Coal deposits of Tertiary age have now been found more or less throughout the two great islands (north and south) of New Zealand. They are best known, and they have been chiefly worked, however, in the provinces of Otago, Nelson, Canterbury, and Auckland. Their apparent more meagre development in other provinces is probably simply due to the circumstance that the latter have not, as yet, been so thoroughly explored or so extensively colonised and peopled as the others. The explorations, however, of provincial and geological surveyors, of prospecting goldminers and sheep-owners, and of other pioneers of civilisation, are daily adding to the number of the known coal-fields of New Zealand; and it is probably not going too far to assert, in general terms, that the whole area of its two great islands is studded over with coal-basins of various extent, depth, age, and quality of coal.

Deviations from the usually described arrangements of the parts, of which the human body is composed, have from time to time attracted the attention of the anthropotomist. In many anatomical text-books, as well as in sundry memoirs specially devoted to the subject, numerous examples of such variations have now been recorded. To the scientific anatomist these have always had a certain value, but of late years this department of anatomical inquiry, more especially in connection with variations in the muscular system, has had additional importance and interest attached to it, on account of the attention which has been directed to the correspondence, or want of correspondence, in the muscular arrangements in man and the other mammalia, more particularly the apes.

Professor Agassiz, in his “Poissons Fossiles,” vol. ii. p. 78, has mentioned a species of Pygopterus as occurring in the carboniferous shales of Wardie, near Edinburgh, and which he has named P. Greenockii, in honour of Lord Greenock, the first collector of ichthyolites from that locality. He has, however, neither given a figure of this species nor any description of it, beyond saying that the known fragments consist of hardly anything but heads, with the anterior portion of the trunk, and that the scales covering this part of the body are higher than broad—a circumstance distinguishing them from the scales of all the other species of the genus.

In 1855, the Professor of Materia Medica in the University of Edinburgh, in a paper read before this Society, directed the attention of physiologists to some of the remarkable properties of the Calabar bean. In 1862, I presented a graduation thesis to the University of Edinburgh on the “Characters, Actions and Therapeutic Uses of the Ordeal Bean of Calabar.” The principal results I had obtained at that time were that this substance causes death by either syncope or asphyxia, the latter being due to an effect on the spinal cord and on the respiratory centres; that the symptoms resemble those of cardiac or pulmonary embarrassment, according to the quantity of the poison administered, and to its rate of absorption; and, also, that the topical application of this agent to the eyeball, or to its neighbourhood, produces a marked and rapid contraction of the pupil and various disturbances of vision. Since then, and more especially because of the peculiarity of the last of these conclusions, a lively interest has been taken in this substance. Its actions on the eye have been investigated by nearly all the leading ophthalmologists of Europe and of America, and its general physiology has occupied the attention of many distinguished students of biology. Nor have these labours been barren of practical results. Ophthalmic medicine has adopted this agent as one of its important remedies, and there can be little doubt that general medical practice will soon include in its Pharmacopœia a drug of so great energy.

A brief account of the weather of this period as regards temperature was read before the Royal Society last year. It was drawn up at the request of Professor Balfour, to accompany his paper “On the Remarkable State of Vegetation in the Edinburgh Botanic Garden in December 1863.”

From the 26th of October to the end of December the weather was in every way remarkable. Though frost occurred in the end of October and beginning of November it was not severe, and the temperature continued on the whole seasonable till the 12th of November. From this date till the end of the month it ranged unprecedently high, being 9° above the average temperature of the season. It then fell for the next ten days, but on no occasion below the average; and again rose considerably above the average during the week ending with the 18th of December. Under this genial weather vegetation in the open air advanced rapidly to a state of forwardness not usually seen till the month of March. In December 245 plants were in flower in the Gardens in the open air, and of these 35 were spring flowers. The frost which had occurred was insufficient to damage, to any material extent, 210 autumn-flowering plants; and the high temperature of November, which was as high as what ordinarily occurs in the beginning of May, brought the spring flowers prematurely into bloom, so that there was to be seen the rare spectacle of sweet peas and hepaticas flowering together.

The etymology of the names of places in a country is either a very important element in fixing the ethnology of its inhabitants, or it is a snare and a delusion, just according as the subject is treated. When such names are analysed according to fixed laws, based upon sound philological principles, and a comprehensive observation of facts, they afford results both important and trustworthy; but if treated empirically, and based upon resemblance of sounds alone, they become a mere field for wild conjectures and fanciful etymologies, leading to no certain results. The latter is the ordinary process to which they are subjected. The natural tendency of the human mind is to a mere phonetic etymology of names, both of persons and of places. It is this tendency which has given rise to what may be called punning etymologies, in which the King of Scotland plays so facetious a part, when the first Guthrie had that name fixed upon by the king, from his proposing when asked, how many fish should be prepared, to gut three; and when Rosemarkie received its name because the king, on asking what land he neared, was answered, Ross mark ye. This illustrates the natural tendency to suggest a mere phonetic etymology, in which the sounds of the name of the place appear to resemble the sounds in certain words of a certain language, the language from which the etymology is derived being selected upon no sound philological grounds, but from arbitrary considerations merely.

In examining the colours produced by thin laminæ of the crystalline lens of fishes, I observed a series of rectilineal serrated fringes perpendicular to the direction of the fibres, and produced by inclining the laminæ in a plane cutting these fibres at right angles. I was thus led to imitate these fringes or bands by combining grooves or striæ cut upon glass or steel surfaces, or grooves taken from these surfaces upon isinglass or gums.

In the preceding paper I have described the bands produced by gratings or grooved surfaces with 500 divisions in an inch, when the two grooved surfaces are in contact, and the grooves in the one slightly inclined to those in the other.

The following results were obtained with two gratings, one of wrhich had 2000 and the other 1000 divisions in an inch.

1. When the surfaces are in perfect contact, and the grooves parallel, very irregular bands are seen on the united surfaces, either with a lens or by ordinary vision, and are parallel to the grooves. They are seen only on the 2d, 4th, 6th, &c., spectra on each side of the luminous bar or disc.