250 MISCELLANEOUS NOTES AND OBSERVATIONS. 



The Oxhey Cutting on the London and North- Western Railivay, 

 Watford. — The section I have now the pleasure of presenting to the 

 Society was given to me by Mr. Buck, one of the engineers under 

 Robert Stephenson. It may be easily compared with the cutting, 

 Avhich is well described as the Oxhey Cutting. Beginning with 

 the London Clay, the next bed in descending order is a bed of silt 

 in which sharks' teeth, etc., are found.*' Its presence is worth 

 notice, for as far as I can judge it was by striking this bed that the 

 difficulties in the construction of the Thames Tunnel arose. The 

 beds below are the plastic clays of the Woolwich and Reading 

 series. The slips in the cutting show, I think, nearly all the 

 \)Q(\.s. — \_Rev.']J. C. Clutterhuch, Long Wittenham Rectory, Ah ing don. 



Meteorology. 



The Temperature of Thirty Summers and Thirty Winters at 

 Hitchin. — The results given in the accompanying tables (p. 251) 

 were obtained from thermometers the position of which was approved 

 by Mr. Symons when on a visit here to inspect the effects of a hur- 

 ricane at Baldock some few summers since. I undertook the analysis 

 to disprove an idea that was current that after such a severe winter 

 as we have just had we might expect a very hot summer, but 

 unfortunately the present appalling weather, had I waited, would 

 have saved me all the trouble. An old farmer in this neighbour- 

 hood has to go back to 1816 for a parallel case. There had been 

 two successive very hard winters, and after the second, harvest 

 was not begun until the middle of September, and may be said 

 never to have been finished at all. The tables show that a hot 

 summer has hardly ever followed a winter below the average. — 

 William Lucas, LTitchin. 



Botany. 



Botanical Notes. — I noticed last autumn two curious sports. One 

 was in a yellow dahlia in the rectory garden. On the same stem 

 and branch there was a perfect purple flower, one other bloom had 

 a few pi;rple petals, but the rest were entirely yellow. The other 

 sport occurred in fruit. A friend sent me a bunch of grapes in 

 which the terminal berries had coalesced and formed one large fruit, 

 the size of a tomato, and resembling one in form, with the seam and 

 the swollen appearance of that fruit. 



Last spring I cut some sprigs in flower from a male aucuba and 

 placed them amongst some female plants. These are now full of 

 berries and are just beginning to change from green to scarlet, 

 assuming a pink tint soon to deepen into scarlet. I do not re- 

 member any other shrub that takes twelve months to ripen its 

 fruit. The fruit of the ivy is now ripening, but it flowers in the 



* The lowest zone of the basement-hed of the London Clay. The section is 

 deposited in the Society's Library. — Ed. 



