490 British Association for the Advancement of Science. 



T/ieorie de la Chaleur just published, dissents from this opinion, and 

 is disposed to assign another reason for the higher temperature be- 

 low the surface. He observes that the cosmical regions in which the 

 solar system moves have a proper temperature of their own ; that 

 this temperature may be different in different parts of the universe ; 

 and that if this be so, the earth would be some time in acquiring 

 the temperature of the part of space in which it has arrived. This 

 temperature will be propagated gradually from the surface to the 

 interior parts. And hence, if the solar system moves out of a hotter 

 into a colder region of space, the part of the earth below the surface 

 will exhibit traces of that higher temperature which it had before 

 acquired. And this would by no means imply that the increase of 

 temperature goes on all the way to the centre. Though these opi- 

 nions may not gain the assent of geologists, it may be proper that 

 they should be aware that such have been promulgated. 



On the Geographical Position of Cape Farewell. By Dr. West. 



The chief object of the memoir was to show, That Cape Farewell, 

 so named by Davies in 1585, is not, as stated by Egede, Crantz, and 

 Giesecke, on the island of Sermesok, but on another island many 

 miles to the south-east of it ; — That Staten Hoek is not, as generally 

 laid down in charts, a promontory on the southernmost extremity of 

 the main land, nor yet, as stated in the Edinburgh Review (No. 59,) 

 an inlet, but that it is identical with Cape Farewell, and received its 

 name, which signifies the States' Promontory, from the Dutch na- 

 vigators. Dr. West also showed that this fact, though now appa- 

 rently quite unknown in these countries, was understood and plainly 

 stated nearly ninety years ago in an English work, Drage's Account 

 of the Voyage in the California in 1746 and 1747. 



The memoir was accompanied by a copy of Graah's Chart of 

 Greenland, the latest and most correct extant, from which it appeared 

 that Giesecke, in his account of Greenland in Brewster's Edinburgh 

 Cyclopaedia, and in his map of that country in the 14th vol. of the 

 Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy, has placed the island of 

 Sermesok nearly a degree too much to the south ; that no part of 

 the main land could possibly be seen from the open sea to the south 

 of the coast of Greenland ; and that the island most to the south of 

 the strait Ikareseksoak is the only one on which is a cape answering 

 to the description given by navigators of Cape Farewell. 



Dr. W T est concluded his memoir by expressing his opinion that 

 Captain Graah, by his having satisfactorily ascertained that there 

 was no trace whatever of a colony on the east coast from its southern- 

 most extremity to lat. 65° 30', has completely established the correct- 

 ness of the opinion of Eggers that the (Esterbygd, or eastern settle- 

 ment, was situated on the south-west coast, in what is now Juliane- 

 shaab's District; and that it received its name merely from the fact 

 of its being to the east of the other settlement, the Vesterbygd. 



