to be recommended on other accounts for sporting purposes, has been obviated by the Messrs. Prentice, who now enclose each charge in the thinnest possible coating of india-rubber, by which the access of moisture is com- pletely prevented. Of two other important papers communicated to the Royal Society we can only give the titles. The first is by Mr. H. OC. Sorby, “On a Definite Method of Qualitative Analysis of Animal and Vegetable Colouring Matters by means of the Spectrum Micro- — scope.”* ‘This is really a: continuation of the experiments described in an article in our own pages, made with improved apparatus and a more definite aim. ‘The paper requires very careful reading at length for the full understanding of its contents. While on this subject we may refer the reader interested in the matter to a valuable paper by M. Preyer, “On the Quantitative Determination of Colourmg Matters of the Blood by means of the Spectroscope.”t The next is a paper by Sir B. Brodie, read May 3rd, and entitled “