In 1880 a rather sharp shock of earthquake was felt in Scotland, an account of which I communicated to this Society. Since then seven shocks have been felt in Scotland, and a notice of them, especially of the last, which occurred this year, will, I hope, be of interest to the Society.

From time to time memoirs have appeared by various chemists, pointing out that there is a tendency among the sulphates of the magnesium group to combine with one another in definite molecular proportions. This tendency has been brought into connection with the fact that these sulphates have almost identical atomic volumes.

This is merely the concluding portion of the tables attached to a paper which was formerly communicated to the Society by Dr Murray, and which is printed in your last Part of Proceedings. I need only state that the same methods described in that paper were used in these analyses, of which the accompanying tables give the results:

Dear Sir,—During the very delightful excursion in your “Medusa,” in which I had, with two of our friends, the pleasure of accompanying you through some of the western lochs of Scotland, we had not only many opportunities of admiring the special beauties of your country, but also many periods devoted to scientific work and to scientific discussions. You were good enough to demonstrate to us your ingenious methods of determining deep-sea temperatures. You dredged in our presence masses of beautiful shining Schizopods, and also before our eyes you formed the once so famous Bathybius Huxleyi. We conversed on general principles of natural philosophy, and on the different modes of regarding organic life and organic forms. You then invited me to give you a written explanation of my own morphological views—an invitation which I propose to aocept in the following pages.

The enormous amount and peculiar character of the deposits of carbonate of lime, found in all parts of the globe, give the question of the formation of these deposits a peculiar interest, consisting, as these deposits do, of fossilised remains of lime-secreting animals, and bearing witness in themselves as to their origin. It is beyond question that the great mass of carbonate of lime found in the later geological epochs has, primarily, been absorbed by the marine fauna and flora from the ocean, and secreted by them in the form of coral, shells, or calcareous plants. From this may be realised the important function which lime salts play in respect to the economy of marine life.

It is well known that carbonate of lime is soluble in water in a slight degree, sufficiently so to give a distinctly alkaline reaction. Fresenius gives this solubility at one part of ten thousand, although in the presence of carbonate of ammonia, this is decreased to one in sixty-four thousand.

Cases of absence or defect of the corpus callosum are of interest not only because of their great rarity, but because of the light which they throw on the distribution and functions of this commissure, and on the development of the mesial aspects of the cerebral hemispheres.

A series of Photographs of the Nice Observatory, presented by M. Bischoffsheim through the Astronomer-Royal for Scotland, were exhibited.