218 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



crous nor homely associations can any longer adhere to it. The sci- 

 ence that adopts it, dignifies it for the occasion. Its progress to a 

 post so respectable has been sloio, it is true ; but that post is at last 

 attained ; and it would now seem that lexicographers need not be 

 at a loss how to treat this and the related word in accordance with the 

 present state of the English language." * 



Professor W. B. Rogers spoke of the estimates which had 

 been made of the probable thickness of the earth's crust, 

 based on the rate at which the temperature increases from 

 the surface downwards ; and he remarked that recent ex- 

 periments tend to show that the crust must be much thicker 

 than had been supposed. Bunsen, especially, has shown 

 that the fusing point of some substances is greatly raised 

 by pressure ; but this has been demonstrated only in the 

 case of certain substances, and could not be true of all ; ice 

 being a well-known exception, melting, as it does, under 



* Present " national use " (see Campbell) is well ilhistrated by the two follow- 

 ing examples, one from each side of the Atlantic, and both belonging to the 

 present year. 



Mr. Francis T. Buckland, in his just published " Curiosities of Natural History," 

 says : " Not long ago I met a man in Oxford Street who was wheeling along a 

 truck full of tortoises of different sizes. He said he had bought them as a specu- 

 lation, from the captain of a ship then in the Victoria Docks, who had got a cargo 

 of them. In order to get customers, he assured the passers-by that they were 

 capital things to ' keep the kitchen clear of black beetles.' This was simply untrue, 



for this kind of tortoise is purely a vegetable cater I bought the largest of the 



•lot, and took him home on the top of an omnibus. The driver had evidently not 

 had a zoological education, for he could not make out the nature of my prize at all. 

 After patiently listening to my lecture on tortoises in general, he relapsed into 

 silence," &c. (pp. 395, 396.) Glance at the next page, and the word " suffers a sea- 

 change " at once : " A few weeks ago, when on my way to see the great iron ship 

 opposite Greenwich, a boy got into the steamer at London Bridge, carrying a turtle 



on his back He told me his business was to fetch turtle from London, when 



wanted for one of the hotels at Greenwich," &c. (p. 397.) 



The c\i-Atlantic example is furnished by one who, while a " chorded shell " is 

 reposing on his left hand, writes thus with the other : " A turtle — which means a 

 tortoise — is fond of his shell ; but if you put a live coal on his back, he crawls out 

 of it. So the boys say." The animal that New-England boys have to do with 

 possesses the more perfect type of the order to which it belongs ; and a local idiom 

 is here translated for the benefit of the entire belt of English readers that now en- 

 circles the earth. 



