Notices of Memoirs—President’s Address to Section C. 451 
one; for, whilst the rich ores of Bilbao and Elba are becoming scarce, 
there are still vast quantities of ore available in the north of Scandi- 
navia, in the south of Spain, in Algeria, Canada, Cuba, Brazil, 
Venezuela, Chili, India, China (notably in the Shansi district), 
Australia, and South Africa. The high cost of carriage is, of course, 
an important factor; but the great economies which have and will 
be effected in transport will reduce this item. The future of the 
home demand is likely to be affected by the development of the basic 
open-hearth process of steel-making which enables phosphoric ores to 
be utilised. In the course of time such phosphoric ores will doubtless 
occupy a very prominent place in the manufacture of high-class steel. 
The development of magnetic concentration and of tke briquetting of 
pulverulent ores for furnace use will render possible greater utilisation 
of poorer ores, while the development of the electric furnace will 
doubtless render it possible to utilise black sands and other titani- 
ferous iron ores which, although met with in abundance, cannot at 
present be treated profitably in the blast-furnace. There need, there- 
fore, be no immediate anxiety regarding the supply of the more impure 
iron ores, the application of which cannot fail rapidly to increase. 
NOTICES OF MEMOTRS. 
British AssocraTION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE: SEVENTY- 
SEVENTH ANNUAL GeENERAL MEETING HELD AT. LEICESTER, 
_ Aveust Ist, 1907. 
I.—ApprEss To THE GeroLogicaL Section. By Professor J. W. 
Grecory, D.Sc., F.R.S., President of the Section. 
(Concluded from the September Number, p. 418.) 
IV. Plutonists and Ore-formation.—Belief in the earth’s internal 
fires was most faithfully held amongst geologists by the Plutonists of 
the eighteenth century, and repudiated with equal thoroughness by 
the Neptunists, who refused to concede that volcanic action was due 
to deep-seated cosmic causes. Thus Jameson in 1807 stoutly main- 
tained that volcanoes were superficial phenomena due to the com- 
bustion of beds of coal beneath fusible rocks, such as basalt, and that 
the explosions were due to the sudden expansion of sea-water into 
steam by contact with the burning coal. Volcanoes, according to 
this view, were correctly described as burning mountains, giving 
forth fire, flame, and smoke. The extreme Neptunist and Plutonist 
schools have long since been extinct, but the controversy is not quite 
closed. The battlefield is now practically restricted to economic 
geology, and the issue is the origin of some important ores. 
Ore deposits present so many perplexing features that deep-seated 
igneous agencies were naturally invoked to explain them, and some of 
the most thorough-going champions of the igneous origin of ores make 
claims that remind us of the eighteenth-century Plutonists. The 
question is to some extent a matter of terms. Many of the ores 
which Vogt, for example, describes as of igneous origin he attributes, 
' 
