PRESIDENT’S ADDRESS. 320 
they divided: some going forward by the sands to Seaham Har- 
bour, while two or three, less disposed for walking, remained to 
explore the rocks at low tide. The shore on this part did not 
afford much worthy of notice, but an elegant and delicate little 
zoophyte of the genus Plumularia was found clothing the under 
side of shelving rocks near low-water mark. It proved to be a 
curious variety of P. pinnata with the ova-vesicles attached to the 
creeping root-fibres, which had not before been observed on this 
coast, where the species is usually found in deep water. Dr. 
Johnston informs me that he has‘received the same variety from 
Devonshire. Mr. John Storey, jun., one of the party who had 
remained behind, took some beautiful sketches of the coast 
scenery, which is here rendered picturesque by the varied forms 
assumed by the magnesian limestone rocks. A few land shells 
were collected in Ryhope Dene, but owing to the lateness of the 
season few plants were observed. Scolopendrium vulgare grows to 
a large size in this dene. A frond of one of the specimens collec- 
ted measured from the base to the apex, after being dried, above 
19} inches. The party united again at Ryhope and returned by 
railway to Sunderland, where they examined the extensive ex- 
cavations of the magnesian limestone for the docks now in 
progress, and afterwards dined together in Bishopwearmouth. 
An evening meeting for the reading of papers was held in the 
Rooms of the Natural History Society in Newcastle, on the 12th of 
December. A considerable number of members and their friends, 
including some ladies, assembled in the Museum, which was bril- 
liantly lighted with gas. Numerous beautifully dried and moun- 
ted specimens of flowering plants, collected at the field meetings 
by Mr. Daniel Oliver, jun., were displayed on the tables ; as were 
also a series of forty exquisite prints in chromo-lithography, being 
the proof plates of a work about to be published on the Cephalo- 
poda, or Cuttle Fishes, of the Mediterranean, by M. Verany of 
Genoa: accompanying these, specimens of the animals in spirits 
were exhibited, particularly that of the Argonauta Argo, or 
Paper Nautilus, about which there has been so much controversy 
among naturalists. Many illustrated works on Natural History, 
belonging to the Literary and Philosophical Society, were also 
