Sept. 11, 1884] 



NA TURE 



469 



proposed gift to McGill College for this purpose, by a 

 benevolent gentleman of Montreal, of $50,000. 



Other votes of thanks were passed to railway, steamer, 

 and telegraph companies, and others who have aided the 

 meeting. Mr. Hugh M'Lennan and Mr. Andrew Robertson 

 responded for them. 



The final vote of thanks to the President was moved 

 by Prof. Daniel Wilson and seconded by Prof. Robert 

 Ball and Sir William Dawson. After a brief appropriate 

 reply by Lord Rayleigh, the British Association adjourned, 

 to meet at Aberdeen in 1885. 



About 300 British and Canadian members of the 

 Association have arrived in Philadelphia from Montreal 

 to attend the meetings of the American Association for 

 the Advancement of Science. A local hospitality com- 

 mittee received them at the railway stations, providing 

 homes for them with citizens or in hotels. They were 

 formally welcomed to Philadelphia at a large meeting at 

 the Academy of Music on Friday night. Mr. John 

 Welsh, formerly Minister to England, delivered an address 

 as chairman of the local committees, and Provost Pepper, 

 of the University of Pennsylvania, made a special address 

 of welcome, to which Prof. Robert S. Ball replied for the 

 British Association. A members' promenade reception 

 and banquet followed. The British guests were given 

 excursions on Saturday to the Atlantic sea-coast resorts 

 near Philadelphia ; also by the Pennsylvania Railroad to 

 Cresson, at the summit of the Alleghany Mountains ; also 

 by the Reading Railroad through the anthracite coal 

 regions of Pennsylvania. 



The American Association has appointed a Committee 

 to confer with a similar Committee of the British Associa- 

 tion relative to arranging for the proposed International 

 Scientific Congress referred to in the closing proceedings 

 of the British Association at Montreal. 



SECTION E 



GEOGRAPHY 



Or-ENiNG Address by General Sir J. H. Lefroy, R.A., 

 C.B., K.C.M.G., F.R.S., F.S.A., V.P.R.G.S., President 

 of the Section 



Man's acquaintance with the planet he inhabits, with the 

 earth which he is to replenish and to subdue, has been a thing 

 of growth so slow, and is yet so imperfect, that we may look to 

 a far distant day for an approach to a full knowledge of the 

 marvels it offers, and the provision it contains for his well-being. 

 He has seen, as we now generally believe, in silent operation, 

 the balanced forces which have replaced the glacier by the forest 

 and the field ; which have carved out our present delights of hill 

 and dale in many lands, and clothed them with beauty ; and it 

 may be that changes as great will pass over the face of the earth 

 before the last page of its history is written in the books of 

 eternity. But it is no longer before unobservant eyes that the 

 procession of ages passes. Geography records the onward m irch 

 of human families ; often by names which survive them it rears 

 enduring monuments to great discoverers, leaders, and sufferers ; 

 it is an indispensable minister to our every-d-ry wants and in- 

 quiries ; but beyond this it satisfies one of the most widely 

 diffused and instinctive cravings of the human intelligence, one 

 which from childhood to maturity, from maturity to old age, in- 

 vests books of travels with an interest belonging to no other class 

 of literature. If "the proper study of mankind is man," where 

 else can we learn so much about him, or be presented with such 

 perplexing problems, such diversity in unity, such almost in- 

 credible contrasts in the uses of that noble reason, that Godlike 

 apprehension, which our great poet attributes to him ? or see the 

 " beauty of the world, the paragon of animals" {Hamlet, Act. ii. 

 Sc. 2) in conditions so unlike his birthright ? Geography, then, 

 is far from being justly regarded as a dry record of details which 

 we scarcely care to know, and of statistics which are often out 

 of date. 



It is scarcely necessary to do more than allude here to the 

 intimate relations between geography and geology. The changes 

 on the earth's surface effected within historical times by the 

 o peration of geological causes, and enumerated in geological 



books, are far more numerous and generally distributed than 

 most persons are aware of ; and they are by no means confined 

 to sea-coasts, although the presence of a natural datum in the 

 level of the sea makes them more observed there. A recent 

 German writer, Dr. Harm, has enumerated ninety-six more or 

 less extensive tracts known to be rising or sinking. We owe to 

 Mr. R. A. Peacock the accumulation of abundant evidence that 

 the island of Jersey had no existence in Ptolemy's time, and 

 probably was not wholly cut off from the Continent before the 

 fourth or fifth century. Mr. A. Howarth has collected similar 

 proofs as to the Arctic regions ; and every fresh discovery adds 

 to the number. Thus the gallant, ill-fated De Long, a name not 

 to be mentioned without homage to heroic courage and almost 

 superhuman endurance, found evidence that Bennett Island has 

 risen a hundred feet in quite recent times. Nordenskjiild found 

 the remains of whales, evidently killed by the early Dutch fishers, 

 on elevated terraces of Martin's Island. The recent conclusion 

 of Prof. Hull, that the land between Suez and the Bitter Lakes 

 has risen since the Exodus, throws fresh light on the Mosaic 

 account of that great event ; and to go still further south, we 

 learn from the Indian Survey that it is " almost certain " that the 

 mean sea-level at Madras is a foot lower, i.e. the land a foot 

 higher, than it was sixty years ago. If I do not refer to the 

 changes on the west side of Hudson's Bay, for a distance of 

 at least six hundred miles, it is only because I presume 

 that the researches of Dr. Robert Bell are too well known 

 here to require it. Any of my hearers who may have visited 

 Bermuda are aware that so gently has that island subsided, that 

 great hangings of stalactite, unbroken, may be found dipping 

 many feet into the sea, or, at all events, into salt-water pools 

 standing at the same level, and we have no reason to suppose the 

 sinking to have come to an end. We learn from the Chinese annals 

 that the so-called Hot Lake Issyk-kul, of Turkestan, was formed 

 by some convulsion of nature about 160 years ago (Proc. R.C.S. 

 vol. xviii. p. 250), and there seems no good reason to reject the 

 Japanese legend that Fusiyama itself was suddenly thrown up 

 in the third century before our era (b.c 286). These are but 

 illustrations of the assertion I began with, that geography 

 and geology are very nearly connected, and it would be equally 

 easy to show on how many points we touch the domain of botany 

 and' natural history. The flight of birds has often guided navi- 

 gators to undiscovered lands. Nordenskjbld went so far as to 

 infer the existence of "vast tracts, with high mountains, with 

 valleys filled with glaciers, and with precipitous peaks," between 

 Wrangel Land and the American shores of the Polar Sea, from 

 no other sign than the multitudes of birds winging their way 

 northward in the spring of 1879, from the Vegas winter quarters. 

 The walrus-hunters of Spitzbergen drew the same conclusion in 

 a previous voyage from the flight of birds towards the Pole from 

 the European side. Certainly no traveller in the more northern 

 latitudes of this continent in the autumn, can fail to reflect on 

 the ceaseless circulation of the tide of life in the beautiful har- 

 mony of Nature, where he finds that he can scarcely raise his 

 eyes from his book at any moment, or direct them to any quarter 

 of the heavens, without seeing countless numbers of wild fowl,, 

 guided by unerring instinct, directing their timely flight towards 

 the milder climates of the South. 



To address you on the subject of geography, and omit mention 

 of the progress made within these very few years in our know- 

 ledge of the geography of this Dominion, might indeed appear 

 an unaccountable, if not an unpardonable, oversight ; neverthe- 

 less, I propose to touch upon it but briefly, for two reasons : 

 first, I said nearly all I have to say upon a similar occasion four 

 years ago ; secondly and chiefly, because I hope that some of 

 those adventurous and scientific travellers who have been engaged 

 in pushing the explorations of the Geological Survey and of the 

 Canada Pacific Railway into unknown regions will have reserved 

 some communications for this Section. Canada comprises within 

 its limits two spots of a physical interest not surpassed by any 

 others on the globe. I mean the pole of vertical magnetic at- 

 traction, commonly called the magnetic pole ; and the focus of 

 greatest magnetic force, also often, but incorrectly, called a pole. 

 The first of these, discovered by Ross in 1835, was revisited in 

 May 1847 by officers of the Franklin Expedition, whose obser- 

 vation, have perished, and was again reached or very nearly so 

 by McClintock in 1859, and by Schwatka in 1S79 ; neither of 

 these explorers, however, was equipped for observation. The 

 utmost interest attaches to the question whether the magnetic 

 pole has shifted its position in fifty years, and although I am 

 far from rating the difficulty lightly, if i, probably approachable 

 overland, without the great cost of an Arctic expedition. The 



