No. S.] NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY. 473 



anything in the structures of animals and plants that when made 

 the subject of microscopic study is not capable of furnishinp; the 

 material of thought and improvement, and I trust that the 

 Microscopical Club will frequently send in to this society such 

 evidences of its life and vigor as were presented in this paper. 



We were indebted to Mr. Fowler for the exhibition of a very 

 interesting series of drawings of fishes, prepared by him for the 

 international exhibition in London. No method of illustration 

 of our fishes is better than such faithful drawings as those of Mr. 

 Fowler, and I have no doubt they will be as much appreciated 

 and admired by the visitors to the exhibition as by the members 

 of our society. In preparing these drawings Mr. Fowler has had 

 his attention called to many varietal forms and other peculiarities 

 of our fishes, an account of which he will, I hope, one day pre- 

 sent to us. 



Our attention was directed to the analyses of soils by Dr. Ed- 

 wards. This is a subject which has received far too little atten- 

 tion in Canada, and since the now somewhat distant time when 

 Dr. Sterry Hunt was commissioned by the Geological Survey to 

 analyse the exhausted and virgin soils of some typical districts 

 of this country it has been much neglected. It is time, in the in- 

 terests of agriculture, that the Government should appoint a 

 chemical commission to collect the facts as to the exhaustion of 

 soils and present them to the public. 



Geology, as usual, occupied a prominent place in our proceedings 

 The discovery of the bones of a whale at Smith's Falls in the post- 

 pliocene gravel, and at an elevation of more than 400 feet above 

 the sea, bears remarkable testimony to that submergence of the 

 continent in the glacial age of which we have so many indications. 

 Dr. T. Sterry Hunt occupied one of our evenings with an elaborate 

 account of the state of the controversy relating to the age and 

 relations of the Taconic rocks. The battle about the ages and 

 subdivisions of the older crystalline rocks still rages fiercely and 

 the most extreme views, are expressed. Only a few days ago I 

 found in Nature a report of a paper by Mr. Geikie the director 

 of the Geological Survey of Great Britain, in which he utterly set 

 at nought the divisions of Dimetian, Arvonian and Pebidean 

 applied by Hicks to sucessive series of pre-cambri;in rocks. How it 

 will end is not possible to divine. In the mean time we are much 

 indebted to Dr. Hunt for his masterly statement of the points at 

 issue in one department closely connected with the main subject. 

 Vol. X. EE No. 8. 



