﻿162 Canadian Record of Science. 



In the discussion which followed, Mr. Matthew, Dr. 

 Johnston Lavis, Sir James Grant, Professor Eupert 

 Jones, Professor Bonney, and others took part. One 

 speaker remarked that Eozoon had been attacked for 

 many years, but there w^ere some geologists who still had 

 faith in it. 



In responding, Sir William Dawson thanked the 

 speakers for the fair and friendly manner in which they 

 had received his old friend of the Laurentian rocks, and 

 hoped it was not merely on the principle that nothing 

 but good was to be said of the dead. His object had been 

 to exhibit to a representative audience a series of charac- 

 teristic examples of these curious objects, leaving those 

 present to form their own conclusions. In any case, 

 he thought they must admit that the discussion of the 

 subject had been of advantage to science ; and he hoped it 

 would eventually lead to a great extension of our 

 knowledge of the earliest forms of life. 



It was announced that additional specimens were on 

 exhibition at University College Museum, and that some 

 of these would be demonstrated under the microscope on 

 the following afternoon. (Partly from Keport in Liverpool 

 Post) 



Eemarks on the Distinctive Characters of the 

 Canadian Spruces^ — Species of Picea. 



By Gkorge Lawson, Ph.D., LL.D., F.R.S.C, Professor of Chemistry, 

 Dalhousie College, Halifax, Nova Scotia. 



Our native spruces (belonging to the genus Picea) have 

 received attention at different times from many botanists, 

 but their conclusions in regard to the number of species, 



1 This iinpoitant pajjcr, originally presented to the Royal Society of Canada in 1887, 

 appears to have been published privately, since it cannot be found in any of the 

 journals of that year. The renewed interest which has of late centred in the possible 

 distinction of Picea nigra and P. rubra makes it desirable that these observations 

 should be placed in some publication through which they may be brought more pro- 

 minently under the notice of working botanists, to whom they are known, but 

 not accessible. D. P. Penhallow. 



Montreal, October, 1896. 



