BRITISH ASSOCIATION NOTES. 461 
walls is seen at its best. Cinnabar streaks the sides with red; magnesia lies in 
great white masses ; sulphur crystals form yellow patches around each little steam- 
hole, and rocks are covered with blue and green compounds of copper that have 
condensed from the heavy fumes. Tossed together in the wildest way the rocks 
show all these vivid tints, while the general effect on the eyes is the endless range 
of reds and yellows. The puffing, steaming, and sputtering holes in the hillsides 
culminate in the great tea-kettle's spout, which emits a hoarse blast of steam that 
makes the guide's cup whirl like a fly-wheel when he hangs it on his stick and 
holds it across the orifice. 
The Indians knew this canon ages ago, and it is not many years since they 
tore down the rude tepee that they had built over one of the springs for a sweat 
bath. The old men were cured of their rheumatic woes by the sulphur steam, 
and marvelous efl'ects are now produced on the white man who dares to " sulphur 
the deep damnation " of one of the steam baths provided at the bath house near 
the hotel. The bath house is built over a collection of boiling sulphur springs, 
and the patient, or the victim, is first conducted to a box of a room where the 
steam creeps in at every crack of the floor as hot as it came from the center of 
the earth. After a thorough parboiling there comes the hot and tepid showers, 
a plunge into a tank of cold sulphur water, and then a glow and a rapturous and 
delightful sensation of having grown twenty years younger and spryer. — Cor. 
Globe- Democrat. 
PROCEEDINGS OF SOCIETIES. 
BRITISH ASSOCIATION NOTES. 
In a paper read before the Mathematical and Physical Section, Professor 
Chandler Roberts remarked on the rapid diff"usion of molten metals. The two 
metals chosen were lead and gold enclosed in a U-shaped tube, the lead occupy- 
ing the lower portion of the tube, and the gold being put in at the top of one 
limb. After about forty minutes Professor Roberts found that the two metals 
had been thoroughly mixed. Sir W. Thomson called attention to the extreme 
importance of this, with reference to metallic alloys, and remarked that it re- 
sembled the difi"usion of gases or of heat in a gas rather than of a solid in a 
liquid. Salt would take years to diffuse in a similar manner through water. 
A paper was read which had been received from two American gentlemen, 
Messrs. W. B. Scotland H. F. Osborne, upon the "Origin and Development 
of the Rhinoceros Group. " These gentlemen have made careful researches in 
the extensive series of tertiary lake deposits in the northwestern United States, 
in which specimens of very many animals have been discovered, which render it 
possible satisfactorily to trace the genealogy of several important groups of mam 
