PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 9 



an hour. Fortunately the damage is not as extensive as 

 might have been expected. The address to the Geological 

 Section of the British Association by its President, Dr. Smith 

 Woodward, one of our honorary members, is well worth 

 reading by others than geologists. He deprecates much 

 the views of those who expect to find complete series of animals 

 in a fossil state, for the gaps in our knowledge of fossil faunas 

 and floras are great and numerous, and will probably never 

 be even approximately bridged over. Another subject 

 into which he enters is the old age and death of races without 

 any obvious cause, and the signs which accompany its 

 approach, such as gigantic size, as in the Dinosaurus, and 

 the extreme development of excrescences, such as spines or 

 horns, as in the Pariasaurus and the Irish elk. A thigh bone of 

 a species of Dinosaur has lately been found in German East 

 Africa, measuring 6ft. lOin. in length, or 2 feet longer than that 

 of the Diplodocus, the immense reptile whose cast is in the 

 Natural History Museum. A skull of Megalosaurus has for 

 the first time been discovered. It was found at Minchin- 

 hampton, and is thought to belong to a different species from 

 Bucklandi, represented by the jaw at Sherborne, of which 

 we have a cast in the Dorset County Museum. A series of 

 remains of another large Dinosaur (TracJiodon) from Wyoming 

 has lately been acquired by the British Museum, including 

 some remarkable impressions of its skin. The only other 

 fossil I shall mention is small, but most interesting. We have 

 all seen in our gardens the leaves with round holes cut out of 

 them by the leaf cutter bees to line their nests, if we have not 

 observed the nests themselves and the bees. A bee, closely 

 allied to our present-day species, and a specimen of its work 

 on a leaf, much the shape of a willow leaf, have been found 

 in Miocene shales in Colorado, showing the great antiquity 

 of the habit amongst these insects. New minerals, as well as 

 fossils, are continually being discovered, and an appendix 

 to Dana's Mineralogy, covering the years 1899-1909, enumer- 

 ates and describes no less than 60 from different parts of the 

 world. 



