cv i. PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 



experiments have given results unexpected by any but the inventor. 

 Besides preventing sea-sickness its effects will in other ways be of 

 much value. A scheme for the carrying out of the proposed 

 Channel tunnel connecting England and France has failed 

 owing to the great general opposition received on account of the 

 dangers of invasion of our country in case of war. Though the 

 majority of the Commission appointed to consider the matter 

 were in favour of the scheme for making the Panama Canal on 

 the sea level without locks, it was finally decided to use the lock 

 system on account of the smaller cost and the shorter time 

 employed in construction, the sea level plan involving enormous 

 excavations. The canal will rise to a height of 255 feet, and 

 will be nowhere less than 200 feet in breadth and 45 feet in 

 depth. An enormous dam will also be required i J mile long, J 

 mile wide at the bottom, and 135 feet high. Serious changes 

 are threatened in the region north of the Gulf of California by 

 the diversion of the Colorado River, caused by the making of a 

 canal from it for irrigation purposes a few years since. The 

 river was becoming diverted into this canal and a dam was 

 made, but this has failed to stop the influx, and there is danger 

 of the whole river being diverted, causing immense and rapid 

 changes by denudation in the new course, and by deprivation of 

 water in the neighbourhood of the original river. An artesian 

 well has been bored to a depth of 728 feet on Bovington Heath, 

 near Wool, Dorset, the geological details of which we look 

 forward to hearing in a paper from Mr. Hudleston next winter. 

 Valuable geological information is often procured from these 

 borings, which have in some places been carried to immense 

 depths, one at Schadelbach, in Prussia, reaching a depth of 

 5,736 feet. To effect this, an i lin. steel tube was first driven to a 

 depth of 60 feet, then percussion drills to 570 feet, with streams 

 of water forced down a tube to carry off the detritus. Then 

 tubular diamond drills were used of 8in. diameter and smaller 

 down to 3,510 feet, and for the rest of the distance a tubular 

 drill of 2in. diameter, yielding a core of a diameter of lin. This 

 occupied about four years, and cost about 403. a foot, and was 



