Royal Society. — Royal Inslihitian. \j\ 



marrow is ?.cted on by the brain in the same manner as the 

 muscles of the heart are acted on by the spinal marrow. Never- 

 theless, although the heart retains its contractibility after the 

 nerves of the brain are removed, he admits that violent joy will 

 destroy its functions cjiiicker than decapitation. Respiration 

 appears to dejjend on the nervous system ; the heart is capable 

 of contraction like all other muscles ; the involuntary muscles 

 obey the same la^v as those of voluntary motion. 



Feb. 16. Mr. Cliff, in a letter to Sir E. Home, descnix d the 

 effects of several experiments made to ascertain the influence of 

 the spinal marrow in fishes, particularly carp. The hearts of 

 two carps were laid open, and the fish immersed in water : in an 

 hour the fins ceased to move, but the gills continued to act ; in 

 two hours the latter became motionless, and in three hours and 

 forty minutes all action of the heart had entirely subsided. In 

 another experiment, the heart was laid open and exposed to the 

 ivir, when its pulsations were from twelve to twenty in a minute. 

 A red hot wire was passed up the spinal marrow to the brain of 

 a carp: still the action of the auricle and pulsation continued for 

 six hours and a half. It appeared that the heart's action when 

 laid open and exposed to water is sooner destroyed than when 

 left in the air : exposing the heart accelerates its action or 

 quickens the pulsation for a time, which gradually subsides. In 

 these experiments the removal of the brain produced no imme- 

 diate effect on the action of the heart. 



A letter from Dr. Brewster to the President was read, de- 

 scribing some of this philosopher's experiments on a new pro- 

 perty of light from the second surface of reflecting bodies. 



Feb. 23. Part of an erudite paper by Sir Humphry Davy wus 

 read, On the Composition of the Paints used by the Greeks. Sir H. 

 in the introduction took a review of the progress of painting among 

 the Greeks, a people who had an innate taste for tiie beautiful 

 and the magnificent ; he next traced the march of the arts from 

 Greece to Rome, and lastlv proceeded to an analysis of the colour- 

 ing matter of the remains of the Greek paintings fouiid on the 

 walls of Herculaneum and Pompeii. The principal colour in 

 these paintings, it appears, consisted of carbonates of copper pre- 

 pared and blended in different proportions. 



ROYAL INSTITUTION. 



Mr. Brande has commenced a course of lectures on the rise 

 and progress of chemical philosophy, and its applications to the 

 arts, in which he proposes to unfold the gradual advance of the 

 -science, and to illustrate it by experimetit. 



The first lecture embraced a view of the early periods of che- 

 K 4 mistrv. 



