Edible Bird's Nests 227 



in Switzerland last summer, at a height of 7000 feet, the sky, 

 one night, had been completely overcast at the beginning 

 and quite clear at the end, yet the difference shown by a 

 thermometer, lying on swansdown, from one suspended in 

 the air, had been in the one case 9 F., and in the other only 

 10. His observations at Hindhead had given him con- 

 firmatory results. 



Sir J. D. Hooker said that the plants, collected by Mr. 

 H. H. Johnston in the high district west of Kilimanjaro and 

 by Mr. Thompson from the neighbourhood 'of the same 

 mountain, had been received at Kew, and showed the trees 

 to be of South African and Abyssinian types. 



Dr. Sclater exhibited a specimen of the edible bird's nest, 

 and asked whether this was certainly composed of fucoid 

 material or, as some said, of a consolidated salivaceous 

 matter. 



Nov. 27th, 337th meeting. Professor M. Foster said that 

 he had examined a piece of the bird's nest exhibited at the 

 last meeting, and had found no cellulose, or fibrine, or pectine, 

 but only mucine, which seemed to form a kind of lattice of 

 threads. Sir Everard Home had described the glands which 

 secreted it. They were present also in the neck of the 

 common swift. Sir J. D. Hooker, however, said that he 

 had noted in another piece of the nest a tissue resembling 

 that of some of the gelatinous algae. 1 



General Strachey reported that at the meeting of the 

 Prime Meridian Conference, which began on Oct. ist at 

 Washington, U.S.A., the following resolutions were adopted : 

 (i) that the meridian of the Observatory of Greenwich 

 should be the initial meridian for longitude ; (2) that the 

 meridian longitude should be counted in two directions up 

 to 180, east longitude being 4- and west longitude ; 

 (3) that the conference propose the adoption of a universal 

 day for all purposes for which it may be found convenient, 

 not to interfere with the local or standard time, where 

 desirable ; (4) that the universal day be a mean solar day, 

 to begin for all the world at the moment of mean midnight 

 1 See Jan. 29th, 1888. 



