1873. 

 PKOCEEDINGS. 



EOYAL SOCIETY OF VICTOKIA. 



ANNUAL MEETING. 

 10th March, 1873. 



The President in the chair. The minutes of the proceedings of 

 the last meeting were read and duly confirmed. 



Mr. Wm. Thomson, F.R.C.S.E., was duly elected a member of 

 the Society. 



The Secretary read the Report of the Council as follows : — 



Annual Repobt. 



"Your council has great pleasure in reporting that, although 

 Volume X. of the Society's Transactions is not yet quite ready for 

 publication, it is in the printer's hands, and will be issued on or 

 before the May meeting of the Society. Great difficulty has been 

 experienced in collecting the papers, particularly those longest on 

 hand. Several of them were returned to the authors at their 

 desire, for various reasons, but mainly because there was no imme- 

 diate prospect of their being printed, and it was considered that the 

 Society had scarcely a right to retain them. A few of them are 

 thus unfortunately missing, and even if ultimately recoverable, 

 cannot appear in the forthcoming volume. It is hoped that the 

 number of papers which compose it, and the value of some of them, 

 may compensate to a certain extent for the absence of a few. In 

 the condition, until lately, of the finances of the Society, your 

 council did not feel justified in resuming printing, but the liberality 

 of the present Government — by obtaining a vote of the Legis- 

 lature for £200 for the purpose — has enabled it to do so. Your 

 council trusts that in future the State grant will be an annual one, 

 and that the Society's " Transactions" will henceforward be pub- 

 lished periodically and regularly. 



" Besides the papers enumerated in the report of the council 

 presented to the last annual meeting, the following additions to the 

 list have since been made, all of which appear or are noticed in the 

 coming volume. The first on " Patents and their Utilisation," 

 was read by Mr. Thomas Harrison, on the 8th April, 1872, and on 

 the same date Mr. Robert Caldwell read a paper on " Meat- 

 preserving." A third paper was contributed at the same meeting by 



