PRESIDENT S ADDRESS. 9 



disagree so much that one can hardly decide which, if any, to 

 follow, and the calculations seem to be based on insufficient 

 data. Thus the age of the sea is calculated by estimating 

 the amount of salt it contains, and also the amount now 

 annually poured into it by rivers ; but it is, of course, impossible 

 to tell what these quantities were in past ages, which makes 

 the result unreliable. Besides this, seas or salt lakes must 

 have laid down the deposits of salt which occur in various 

 countries, and there may have been much alternation of 

 deposit and denudation, which would extend the time in- 

 definitely. The President of the Geological Section of the 

 British Association gives a learned and interesting address on 

 the glaciation of this country, but considers that there is not 

 yet sufficient evidence to enable us to decide as to the manner 

 in which that glaciation took place. The third edition of 

 " The Building of the British Isles," by our Hon. Member, 

 Mr. A. J. Jukes Browne, F.R.S., has been issued, and a copy 

 is in the Dorset County Museum. New seismological stations 

 have lately been established at Guildford and West Bromwich, 

 and the sensitiveness of the British Association seismographs 

 is such that 279 earthquakes were recorded in the Isle of Wight 

 in the second half of 1909. in which period those recorded with 

 different instruments at three Continental towns were only 

 123, 64, and 42 respectively. The region of most pronounced 

 activity is at the present time in the neighbourhood of Java 

 and the Philippines. An earthquake of great violence occurred 

 in Eastern Turkestan on January 3rd last, and was strikingly 

 recorded by English instruments. Recent triangulations 

 in California show that the area affected by the great earth- 

 quake of 1906 has undergone an extension of 1 part in 30,000. 

 The occurrence of a fossil feather in the tertiary ironstone of 

 Redruth, Victoria, is worthy of record, such remains being 

 so rarely found and in only a few localities. The genus is not 

 identified. The skull of a new species of Odontopteryx has 

 been found in tertiary strata in Brazil, the one representative 

 of this genus having hitherto been a smaller skull from the 

 London clay. The jaws of this bird are serrated in the form 



