OF ARTS AND SCIENCES : SEPTEMBER 13, 1870. 297 



Six hundred and twenty-third Sleeting. 



September 13, 1870. — Monthly Meeting. 



The President in the chair. 



The Corresponding Secretary read letters from Messrs. New- 

 comb, Safford, H. J. Clark, and Merivale, acknowledging their 

 election by the Academy. 



The President stated that when abroad he procured a com- 

 plete set of the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical 

 Society ; after a delay of nearly a year, they had not yet come 

 to hand, but he still hoped to recover them. He also Called 

 attention to a copy of the Greek Dictionary of Professor Sopho- 

 cles, in which the author acknowledged his indebtedness to 

 the Academy in the following note : — " The greater part of 

 the Author's Glossary of Later and Byzantine Greek, forming 

 Vol. VII. (new series) of the memoirs of the American Acad- 

 emy, has been incorporated in the present book." 



Professor Benjamin Peirce referred to the appropriation 

 recently made by Congress to observe the eclipse next Decem- 

 ber, and stated that the full number of observers had not yet 

 been obtained. As the English government has withdrawn 

 the vessel offered to the Royal Society, it becomes the more 

 necessary that great efforts should be made to render the 

 American expedition a success. 



Mr. W. H. Dall referred to the expedition organized in 1865 

 to explore the route for the International Telegraph line be- 

 tween the mouth of the Amoor River and some point in the 

 United States territory. 



To this expedition a scientific corps was attached, under the leader- 

 ship of the late lamented Robert Kennicott. The special problems to 

 be solved were those of the boundary of the water-shed of the extreme 

 northwest portion of the continent, and the distribution of animal life 

 in the same region. The result of these explorations showed that the 

 great Yukon River of the Hudson Bay territory was identical with the 

 Kivichpdk of the Russians, and debouched into Bering Sea, south of 

 Norton Sound ; that the Rocky Mountains, instead of being prolonged 

 in a nearly straight line northward to the Arctic Sea, were really bent 



vol. viii. 38 



