PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS. 9 



modes of coast protection by grojoies and otherwise, and advise 

 that the care of the coast should be assigned to the Board 

 of Trade, which should be invested with considerable powers. 

 A valuable address on Petrology by the President of the 

 Geological Section of the British Association can be referred 

 to by those interested in the subject, but is hardly suitable 

 to be dealt with here. Immense deposits of anthracite coal 

 have been discovered in British Columbia, and will perhaps 

 postpone that time when our unfortunate successors will 

 have to find a substitute for that useful article owing to the 

 exhaustion of our coalfields, though if recent events repeat 

 themselves, we may ourselves be compelled to consider this 

 question seriously before long owing to the difficulties of 

 obtaining it, but so long as we have sun heat and tide force 

 to draw upon, I believe that we shall manage to get along, 

 and though it does not seem worth while at present to utilise 

 these agents, recent attempts to use sun heat have been 

 attended with success. The great difference in the quality 

 of the diamonds found in different S. African mines is shewn 

 by their average prices, which vary from 14s. per carat in one 

 mine to as much as 85s. in another. A large diamond of 

 175 carats has lately been found in Brazil. To turn to fossil 

 animals, it is very rarely that we are able to learn anything 

 about their skin unless it is covered with bony armour, but 

 in a specimen of Trachodon, a Dinosaur from Wyoming, 

 the finely tuberculated skin is well preserved. Some of the 

 Dinosaurs found in German East Africa are of enormous 

 size, considerably exceeding the Diplodocus in the Natural 

 History Museum and indeed any other known fossil reptile. 

 A fine skull of the horned Dinosaur, Triceralops, from Wyo- 

 ming has lately been added to the National Collection. It 

 measures 3| feet in length and is the first exhibited in Europe. 

 The discovery of a large fossil rat, much bigger than our 

 brown rat, in the Pleistocene of Crete, makes us thankful 

 that we did not live in those times, and there has recently 

 been uncovered at Freshwater West in Pembrokeshire a 

 fossil forest, probably of Neolithic date, which had hitherto 



