1 84 Proceedings. 



Ordinary Meeting, March 18th, 1890. 



Professor Osborne Reynolds, M.A., LL.D., F.R.S., 

 President, in the Chair. 



Professor W. C. WILLIAMSON, F.R.S., alluded to the 

 new doctrine of the growth of pith in the fossil forms of 

 exogenous plants which he had recently put forward before 

 the Royal Society. The plants to which the doctrine is 

 applied now only exist as club mosses, ferns, and so on, 

 but once reached the size of forest trees and found their 

 support in the pith formation to which Dr. Williamson has 

 called attention. Mr. Charles Bailey, F.L.S., remarked 

 that the modern and comparatively dwarfed forms must be 

 regarded as cases of degeneracy. 



Mr. W. H. JOHNSON, B.Sc, exhibited an improved form 

 of gauge for measuring the thickness of metal sheets, rods, 

 and other substances from three-fourths to at least one ten- 

 thousandth part of an inch. Mr. JOHNSON briefly sketched 

 the history of measuring, from the origin of the foot and 

 inch, and pointed out that the workers in metal must, from 

 a very early time, have required much more accurate means 

 of measurement than other artisans. Wire drawing is a 

 very old industry, and it is remarkable that in Africa 

 Livingstone saw wire drawn by a method the same in 

 principle as the most modern methods, with the exception 

 that machinery worked by power is used in the latter. 

 The process of wire drawing came to England from West- 

 phalia during the last century. The sizes were known by 

 names before the modern nomenclature by numbers, one of 

 which, that of " six-band," still remains as a name for No. 22 

 gauge in brass wire. The development of submarine tele- 

 graphy necessitated, twenty-five years ago, a still more accu- 



