232 Annals of the Philosophical Club 



May I2th, 3615! meeting. Professor Flower read a letter, 

 dated Wadelai, November 3rd and 8th, 1886, containing the 

 latest intelligence received from Emin Bey. He announced 

 the despatch of several skeletons of the chimpanzee as well 

 as of the diminutive native tribe, called Akkas, especially 

 one of a very old woman. 1 He expressed his intention of 

 continuing to collect for the British Museum, and showed 

 no anxiety as to his own position. 



Professor Bonney exhibited and described some sands 

 given to him by Sir W. Bowman and Mr. J. B. Martin, which 

 were reported to have been ejected with jets of water during 

 the Charleston earthquake 2 at the end of August last. They 

 consisted of quartz, felspar, two micas, and hornblende, with 

 a little tourmaline and perhaps zircon : evidently the debris 

 of crystalline rocks, and very probably derived from the 

 Archaean ridge west of Charleston, which is probably the 

 source of the Tertiary and later materials of the lower lands. 

 They had no special character, showed no signs of abrasion, 

 and had more resemblance to the detritus of a river than of 

 the sea-shore. 



June i6th, 362nd meeting. Mr. Thiselton-Dyer discussed 

 the alleged formation of pearls in the interior of the cocoa-nut. 

 They are described in the Herbarium Amboinense, written 

 about two centuries ago. Since then they have been 

 occasionally mentioned. Dr. Sidney Hickson recently 

 obtained two specimens in the Malay Archipelago, but no 

 European is known to have found one in the nut. The story 

 is either a fraud of long standing, or it is true. On the one 

 hand, no similar products are reported from other regions 

 where the cocoa-nut is cultivated ; on the other, we cannot 



1 This race of dwarfs, whose average height does not exceed 4 feet 

 10 inches, lives to the south-west of the Albert Nyanza Lake, and was 

 first made known by Schweinfurth in 1874. Their projecting jaws and 

 protruding lips give them an ape-like aspect, and they are very low in 

 the scale of humanity. 



2 It occurred on August 3ist, and disturbances continued for two or 

 three days. For an account see Nature, vol. xxxiv. page 460. For a 

 similar incident in the neighbourhood of New Madrid on the Mississippi 

 during the earthquakes of 1811-12, see Lyell, Principles oj Geology, vol. ii. 

 page 109 (ed. 12). 



