June 12, 1913] 



NATURE. 



39i 



graphy of the world is carried on by such contacts 

 as these, and the present paper, therefore, constitutes 

 a theory of the action of these detectors. — J. Walker : 

 The extraordinary ray resulting from the internal 

 reflection of an extraordinary ray at the surface of a 

 uniaxal crystal. By the principle of least time it is 

 shown that the diameter of the extraordinary wave- 

 surface described round the point of incidence, that is, 

 conjugate to the reflecting surface, is coplanar with 

 the incident and reflected extraordinary rays, and is 

 the median of the triangle formed by these rays and 

 a parallel to the reflecting surface. The direction- 

 cosines of the reflected ray are then obtained in terms 

 of those of the incident ray and the said diameter of 

 the wave-surface. — S. Buttenvorth : The evaluation of 

 certain combinations of the ber, bei, and allied func- 

 tions. 



New South Wales. 

 I.innean Society, March 26. — Mr. W. W. Froggatt, 

 retiring president, in the chair. — Annual General Meet- 

 ing. — Presidential address: "A Century of Australian 

 Civilisation, from a Zoologist's Point of View." The 

 address was devoted to a consideration of the great 

 changes that have been wrought by the advent of the 

 white man with his domestic animals, in the displace- 

 ment of the aboriginal population and the original 

 fauna, in the course of a hundred vears' civilisation. — 

 Ordinary Monthly Meeting. — Mr. W. S. Dun, presi- 

 dent, in the chair. — A. H. S. Lucas: Notes on Aus- 

 tralian marine alga?. No. 1. — H. J. Carter : Revision 

 of the Australian species of the subfamilies Cypha- 

 leinae and Cnodaloninae (family Tenebrionidas). 



April 30. — Mr. W. S. Dun, president, in the chair. — 

 A. B. Walkom : Stratigraphical geology of the Permo- 

 Carboniferous system in the Maitland-Branxton dis- 

 trict, with some notes on the Permo-Carboniferous 

 palseogeography in New South Wales. The vertical 

 succession of the formations represented in the area 

 under consideration — Lower Marine Series, Greta Coal 

 Measures, and Upper Marine Series — has been worked 

 out in some detail. Vertical sections of the Lower 

 Marine Series were obtain in three localities, showing 

 a thickness of nearly 4800 ft. In his important mono- 

 graph on the geology of the Hunter River Coal 

 Measures of New South Wales (1907), Prof, David 

 mapped the outcrop of this series and gave numerous 

 detailed sections of the coal seams developed at many 

 points along the outcrop ; but, at this time, very little 

 was known about the development between Branxton 

 and Pokolbin. Additional data now available show 

 that in four localities, as elsewhere, the main Greta 

 seam is split, and that the upper split has been struck 

 in ach- case; the lower split seems to be entire at 

 Rothbury, but splits again further north. — A. B. 

 Walkom : The geology of the Permo-Carboniferous 

 system in the Glendonbrook district, near Singleton. 

 The Glendonbrook district lies from five to fifteen 

 miles E. by N. from Singleton. Permo-Carboniferous 

 rocks are developed there in a small isolated basin. 

 They consist chiefly of sandstones, conglomerates, and 

 shales belonging to the Lower Marine Series, Greta 

 Coal Measures, and Upper Marine Series. The whole 

 basin is only some three miles in diameter, and is 

 surrounded by rocks of Carboniferous age. Further 

 to the west, nearer Singleton, owing to heavy fault- 

 ing, rocks belonging to the Upper Coal Measures 

 and Upper Marine Series also appear. All these rocks 

 are described more or less in detail, and their rela- 

 tions to one another discussed. A coal seam about 

 10 ft. thick occurs in the Greta Coal Measures in 

 the basin mentioned above. — A. B. Walkom : Notes on 

 some recently discovered occurrences of the pseudo- 

 morph, glendonite. Glendonite, a pseudomorph after 

 NO. 2276, VOL. 91] 



glauberite, lias been recorded from seven horizons in 

 New South Wales and Tasmania, all, however, in 

 the Upper Marine Series. In this paper, the occur- 

 rence of the mineral in rocks of the Lower Marine 

 Series is recorded for the first time, with details of 

 a comparison of crystals from both series. 



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