4 8 



acre yields as much as five of horizontal beds. The enterprise 

 and skill of the Belgian engineers deserves great praise. A 

 novel sight to Englishmen is the crowd of girls and women 

 who work down the mines, all dressed in male attire. They 

 are intelligent and active, speak only the Walloon dialect, and 

 earn I J to 2 francs per day. The largest ironworks in the 

 world are near Liege, at Suaing, covering 181 acres, and 

 founded by an Englishman, Sir John Cockerell, fifty years 

 ago, and are certainly one of the sights of Belgium. They 

 make everything from rails to locomotives and steamboats, 

 and have extensive orders even from England. Dr. Holden 

 next described a walk through the Hartz Mountains before the 

 war fever, and gave an interesting account of the lead mines, 

 smelting works, and the zinc process used there for desilver- 

 ising the galena. The subject was illustrated by diagrams, 

 specimens of fossils, ores, &c. 



On Wednesday, the 1st of March, Professor Redfern, of 

 Queen's College, delivered a lecture on " The Circulating 

 Fluids in Man and Animals," of which the following is a brief 

 abstract : — 



Every tissue is interested in the circulating fluid. It con- 

 cerns the life of every one of them ; it is essential to their 

 action; from it the secreting organs derive the materials for 

 the manufacture of their secretion ; it yields the excreted 

 matters to the excreting organs, and furnishes the pabulum 

 for the growth and nourishment of every part of the body ; 

 incessant demands are made upon it by every part of the 

 organism through which it circulates. Two circulating fluids 

 have been observed in members of the vertebrate sub-kingdom. 

 The most obvious character by which these may be distin- 

 guished from each other is their colour, which is red in one 

 case, and white in the other. In other respects the fluids are 



