1894- NOTES AND COMMENTS. 85 



magnificent building and its extensive organisation ? He sees on 

 a newspaper placard : — 



IMPERIAL INSTITUTE. 

 SMOKING CONCERTS. 



Counsel's Opinion. 



Horace Woollaston Monckton, F.L.S., F.G.S., of the Inner 

 Temple, Barrister-at-Law, has kindly sent us a reprint of some " Short 

 Papers," samples apparently drawn at hazard from the numerous 

 compartments of a many-sided mind. Among articles so diversely 

 interesting to the man of science as " Fish Culture at Howietown," 

 " Legitimation,'' " Trial by Wager of Battle," and — but no, we dare 

 not add " The Bagshot Beds of the London Basin" — there is one on 

 a subject we have occasionally dealt with, " Women as Fellows of 

 Scientific Societies." As a presentment of the question in its legal 

 aspect, this paper may save many of our learned paupers the lawyer's 

 fee that they could so ill spare. Mr. Monckton's opinion is that, 

 assuming women were not mentioned in the original charter, and had 

 not for some 60 years been admitted to a given Society, then, if it 

 were wished to admit women, a new charter would be needed to make 

 their election binding in law. The author's words are Delphic in 

 obscurity and Scottish in caution: — "There is a new charter necessary 

 — some may be of opinion that is — but this seems going rather far — 

 suppose every fellow of the society wished to alter the usage, and 

 there is nothing in the charter against the proposed alteration — a 

 renewal of the charter seems somewhat superfluous. It has, we 

 believe, been suggested by high authority, that a meeting of the fellows 

 specially called for the purpose, may decide the question by a majority 

 of those present, and perhaps that is a fairly practical view of the 

 question. In any case we may perhaps say with safety that if a 

 majority of a fairly representative meeting, after full notice, decided 

 to alter the usage and admit women as fellows, the courts would be 

 slow to interfere with such a decision." 



The Growth of a Madrepore Coral. 



Mr. G. C. Bourne has returned to his early love, and in the 

 Scientific Transactions of ihe Royal Dublin Society (vol. v., pp. 205-238, 

 pis. xxii.-xxv.) gives an exceedingly interesting account of those 

 young stages in the development of the Madrepore coral Fungia that 

 succeed the embryo-stage. The extreme difficulty of investigating 

 organisms in which the soft body-tissues are so closely inter-penetrated 

 by hard skeletal tissues, or stereom, is paralleled by the difficulty of 

 describing the results in brief yet intelligible language, and the 

 difficulty is not lessened by the use of the new terms that Mr. Bourne 

 has found it advisable to invent. To only one point can we now 

 direct attention. The large, flat coral, which has been called Fungui 



