Au mois d'Août dernier, Mr Scourfield eut l'obligeance de me remettre à Berne, lors du congrès de Zoologie, trois petits flacons, dont deux contenaient du détritus pris au fond du Loch Ness, et le troisième du plankton provenant du même lac; ces diverses récoltes dataient de 1903, et étaient conservées à l'alcool. Plus tard, en Novembre, Mr Scourfield m'adressa également trois tubes provenant de la même localité, et dont le contenu, récolté le 7 du même mois, était encore dans son eau d'origine, de sorte que beaucoup des organismes s'y trouvaient vivants et souvent en bonne santé.

Dr Penard has examined and reported upon the Rhizopods and Heliozoa collected in Loch Ness at depths exceeding 250 feet. No littoral samples were sent to him, as his object was to investigate the sarcodine fauna peculiar to deep lakes. The majority of the species found in the deep collections were recognised as belonging to the fauna of the littoral region, or of the adjacent moors, only some half a dozen species or varieties being regarded as peculiar to the abyssal region.

In order to complete the list of the Sarcodina of Loch Ness, in so far as this can be done from the observations made by the Lake Survey, I now add the names of several species which were not detected in any of the collections sent to Dr Penard. Nearly all are common bog species.

The physical anthropology of the Faroes has recently been described in a very elaborate manner, as far as the island of Suderoe is concerned, by Dr F. Jørgensen (1), who was resident there as a medical man for some years. While pointing out, however, that the people of Suderoe differ considerably from those of the ‘northern islands,’ he only gives a comparatively small series of data regarding the latter, nor does he state to which of the northern islands the men he examined belonged, or even whether they came from one island or from several. Apart from Suderoe, there are sixteen inhabited islands (fig. 1) in the group, and between some of them very little communication exists even at the present day. In historical accounts of the Faroes the six following islands are usually called the ‘northern isles,’—viz., Kalsoe, Kunoe, Boroe, Wideroe, Fugloe, and Svinoe,—but I take it that Dr Jørgensen would include at least Osteroe, Stromoe, and “Waagoe also. His elaborate, laborious, and presumably accurate tables serve so well to point the moral that until a uniform method, a uniform standard, and a uniform set of anthropometrical instruments are adopted by anthropometrists of all nationalities final work in this branch of science will be impossible, that I have thought it well to put on record a small series of measurements taken by myself in the Faroes recently, and at the same time to point out wherein some of the data pretty generally adopted fail in accuracy, differing with the observer as well as the observed.

The first observations on seiches in Scotland were made last summer by members of the Lake Survey, the differences in level having been measured by a foot-rule. A Sarasin limnograph was procured by the Survey and was set up at Fort Augustus on Loch Ness in June of this year, and has been recording since then, with only a few stoppages. The biggest seiche so far recorded had an amplitude of about 9 cm. The boat-house of St Benedict's Abbey, kindly put at Sir John Murray's disposal by the Lord Abbot, gave shelter to the instrument both from wind and waves.

In 1895 the Edinburgh and District Water Trustees obtained an Act of Parliament for the introduction of a new water supply to the city of Edinburgh drawn from the Talla Water, one of the upper tributaries of the river Tweed.

The Bill as originally introduced contained provisions for giving off 4,000,000 gallons a day as compensation to the stream, and for appropriating the remainder of the water.

The Tweed Salmon Fisheries Commissioners and other proprietors interested were advised that the proposed amount of compensation was too small, and after various negotiations a clause was ultimately adjusted providing that rain gaugings should be taken over the drainage area for a period of seven years from the 1st January 1896 by the authors of this note (Mr Tait having been appointed in lieu of his predecessor), and that thereafter they should fix—taking all the circumstances into consideration—what was the available annual rainfall of the district.

The particular bull trout with which I desire to deal in this paperare the important migratory fishes which are commonly referred to by this name in Scotland. I make no mention of more or less monstrous examples of the common brown trout, or even of those examples of S. fario which have assumed a semi-migratory habit, and have become much modified by reason of their life in the estuaries of our larger rivers.

A striking feature of the results obtained at the seven gauges in the drainage area is the divergence from the commonly accepted relation between rainfall and height above sea-level. The following table shows the “theoretical” amounts of rainfall, averaging 62·51 inches, that might have been expected at the several gauges, on the assumption that there was a uniform increase of 3 per cent. for every 100 feet of rise ; and in comparison with these, the amounts actually recorded, also averaging 62·51 inches.

§ 1. In the practical calculation of the periods and nodes of the lakes we have hitherto examined it has been found that the use of the Seiche Functions gives the best results. Indeed, as will appear from details presently to be submitted to the Society by Mr E. M. Wedderburn and myself, the agreement between theory and observation, so far as we have gone, is beyond what might reasonably have been expected. Also the phenomena of concave lakes, i.e. such as have no shallows or points of minimum depth, are easily deducible from the formulæ given in an abstract (Proc. R.S.E., vol. xxv. p. 328, 6th Oct. 1904) which I communicated to the Society on 18th July 1904. On the other hand, the theory of convex lakes is less easy of manipulation, chiefly owing to the difficulty in calculating the roots of the equations

Preliminary observations upon this subject, which were made by the author on behalf of a committee of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society of London, are published in a report presented by the committee and read on May 26th of this year before that Society.

The first of the writings dealt with in the present communication is of a considerably earlier date than the others: its proper place is immediately in front of Sylvester's paper of the same year. The account of it here given should therefore he found between pages 140 and 141 of this volume of the Proceedings.

Some time ago, while studying the chemical dynamics of the changes which occur in solutions of urea or carbamide, I came upon some rather unexpected results which led me to hope that investigations conducted on somewhat the same lines with other substances of the amide group might prove to yield results of some interest. The amides referred to are those derived from carboxylic acids. While proceeding to this investigation I noticed some measurements, obtained in connection with the viscosity of aqueous solutions of carbamide, which appeared of sufficient interest to demand an inquiry into the nature of solutions of this class of substances before proceeding further with the subject of inquiry in the manner at first intended.

Since the year 1889, when the last of a series of six papers with a title similar to the above appeared, further research has led to the discovery of a number of writings belonging to the period then dealt with, viz., 1693–1844. Of those an account is now given before proceeding to the papers of later date than 1844.

In a paper read before the Royal Society of Edinburgh, on 6th January 1902, and printed in its “Proceedings,” I attempted to explain the constitution of matter by supposing the atoms of matter to be bubbles of ether.

In order to fully understand what follows it is absolutely necessary to read that paper in its entirety, but for the benefit of those who may not have access to it, or who do not care to enter deeply into the subject, I give a short synopsis of it.

1. Vanishing aggregates of determinant minors have of late received considerable attention and are now becoming well known. From aggregates for axisymmetric determinants of the form given by Kronecker,* Muir,† or the present writer‡ we may get other forms, and it is the object of this paper to consider some of these new forms, and in particular to show that the general theorem given by Professor Nanson § is readily obtained from the vanishing aggregates of the type given by the present writer.

So long as Homo sapiens was believed to occupy a higher platform in the organic world than other animals by virtue of his special endowments, no one, apparently, thought of looking for evidence of his origin and history in the obscure vista of prehistoric times. The long cherished traditions and myths which had gathered around the inquiry left little room for any other hypothesis than that his apparition on the field of life was the last and crowning achievement of a long series of creative fiats which brought the present world-drama into existence. In the cosmogony thus conjured up, the multitudinous phenomena of the material world—animals and plants, the distribution of land and water, the recurrence of seasons, etc.—were regarded as having been specially designed and arranged to administer to the life-functions of this new being.

The more or less disguised use of continued fractions has been traced back to the publication of Bombelli's Algebra in 1572, eighty-four years, that is to say, before the publication of Wallis’ Arithmetica Infinitorum, in which Brouncker's discovery was announced and the fractions explicitly expressed. The study of the numerators and denominators of the convergents viewed as functions of the partial denominators was first seriously undertaken by Euler in his Specimen Algorithmi Singularis of the year 1764, in which denoting by

the convergents to

he established a long series of identities, such as

In a recent communication I described how I had obtained crystals of potassium hydrogen succinate showing only curved faces, from an attempt, up to the present unsuccessful, to prepare complex derivatives of succinic acid corresponding to the chromoxalates. In searching the voluminous literature of the subject for particulars of such complex salts I especially noticed two things,—first, the frequent but hitherto scarcely noted parallelism exhibited by these compounds; and second, the noticeable lack of uniformity in the formulæ attributed to them.

Till within recent years the epiphysis cerebri has been generally regarded as a mesial outgrowth from the roof of the thalamencephalon in Vertebrates. The researches of Béraneck (5), Dendy (11), Hill (17), and Locy (19), however, tend to demonstrate the fact that this structure arises in the form of two bilateral outgrowths; while Gaskell (12) has drawn attention to its bilateral nature in Ammocœtes. Some observations which the author made on the development of the epiphysis in Amphibia (8 and 9) were found to agree in the main with those of the above-mentioned workers. The present research was therefore undertaken with the view of corroborating the results which had been obtained in the Amphibia, and it was found that these received support in the case of the chick.

Records relating to the occurrence of medusæ in the Firth of Clyde have not been numerous, though its waters have long been a noted resort for marine naturalists. Forbes, in his Monograph on the British Naked-eyed Medusæ, states that he paid special attention to the medusæ of the Clyde, and that those which he collected while on a yachting cruise in the autumn of 1839 were the foundation of his well-known monograph. Amongst those who have made additions to the list of species I may mention the names of Landsborough, Alder, Allman, Herdman, and two well-known foreigners, Claparède and Haeckel. In June 1902 Dr Clemens Hartlaub, of Heligoland, made a short stay at the Millport Biological Laboratory, solely for the purpose of collecting medusæ, but the complete results of his labours have not yet been published.