690 [Oct 17, 
Japanese now use many Chinese names for things which they had before, 
and for which they had and still have their own names. 
Mr, Phillips instanced the adoption of the word ‘‘alcohol’’ by the En- 
glish, and their abandonment of ‘spirits of wine.” 
Dr. Brinton replied that the evidence was made stronger by the foreign. 
words being repeated in all three dialects ; and that comparative philologists 
recognize the rule as a good one, and the inference as reasonable, that if 
the Xinka vocabularies have no native word for hat, and have instead the 
Spanish word sombrero, the hat was probably not an article of native dress. 
Mr. Ashburner described observations at the Luray caverns, 
and at the Natural Bridge, in Virginia, which he had made 
recently. 
He found by barometric and by direct measurements that the tradition- 
ary data of the French Engineers were exaggerated. Instead of 215’, he 
made the crown of the arch 185/ and 187 above the stream. Instead of 
the popularly received 2000’ above tide, his connections with the nearest 
railway station made the stream 915’, and the crown of the arch 1102/ 
A. T., and the Hotel 1040’... The thickness of the bridge at the north side 
is 46’; at the south side 36/. 
Cedar creek flows beneath the bridge southward. The rock of the bridge 
is nearly horizontal. The rocks north of the bridge dip steeply towards 
it (¢. ¢., downstream, southward) ; those south of the bridge dip percepti- 
bly also towards it (/. ¢, upstream, northward). There is, therefore, a 
local synclinal at the bridge ; and Mr. Ashburner would thus account for 
the existence of the bridge at that particular point. The last remnant of 
the roof of a long cavern, following a special stratum across a synclinal, 
would necessarily be left precisely in the axial line of the trough. 
The Luray cavern ramifies to great, distances, but always in a particular 
group of limestone beds, limited to 65 feet. The cavern of the Natural 
Bridge must have been limited to a certain soluble horizon of the forma- 
tion. Its great height now is no safe index of the height of the cavern 
formerly ; nor of the width of the soluble rock zone ; but is to be ascribed 
to the vertical erosion of its channel by Cedar creck, in adjusting its water 
slope to the neighboring open lower country. 
Dr. Frazer remarked that when he visited the Bridge three years ago he 
noticed steep (45°-++) dips further south ; and therefore that the synclinal 
must be very local. 
Dr. Frazer desired to place on record his dissent from Prof. 
H. ©. Lewis’s paper on a great trap range through Southern 
Pennsylvania, read at the late meeting of the American Asso- 
ciation for the Advancement of Science; because the discus- 
sion which followed the reading of that paper would not appear 
in the volume of the T'ransactions of the Association. 
