REPORT OF THE TRANSACTIONS 
OF THE 
SOCIETY OF PHYSICS AND NATURAL HISTORY 
OF GENEVA, 1861. 
BY REV. M. DUBY, PRESIDENT. 
TRANSLATED FOR THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION BY C, A. ALEXANDER, 
GENTLEMEN: It would afford me great satisfaction to be able to communi- 
cate, in the rapid sketch which I am about to present of the proceedings of our 
Society, some small portion of the pleasure which I have myself derived from 
a review of them. In the full and accurate reports of our secretary, the instruc- 
tive lecture and animated discussion have seemed again to pass before me, and 
_ these I must now attempt to retrace, but, of course, without the hope of repro- 
ducing that which formed so large a part of the charm of our meetings—the 
uniform kindness which pervaded them, the unaffected urbanity with which 
each, whatever might be the line of his own studies, lent an attentive interest 
to the researches of his colleagues. The classification which I shall follow, in 
giving an account of your proceedings since M. Pictet read to you the last an- 
_ nual report, will be that adopted by him, as well as my other predecessors. 
PHYSICAL SCIENCES. 
You recall, doubtless, the interesting paper presented last year by M. Ritter, 
on the figure of the earth. He has lately resumed this subject. In his second 
memoir he has applied to the calculation of the dimensions and exact form of 
the globe the analysis which he had previously developed, while availing him- 
self of all the observations which furnish the actual elements of the .problem. 
His calculations extend over eleven arcs, divided into sixty sections, and com- 
prising seventy-five stations, with a total amplitude of eighty-six degrees, which 
are not all contiguous. It results that the ideal metre, or the ten millionth 
part of the quarter of the meridian, exceeds, by two hundred and twenty-eight 
thousandths of a millimetre, or one hundred and one thousandths of a line, the 
legal metre, or metre of the archives. he flattening of the earth is 53,, with 
an uncertainty of 2.6 in the denominator. The equation of the meridian differs 
unquestionably from that of the ellipsis, the meridian being swelled out towards 
the forty-fifth degree by a stratum whose thickness is twenty-seven toises, with 
a probable error, more or less, of twenty-four toises. This uncertainty pertains 
chiefly to the latitude of three of the stations—Montjouy and Evaux, in the 
French arc, and Kamiez, in the are of the cape. 
To M. Ritter we also owe an account of the new experiments which the office 
-of the ordonnance survey, charged with the geodesic operations of Great Bri- 
tain, has caused to be made in Scotland, with a view to determining the density 
