GENERAL MEETING. 87 
Announcement was made of the election to membership of 
ETHELBERT CARROLL MoraGan. 
It was announced from the General Committee that invitation had 
been extended to the members of the Anthropological and Biologi- 
cal Societies to attend the meeting of December 8th, for the pur- 
pose of listening to the annual address of the President. 
Mr. Epwin Smita exhibited a 
SEISMOGRAPHIC RECORD OBTAINED IN JAPAN, 
describing the apparatus by which it was made, and giving a brief 
account of the seismographic investigations of Professor J. A. 
Ewing. 
Remarks were made by Mr. ANTISELL. 
Mr. C. E. Dutton made a communication, entitled 
THE VOLCANIC PROBLEM STATED. 
[ Abstract. ] 
It is sufficiently obvious that the volcano is a heat problem, or a 
thermo-dynamic problem. All volcanic activity is attended with 
manifestations of great energy. This energy is due to the elastic 
force of considerable quantities of water occluded in red-hot or 
yellow-hot lavas. The problem is to find a satisfactory explanation 
of the origin of the heat, the origin of the occluded water, and their 
modes of reaction. 5 
In attempting this solution, various explanations have been con- 
jectured. The first to be noticed, and the one which, in various 
forms, has met with the most favor from geologists and physicists, 
is that the source of heat is primordial—«. e., it is the remains of a 
large amount of heat contained by the entire earth-mass in its sup- 
posed primordial condition, according to the nebular hypothesis ; 
that water has penetrated from above, either from the ocean or from 
lakes ; and that the contact of cold water with the hot magmas within 
the earth is a summary explanation of the phenomena. This view 
is supported by the following considerations: Ist, the contact of 
water with intensely hot bodies and the resulting generation of 
great explosive force is matter of the commonest experience; 2d, 
the outer rocks and strata are known to be full of fissures, and the 
ocean bottom and lake bottoms are, therefore, presumably very 
leaky ; 3d, nearly all active volcanoes are situated either within, or 
