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general and special movements of subsidence, the author dwelt upon the intimate connection between the Alpine lakes and the innumerable rock basins of the rest of the northern hemisphere. This connection, he said, could hardly be accidental. It pointed to some general cause which had been at work during a recent geological period, and he could not doubt but that this general cause was the thick mantle of ice which, from independent evidence, can be shown to have enveloped a great part of Europe and North America. The idea of the erosion of lake basins by the grinding power of land ice had been first propounded by Professor Ramsay, and there seemed every reason to believe that this view would come eventually to be accepted even by the geologists of Switzerland.—Professor Turner read a preliminary notice of the great finner whale recently stranded at Longniddry. It was so seldom that one of these large whales found its way to our very doors, and there were still so many unsolved problems to be worked out in connection with the structure and classification of the larger cetacea, that he gladly availed himself of the arrival of the rare visitor to devote such time as he could spare to the study of the huge creature. The length of the animal, he said, measured from the tip of the lower jaw to the end of the tail, 78 feet 9 inches. The girth of the body, immediately behind the flipper, was 45 feet. Its girth, in line with the oval orifice, was 28 feet, whilst around the root of the tail it was only 7 feet 6 inches. The inner surface of the lower jaw close to its upper edge and on the border was concave, and sloped inwards so as to admit the edge of the upper jaw within it. The length from the angle of the mouth to the top of the lower jaw, along the curved border, was 21 feet 8 inches. The dorsum of the upper jaw was not arched in the antero posterior direction. It sloped gently upwards and backwards to the blow holes, from which a low but readily recognised median ridge passed forwards on the back, gradually subsiding some distance behind its tip. On each side of this ridge was a shallow concavity immediately in front of the blow holes, the ridge bifurcated and the forks passed backwards, enclosing the nostrils for several inches, and then subsided. The outer borders of the upper jaw were not straight, but extended forward from the angle of the mouth for some distance in a gentle curve, and then rapidly converging in front formed a somewhat pointed tip. Their rounded palatal edges fitted within the arch of the lower jaw. The transverse diameter of the upper jaw over its dorsum between the angles of the mouth was 13 feet 3 inches. From the blow holes the outline of the back, curved upwards and backwards, was uniformly smooth and rounded, and for a considerable distance presented no dorsal mesial ridge. From the tip of the lower jaw to the anterior border of the dorsal fin, the measurement was 59 feet 3 inches. Behind the dorsal fin the sides of the animal sloped rapidly downwards to the ventral surface, so that the dorsal and ventral mesial lines were clearly marked, and the sides tapered off to the tail. The ventral surface of the throat, and the sides and ventral surface of the chest and belly, were marked by numerous longitudinal ridges and furrows. When he first saw the animal, the furrows separating the ridges were not more than from ½ to ¾ of an inch broad, whilst the ridges themselves were in many places 4 inches in breadth; but as the body began to swell by the formation of gas from decomposition, the furrows were opened up, became wider and shallower, and the ridges underwent a corresponding diminution in breadth. The flipper projected from the side of the body thirty-one feet four inches behind the top of the lower jaw, and fourteen feet behind the angle of the mouth. It curved outwards and inwards, terminating in a free, pointed end. The distance between the two flippers, measured over the back between the anterior borders of their roots, was eighteen feet six inches. On the dorsum of the beak and of the cranium, on the back of the body, and for some distance down its sides, the colour was dark steel, amounting in some sights almost to black. On a line with the pectoral flipper the sides were mottled with white, and on the ventral surface irregular, and in some cases large patches of silver grey or whitish colour were seen. The dorsal fin was steel grey or black, except near its posterior border, where it was a shade lighter and streaked with black lines. The anterior of the lobes of the tail, its upper surface near the root and for the anterior two-thirds, were black. The upper surface of the flipper was steel grey, mottled with white at the root, at the tip along its posterior or internal border and on the under surface white patches were seen, on the upper surface near the tip, and here they were streaked with black lines running in the long axis of the flipper. White patches also extended from the root of the flipper to the adjacent parts of the sides of the animal. The outside of the lower jaw was black, whilst the inside was streaked with grey and brown. The tongue of the whale was of enormous size. The dorsum was comparatively smooth in front, but at the posterior part it was elevated into hillocks, which were separated by deep furrows. The baleen had a deep black colour, and consisted on each side of the plates which projected from the palate into the cavity of the mouth. The plates were arranged in rows—370 were counted on each side—which lay somewhat obliquely across the palate, extending from near the base of the great mesial palatal ridge to the outer edge of the palate. The plates diminished in size so much that at the tip, where the two sets of baleen became continuous, they were merely stiff bristles. He was happy to state, however, that the skeleton had been secured by the directors of the Museum of Science and Art in this city, who had granted him permission to examine it as soon as it was in a fit state. Prof. M'Donald gave it as his opinion that the whale which stranded at Longniddry was a water-breathing animal, and not an air-breathing animal.—The other paper read was "On the Aggregation in the Dublin Lying-in Hospital."

Royal Lombardian Institute, November 11.—Professor Schiaparelli communicated a note upon a recent pamphlet by Signor Gaetano Baratta, proposing a method for the geometrical trisection of any given angle. He showed by a table of measurements that the first angle obtained by M. Baratta's rule is always greater than one-third of the primary angle.—Professor Emilio Villari presented a memoir on the electro-motor force of palladium in gas batteries. The author was led by the consideration of the great attractive force of palladium for hydrogen, and the fact that the hydrogen thus held by palladium possesses great chemical activity, to apply it to the construction of gas batteries. He described the mode in which he constructed his batteries and the experiments performed with them, which showed very complex actions, but proved that a palladium-element has a greater electro-motor force than one of Grove's gas-elements, because hydrogen in contact with palladium is considerably more oxydisable than hydrogen in contact with platinum. This electromotor force is still further increased if the palladium which is in contact with oxygen (i.e., the positive electrode) is oxydised.—A new determination of the orbit of Clytie (asteroid 73), with ephemerides, by Signor Giovanni Celoria, was communicated by Professor Schiaparelli.

Natural History Society, November 29.—Principal Dawson in the chair. Mr. Billings read a paper on the genus Scolithus, and some allied Fossils. The fossils known under the names of Scolithus and Arenicolites were described as consisting of cylindrical or rod-like bodies, which penetrate the layers of sandstone perpendicularly downwards, to a distance varying from a few lines to two or three feet. There are several varieties, the most common of which has the rods from one-twelfth to one-fourth of an inch in diameter; in another more rare form they have at the surface of the beds a wide trumpet-shaped expansion, two or three inches across, but taper to a point below, where they are, in general, more or less curved. Under certain circumstances, they can be entirely separated from the rock, and then present the appearance of simple cylindrical or conical rods of sandstone with no internal structure. All the varieties are more or less distinctly marked by a series of oblique annulations—a character which Mr. Billings thought to be of importance, as it seemed to show they were all members of one family of organisms. So long as these fossils were only known by specimens exhibiting no internal structure, it was impossible to decide to which division of the animal or vegetable kingdom they belonged. The Geological Survey had, however, ascertained that the Potsdam formation included a considerable deposit of limestone, in which the same fossil forms were found, with the internal structure beautifully preserved. By these it was proved that they were not the casts of worm-burrows, but sponges. Mr. Billings believed that these ancient sponges, or at least many of them, lived in the sand or soft ooze of the ocean's bottom, with their sometimes wide and trumpet-shaped mouths either even with or a little elevated above the surface. During the discussion that followed the reading of the paper, Dr. Dawson said that if Mr. Billings was right, it would appear that in the seas of the earlier ages protozoic life had the preponderance. In reply to a question by Mr. Whiteaves, Mr. Billings said that siliceous spiculae