314 Miscellaneous Intelligence. 



patient work of weighing and measuring and comparing, which 

 is necessary to make our theoretic speculations of any substantial 

 value, has l>een already done for us. The publication, three 

 years since, of Berthelot's essay on chemical mechanics has given 

 us in a collected form a large quantity of data of the first im- 

 portance; and now I am glad to say that the long labors of 

 another worker in the same field, Timmsen of Copenhagen, are 

 in course of publication in a handy form. I think these two in- 

 vestigators have done more than any one else of late years 

 toward making it possible to give to chemistry the rank of an 

 exact seieiire. But besides the data which they have supplied to 

 us, there are others which are still wanting. For instance, almost 

 every equation of chemical equilibrium involves an expression 

 depending on the specific heats of the materials. At present we 

 do not know enough of the law of specific heats to be able to 

 give in most cases a probable value to those expressions; but 

 these and other data of the kind do not seem out of our reach, 

 and we may hope that the same ingenuity and patience which 

 has gained for u> so much firm ground in thermal chemistry will 

 extend it to the, uncertain spots where we have yet no solid 

 foundation. 



Further, the laws of dissociation so ably investigated by De- 

 ville have taught, us that the force called chemical affinity, by 

 which we suppose the atoms of unlike matters are held together 

 in a compound molecule, follows precisely the same laws asthe 

 force of cohesion, by which particles of a* similar kind are united 

 in molecules." 



The president of the (b-ologh-al section, Robert Etheeidge, 

 took for his subject one of local as well as general interest, a 

 review of what had been hitherto done in the study of the 

 Tertiary rocks ( »f the Hampshire basin. 



Sir Richard Temple, President of the Geographical section, 

 discoursed instructively on the Central Plateau of Asia — its 

 mountains, river-sources, plateau-, lacustrine systems, and the 

 importance of the further investigation of the great region to the 

 sciences of terrestrial physics, geology and meteorology, as well 

 as to that of general history and sociology. 



In the section of Biology, the vice-president, in the department 

 of Anthropology, Professor Hawkins, spoke on "the present 

 phase of the Antiquity of Man." Professor Dawkins remarked 

 upon the great improbability of the discovery of remains of man 

 in the Eocene or Miocene from the fact that the known placental 

 mammals of the first of these periods are all of extinct genera, 

 and from the second ot extinct species; for the most specialized 

 of all animals cannot be looked for until the higher mammalia by 



