THE HAMILTON ASSOCIATION. 159 
REPORT OF THE GEOLOGICAL SECTION. 
kead at the Annual Meeting of the Association, May rrth, 1893. 
The Section, in submitting this report, desires first to intimate 
that the usual interest in the work done during the past year has 
been maintained. ; 
The Section deemed it necessary, and obtained a small sum of 
money from the Council of the Association for the purpose of having 
prepared some sliced and polished sections of our Niagara fossil 
sponges, so that they would be better appreciated by the general 
observer, and also enable the expert to more easily determine the 
species from the revealed skeletal structure. Although the number 
of prepared specimens is not large, the excellency of the work 
bestowed upon them gives great satisfaction to the members of 
the Section. The specific differences are, in many cases, slight, 
but they can be easily determined by the aid of the polished 
sections. 
Our indefatigable chairman has, from time to time, directed the 
attention of the members, by his valuable papers, to the subject of 
identification of some of the fossil plants lately obtained from the 
rock formation in the vicinity, and respecting which there has been 
much diversity of opinion expressed by many palzeontologists. By 
these recent discoveries our chairman has been able to produce 
such convincing evidence as to leave no doubt in the minds of 
the members of the Section that these hitherto so-called problematical 
organisms are of undoubted vegetable origin. 
A large number of very interesting specimens have been added 
during the past year to the Geological Department of the Museum of 
the Hamilton Association. | 
The Section has held ten meetings during the year, at all of 
which interesting papers were read by Col. Grant. These 
papers contain much information of local interest, and are the result 
of careful investigation. Some of them have reference to economic 
materials, some refer to the recent discoveries of fossils, and are 
therefore aids to science, and one offers suggestions as to how we 
can best make our Museum more attractive to the general public. 
