1 62 Annals of the Philosophical Club 



tions, and to clean and keep in order the same. His pre- 

 decessor, it is recorded, was dismissed for striking an official 

 who had rebuked him for neglect of duty. 



April 27th, I47th meeting (anniversary). Dr. Carpenter 1 

 described a new binocular microscope, made by Messrs. 

 Nachet, which he had examined in Paris. The reflecting 

 prism of this sent to the right eye the pencil which should 

 have been transmitted to the left one, and vice versa, the 

 result being to produce a very complete pseudoscopic con- 

 version and give a more correct notion of solid form than 

 could otherwise be obtained. He expected it would be 

 valuable in testing the strength of our previous mental 

 associations, by the different degrees in which our notions 

 of different objects resist the converting process. 



He also said that he had seen, during his visit, a lamp for 

 burning the vapour of American petroleum. A piece of 

 sponge, soaked in this, was enclosed in a metal vessel, and 

 atmospheric air, in passing over it, took up so much of the 

 vapour that, on issuing from a metal tube, it burnt like an 

 ordinary gas light, the charge lasting for about nine hours. 



Mr. Gassiot gave an account of a spectroscope with nine 

 prisms, made under his direction by Spencer Browning. It 

 had been too recently finished to enable him to make a 

 prolonged use of it, but it had, for example, distinctly 

 separated the thallium line from the barium one, which pre- 

 viously had been regarded as coincident. 



May 28th, I48th meeting. Dr. Falconer communicated 

 an account of a recent conference in France concerning the 

 human jaw found in the drift at Moulin Quignon. 2 On 

 hearing of the discovery, he had gone in April to Abbeville 

 and had examined the pit and some flint implements, said 

 to have been found in the same beds, together with one or 



1 He afterwards discussed the question of pseudoscopy in his Mental 

 Physiology, 168-170. See also his Microscope and its Revelations (ed. 

 W. H. Dallinger, pages 92-97). 



z The following account is condensed from a minute (apparently copied 

 from a document) which occupies six and a half pages of the Minute Book 

 (folio). The authenticity of the jaw was for some time a ' burning question/ 

 but it is now generally repudiated. 



