156 Annals of the Philosophical Club 



Professor Tyndall communicated some observations on 

 lunar radiation, made with a thermoelectric apparatus, on a 

 bright clear night when a faint haze, indicative of precipitated 

 vapour in the atmosphere, surrounded the moon. On the 

 cone being turned towards the moon, the pile indicated 

 a radiation of cold, which he accounted for by supposing that 

 the obstruction to terrestrial radiation, due to the mist, had 

 been removed when this had been dispersed by the moon's 

 rays. 



Professor Huxley described the [Neanderthal x ] skull, a 

 cast of which he had recently examined. The brain cavity 

 is only about two-thirds of that in a fully developed man, 

 being intermediate between it and the chimpanzee. The 

 supraorbital ridges are of enormous size, and the fragments 

 of humerus and tibia found with the skull are human in 

 proportion, but are very thick and have strong ridges. 2 



Sir C. Lyell said that the age of the formation, in which 

 the skull was found, is uncertain, and gave an account of 

 the discovery by M. Lartet of human bones with those of 

 extinct animals, including Ursus spelaeus, and with flint 

 implements in a sepulchral vault in the south of France. 



Nov. 28th, 1 33rd meeting. Mr. Grove said that recently, 

 in observing the planet Saturn, the ring of which was then 

 invisible, he had noticed two bands across its disk, which 

 he thought might be explained as follows. The plane of 

 the ring now passes through the earth, but not through the 

 sun, which accordingly shines on one surface of the ring, 

 so the bands result from the passage of the solar light to 

 the disk of Saturn, through the space between the outer 

 and inner ring, and that between the latter and the planet. 



Mr. Paget mentioned a case, where, during a convulsive 

 paroxysm, a patient had swallowed a set of artificial teeth, 

 which had lodged in the throat below the root of the tongue. 



1 In the manuscript of the Minutes a blank occurs where the name should 

 be, but I have no doubt he was referring to the discovery in this cave. 



2 See Huxley's Man's Place in Nature, pages 128-143 (1863). They 

 are more fully described and assigned to the Mousterian age (rather later 

 than that of the St. Acheul race) by W. J. Sollas, Ancient Hunters, chapter vL 



