Miscellaneous. 69 



This narrative raises the question, which is applicable not only 

 to the Kingston boys but to other assailants of the Survey, whe- 

 ther their ire was excited by the little light which they saw 

 "through the cracks," or by their want of more light on the sub- 

 ject. This is, in some sense, an educational question; and leads 

 to a remark on the circulation of scientific reports, which we 

 think has throuo-hout the United States and British Colonies been 

 greatly mismanaged. Such reports, got up as attractively as pos- 

 sible, should be placed in the hands of the trade, with a fair com- 

 mission on their sale; and the gratuitous distribution should be 

 limited to public persons and institutions. In this way a much 

 greater and better circulation would be secured, the reports would 

 be more extensively read and appreciated, and would be more 

 accessible to those who really require them, and a large portion 

 of the expense of printing might be saved. This course has been 

 successfully pursued by the Geological Survey of Great Britain. 

 It has also, we are glad to observe, been adopted in the case of 

 the decades of Canadian fossils ; and we can scarcely doubt 

 that these will eventually be found even remunerative as a pub- 

 lishing speculation, though the sale may be too slow to enable 

 them to be profitably issued by private enterprise. 



j. w. D. 



MISCELLANEOUS. 



Geological Society of London. — The Meeting of this Society, 

 on the 5th January, was occupied principally with Canadian 

 subjects : a paper, by Principal Dawson, on the " Devonian Plants 

 of Canada," and one by Mr. T. Sterry Hunt, on some points of 

 Chemical Geolocrv. 



The paper on Devonian plants related chiefly to the observations 

 made by the writer last summer in Gaspe, which enable him to 

 describe two species of a new genus, to which he gives the name 

 Psilophyton. They are Iycopodiaceous plants, with many dicho- 

 tomous branchlets and rudimentary leaves, allied in some respects 

 to the modern genus Psilotum, but springing from a horizontal 

 rhizome, similar to that of some ferns, and having the branchlets 

 rolled up circinately in vernation. Plants of this kind in fragments, 

 have been recognized previously in the Devonian rocks of Scot- 

 land and the continent of Europe, but were referred to sea-weeds, 

 &c. The Gaspe specimens, for the first time, enable their true 



