VI NOTES BY THE EDITOR 



" Chemistry. The most remarkable advance in this science is that 

 made by Bunsen and KirchhofF, in the application of the colored rays 

 of the prism to analytical research. We may consider their discoveries 

 as the commencement of a new era in analytical chemistry, from the 

 extraordinary facilities they afford in the qualitative detection of the 

 minutest traces of elementary bodies. The value of the method has 

 been proved by the discovery of the new metals, csesium and rubidium, 

 by M. Bunsen ; and it has yielded another remarkable result, in dem- 

 onstrating the existence- of iron, and six other known metals, in the 

 sun. 



" I must not, however, pass over in silence the valuable light which 

 chemistry has recently thrown upon the composition of iron and steel. 

 Although Despretz demonstrated many years ago that iron would com- 

 bine with nitrogen, yet it was not until 1857 that Mr. C. Binks proved 

 that nitrogen is an essential element of steel, and more recently M. 

 Caron and M. Fremy have further elucidated this subject ; the former 

 showing that cyanogen, or cyanide of ammonium, is the essential ele- 

 ment which converts wrought iron into steel ; the latter combining iron 

 with nitrogen through the medium of ammonia, and then converting it 

 into steel by bringing it, at the proper temperature, into contact with 

 common coal-gas. There is little doubt that in a few years these dis- 

 coveries will enable Sheffield manufacturers to replace their present 

 uncertain, cumbrous, and expensive process by a method at once sim- 

 ple and inexpensive, and so completely under control as to admit of 

 any required degree of conversion being obtained with absolute cer- 

 tainty. Mr. Grace Calvert also has proved that cast-iron contains ni- 

 trogen, and has shown that it is a definite compound of carbon and 

 iron, mixed with various proportions of metallic iron, according to its 

 nature. 



" Geology. It is little more than half a century since Geology as- 

 sumed the distinctive character of a science. Taking into considera- 

 tion the aspects of nature in different epochs of the history of the earth, 

 it has been found that the study of the changes at present going on 

 in the world around us enables us to understand the past revolutions 

 of the globe, and the conditions and circumstances under which strata 

 have been formed, and organic remains imbedded and preserved. The 

 geologist has increasingly tended to believe that the changes which 

 have taken place on the face of the globe, from the earliest times to the 

 present, are the result of agencies still at work. But whilst it is his 

 high office to record the distribution of life in past ages, and the evi- 

 dence of physical changes in the arrangement of land and water, his 

 results hitherto have indicated no traces of its beginning, nor have 

 they afforded evidence of the time of its future duration. 



