44 REPORT — 1835. 



Captain G. R. Elwes (Dorset) laid upon the table a paper on the rain- 

 fall in Dorset, ■which had been compiled by a member of the Dorset Natural 

 History and Antiquarian Field Club, Mr. Eaton, from records kept in the 

 county of Dorset during the last forty years. It was a most careful and 

 exhaustive piece of work, and was illustrated by maps and diagrams. 

 Mr. Eaton wished to have the paper submitted to that conference of 

 delegates with the view of eliciting remarks upon it. 



The Chairman said that Mr. Eaton was an old friend of his, and 

 he had much pleasure in testifying to the excellence of his work. One of 

 the maps of Dorset was shaded so as to show the proportionate amount of 

 the rainfall, the other the varying elevation of the land, and, as might have 

 been expected, there was a fair amount of parallelism between the two. 

 Mr. Eaton's work was an admirable example of the way in which the 

 rainfall of a county should be worked out, a labour especially requiring 

 much patience and perseverance. He wished they could have such 

 memoirs for every county. 



Mr. Sowerbutts remarked upon the difficulty of discussing Mr. Eaton's 

 paper in the absence of copies of it, and Professor Meldola said that 

 there was not much to discuss, as the paper had been brought forward 

 simply as an example of the way in which such work should be done. 

 Professor Merivale asked whether it would be possible to obtain copies of 

 Mr. Eaton's paper, and Captain Elwes said that he would do his best 

 to get copies for any gentlemen who would give in their names. 



Mr. Hopkinson stated that twenty years ago he began to record the 

 rainfall of Hertfordshire with about twenty observers, and he had since 

 done his best to add to their number, with the result that there were now 

 about forty. The report which he had published last year contained the 

 monthly returns from forty observers in Hertfordshire. He had obtained 

 about thirty daily records, which were worked up and analysed but not 

 published. In the Transactions of the Hertfordshire Natural History 

 Society much space was devoted to meteorological work and to phenology, 

 and he hoped that the Societies in other counties would work similarly at 

 these subjects. He trusted also that delegates would preserve any early 

 meteorological records they might discover. 



Mr. De Ranee, in illustration of the increasing usefulness of local 

 societies, mentioned the fact that two Committees of the British Asso- 

 ciation, of which for many years he had been secretary — that on Coast 

 Erosion, and that investigating the Circulation of Underground Waters — 

 had just ceased to exist in consequence of the admirable way in which 

 their work had been taken up by the Corresponding Societies. 



His Honour Deemster Gill mentioned that the subject of Coast Erosion 

 had been taken up by a Committee of the Legislature of the Isle of Man, 

 of which he was a member, but their in\'estigations were not yet complete. 

 But they had found that for some twenty miles on the west, the north- 

 west, and the north, erosion had been going on to a very large extent, the 

 evidence showing a destruction of land of about twenty acres to the mile 

 within the last fifty or sixty years. The whole of the information would 

 be sent to the proper Department when the investigation was concluded. 

 Deemster Gill added, in reply to a question, that the portion of the coast 

 mentioned was not rocky but sandy. 



The Chairman remarked that the meteorology of the Isle of Man was 

 being looked after by Mr. A. W. Moore, and Deemster Gill added that all 

 that was necessary was being done thei-e in that department. 



