Scientific Intelligence — Geology. 205 



fragment that was seen to pass Lahaina towards Oahu, fell in the 

 Molokai channel, and threw a mass of water into the air, and was 

 said to be followed by a rumbling sound. 



The llev. Mr Richards of Lahaina mistook the report of the 

 explosion for that of cannon on board of some ship. The explo- 

 sions which I heard at Honolulu led me at first to suppose they 

 were cannon on board of ships not far distant ; but, soon after, I 

 was satisfied that they were meteoric. Very soon the servants of 

 Kalanimoku, Secretary of State, brought me the fragment which 

 they affirmed had just fallen from the sky in our village. This 

 fragment I carefully preserved and brought over, and had the plea- 

 sure of presenting to you ; a different pleasure from that with which 

 Mr Richards and myself picked up and forwarded to the Missionary 

 Museum in Pemberton Square, Boston, a cannon-ball, one of several 

 which had been fired at our heads. — American Journal of Science 

 and Arts, vol. xlix., No. 2, October 1845, p. 407. 



2. Electric Sound. — M. Jacobi has constructed an acoustic tele- 

 graph, in which the sound resulting from the interruption of the 

 electric current is repeated 150 to 200 times in a second. The 

 sound produced is transmitted to a distance of fifteen miles (twenty- 

 four kilometres.) — VInstitut, No. 600, 25 Juin, 1845, p. 231. 



GEOLOGY. 



3. On the Kunker, a Tufaceous Deposit in India. By Captain 

 Newhold. — The kunker is a more or less compact tufaceous deposit 

 of carbonate of lime or silica. Captain Newbold brings evidence to 

 prove that they were produced from springs of water, remains of 

 which may, in some instances, be detected. The vast kunker depo- 

 sits in the plains and valleys of India, are sometimes upwards of 

 seventy feet deep, overspreading places where they could not have 

 been formed from rivers or rivulets. Along the edges of trap 

 dykes mounds of kunker are occasionally observed, like those around 

 the mouths of kunker-depositing springs. In the Kurnool territory, 

 there is a warm spring from which deposits of a calcareous mud are 

 forming ; but around it and below there is a bed of kunker, partly 

 siliceous, in some portions of which fresh-water shells — Melanise, 

 some Planorbes, and others, and impressions of leaves, are contained. 

 The shells afford instructive examples of the various stages of 

 fossilization.. Some of their coats have been completely converted 

 into sparry carbonate of lime ; others have been filled, and remain 

 as casts, when the exterior shell is broken off. Others, again, are 

 lined with drusy crystals of quartz ; in some, this siliceous crystal- 

 lization is just beginning to roughen the surface of the interior, 

 and is hardly pei^ceptible without the aid of a lens, thus exhibiting 

 interesting examples of the processes by which fissures in rocks 

 are Hned and filbd up with minerals, which we look in vain for 

 in the enclosing walls. Some of the kunker is so firm as to re- 



