98 Transactions.—Miscellaneous. 
gladly conform to this rule, but first I must thank you most sincerely for 
the honour conferred upon me, and to assure you that I shall endeavour to 
advance, to the best of my abilities, the interests of our Society, which now 
has existed about fifteen years, and at the cradle of which I have stood. It 
was the intention of the Council to have this address delivered at a con- 
versazione, to be held, if possible, in the new Museum buildings, but as the 
Chairman of the Board of Governors of Canterbury College has intimated 
to a deputation of your Council that it was the intention to open shortly 
that building with a similar festival, in which it would be desirable to 
exhibit for the first time a whole series of objects of artistic and scientific 
interest, which your Council thought could be made available for our 
anniversary meeting, we have thought it would be better to unite for such 
an occasion our efforts with those of the Board of Governors, so that the 
opening ceremony might be of still greater interest. I have no doubt that 
you will fully agree with this view of your Council, which was only adopted 
after careful eonsideration. Instead of passing in review the scientific pro- 
gress during the last year, as far as the accounts given of it have reached 
New Zealand, I have thought it more expedient to speak of a few local 
subjects, of which the remarkable rock paintings in the Weka Pass Ranges, 
near the Waikari, and of which Mr. T. S. Cousins has made a conscientious 
copy for the Canterbury Museum, is, without doubt, of the highest interest. 
I have much pleasure in exhibiting these drawings to-night, as well as 
another, copied by the Rev. James W. Stack, in the Opihi country. 
Deseription of it will be found in Appendix 2 to my address. But, before 
doing so, I shall treat of two other topies, to the consideration of which we 
might well devote some of the time at our disposal. 
First, I wish to allude to the intra-Mercurial planet Vulcan, the exist- 
ence of which is more than hypothetical, although it would be very desirable 
to have this proved beyond a doubt. You are doubtless aware that the 
great French astronomer, Le Verrier, when occupied with an investigation 
into the theory of the orbit of Mercury, found that a certain error in the 
assumed motion of its perihelion could only be accounted for by supposing: 
that the mass of Venus is at least one-tenth greater than it was assum 
. from the measurements taken, or that there exists some unknown planet or 
- planets between Mercury and the Sun, by which a disturbing action is 
produced. Le Verrier, without offering an opinion upon these hypotheses, 
‘towards the end of 1859 communicated them to the scientifie world. 
Shortly after this statement had been made, Lescarbault, a French 
physician living at Orgeres, announced that, on March 26th of the same 
year, he had observed the passage across the sun's dise of what he thought 
might be a new planet, but had not liked to publish this discovery before he 
