54 
College for the experimental illustration of 
papersread. The Society was thus relieved 
of all charges for rent of its meeting room 
and was consequently able to carry on its 
work without charging a larger subscription 
than one pound a year, or a single payment 
of ten pounds as a life composition for an- 
nual payments, with an entrance fee of one 
pound. 
On this slender financial basis a very 
large amount of good work was done. Not 
merely were Proceedings issued containing 
the papers which had been presented to and 
accepted by the Society, but the works of 
Joule and of Wheatstone were printed in 
extenso and distributed to the members. 
Similarly were published in English Helm- 
holtz’s Memoir ‘On the Chemical Relation 
of. Electrical Currents,’ Hittorf’s Mem- 
oirs ‘On the Conduction of Electricity in 
Gases,’ Puluj’s Memoir on ‘ Radiant 
Electrode Matter’ and Van der Waal’s 
Memoir ‘On the Continuity of the Liquid 
and Gaseous States of Matter;’ a useful 
work of reference by Mr. Lehfeldt en- 
titled ‘A List of the Chief Memoirs on 
Physics of Matter’ and a table of ‘ Hyper- 
bolic Sines and Cosines’ by T. H. Blakesley. 
The founders of the Society purposely 
avoided setting up a new journal, being of 
the opinion that the unnecessary multipli- 
cation of the sources to be consulted in 
search of scientific facts was a thing to be 
avoided. By'an agreement with the pro- 
prietors of the Philosophical Magazine it was 
arranged that such of the papers read before 
the Society as the Council might decide to 
publish should, in the first instance, be 
printed in that magazine, and afterwards 
collected and issued to the members of the 
Society in the form of Proceedings. A 
large circulation was thus at once secured 
and the creation of an an additional physical 
journal avoided. 
As the Society grew it became desirable 
that it should have a local habitation not 
SCIENCE. 
[N.S. Von. VI. No. 132. 
far from the other leading scientific societies. 
of London, and the Council were fortunately 
able to make arrangements with the Chem- 
ical Society, whereby since 1894 the meet- 
ings have been held in the rooms of the 
latter Society in Burlington House. 
In 1895 the Proceedings of the Physical 
Society, which had hitherto appeared at ir- 
regular intervals, began to be published in 
monthly parts, and at the same time the 
Society began the publication of Systematic 
Abstracts of papers in Physics printed in 
foreign journals. It is hoped that these 
Abstracts will be of great use in facilitating 
a knowledge by English-speaking physicists 
of the work which is being done by their 
colleagues in other countries. The in- 
creased activity of the Society has involved 
an increase of expenditure, and to meet this 
it has been necessary to raise the subscrip- 
tion payable by members. At the present 
time the annual subscription is £2 and 2s. 
The number of members is over 400 and 
and the list includes nearly all the leading 
physicists of the United Kingdom. 
The Regulations of the Society provide 
for the election of a limited number of 
foreigners as honorary members, and in 
this way some of the most distinguished 
physicists in many countries are connected 
with the Society. 
CURRENT NOTES ON ANTHROPOLOGY. 
THE NATIVES OF THE PHILIPPINES. 
Ir is well known that the Philippine 
Islands had when first discovered by Euro- 
peans two quite different classes of popula- 
tion. On the coast was a light colored race 
similar to the Malayo-Polynesians and 
speaking an allied dialect. In the interior 
was a small-sized, black race, called by the 
navigators ‘ Negritos.’ In the Proceedings 
of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, 1897, 
No. XVI., Professor Virchow figures and 
describes a large deformed skull from a cave 
in the Archipelago, which, in its antiquity 
