VOL. XXIII.] PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. 651 



The talgoi, or ant-bear, will He as if he were dead beside those little nests 

 which are biiilt by those ants called waia, lolling his tongue out as far as he can; 

 these ants will immediately fix themselves in great numbers upon his tongue, 

 then drawing it in, he swallows them. 



There are two sorts of cinnamon-trees, of which the best has a leaf much 

 larger and thicker than the other; but otherwise no difference is perceived. 

 The leaves distilled yield oil and phlegm, as if cloves had been put into the 

 still. On the root of the tree there is a thick, bark, which, when distilled as 

 the former, yields oil and camphire ; which are separated by covering the re- 

 ceiver with a linen cloth, then the camphire remains in the cloth in a lump to- 

 gether, and the oil and phlegm run into the receiver. This camphire has the 

 same colour, the same discussing, dissolving, and healing balsamic quality as 

 the camphire of Japan ; the oil is of the same virtue; for anointing scabs, itch 

 and excoriations, it cures them in a short time. Drinking the phlegm among 

 common water cures fluxes, and gives relief to such as are under that languish- 

 ing disorder, called by the Hollanders the land's disease, and by the Ceylonese, 

 pipa. 



An Account of what passed in the last Public Assembly of the Roy at Academy of 

 Sciences at Paris, held Nov. 12, 1701. By M. Blondel, arid communicated 

 by M. Geoffroy, F. R. S. N° 278, p. IO97. 



M. Cassini opened the assembly with a discourse, containing the observations 

 he had made in his last journey for determining the passage of a meridian line, 

 taken from a point in the observatory at Paris, from one end of France to the 

 other. In the first part of this discourse he went back to the most ancient 

 astronomers, and recounted their opinions of the spherical figure of the earth, 

 and their methods to know its dimensions, of which the two most famous are, 

 first, that of Eratosthenes the Cyrenian, who lived in the reign of Ptolemy 

 Euergetes, King of Egypt : the second that of Possidonius of Riiodes, who 

 lived in the time of Pompey the Great. He then proceeded to those of the 

 moderns, Johannes Fernelius, and some others : and lastly related the method 

 of the late M. Picard, of the Royal Academy, as the most exact. He then 

 spoke of his own observations on the same subject. He showed his method of 

 determining the passage of the meridian taken from a point in the observatory 

 at Paris. By means of triangles, which he made through the whole course of 

 his journey, and very exact calculations, he determined the place of this meri- 

 dian, and marked all the considerable places through which it passed, from Paris 

 to the highest of the Pyrenees, which separate Roussillon from Catalonia. 

 Among these mountains he observed one of the height of 1440 toises. But the 



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