398 Intelligence and Miscellaneous Articles. 
nected with our wants and our comforts. They all exhibit 
proofs of the agency of powerful causes, which destroyed 
and dissolved a considerable part of the ancient world; and 
which by successive operations effected a less perfect con- 
solidation of its rhaterials, in some cases almost assimilating 
them to their original appearances, but always impressing 
on them the stamp of change, always constituting them 
monuments of the great destruction and renovation that 
took place in the obscure and early epochs of the history 
of nature. 
{To be continued. | 
LXVIII. Intelligence and Miscellaneous Articles. 
Tue Royal,Medical Society of Edinburgh will give a gold 
medal! ofjfive, guineas, value, to:the author. of the best ex- 
perimental essay in answer to the following question : 
‘* Does any decomposition of acids and alkalis take place 
on their, uniting‘to,form, neutral. salis, according to an 
opinion lately.advanced, by, Mr.. Davy, im. respect to the 
MunatesN JeoibSM odi xiv Joansmintonst Mee voter 
Honorar¥, extraordinary and ordinary, members are alone 
invited as candidates.;;; ‘Phe dissertations are to be written 
in English, Latin, or Frenchycand tobe delivered to the 
Secretary on or) beforethe first day of December 1512. 
The adjudication of the prize will take place in the last 
week of the following February. ; 
To each dissertation’ shall be affixed a motto, which is 
also to be written on the outside of a sealed packet con- 
taining the author’s name and address.—No dissertation 
with the author’s name will be received ; and all disserta- 
tions, except the successful one, will be returned with the 
sealed packet unopened.” 
Mr. James P. Tupper, member of the Royal College 
of Surgeons and Fellow of the Linnean Society, has in the 
press a work to be entitled ** An Essay on the Probability of 
Sensation in Vegetables ; with Additional Observations on 
Instinct, Sensation, and Irritability.” 
M. Carnot, the mathematician, who during the French 
revolution was for a considerable time minister at war, 
lately composed, by the direction of the French emperor, a 
work for the instruction of the pupils of the corps of en- 
gineers ** On the Defence of Fortified Places.’ A second 
edition of this treatise has recently appeared on the Conti- 
nent. 
