148 Intelligence and Miscellaneous Articles. 
where, chiefly, if not entirely, made up from the denudation of the 
local rocks, the material being brought down by the action of ice 
and snow from the high ground lying inland; while the overlying 
deposit of brown Boulder-clay is part of the great sheet of Low- 
level Boulder-clay and Sands which occupies the plains of the north 
of England from the mountains to the shores of the Irish Sea, and, 
like the more sandy Boulder-clays near Liverpool, its materials were 
probably derived chiefly from Triassic rocks, which occur in the 
neighbouring Vale of Clwyd, mixed with material derived from 
other rocks, and especially with argillaceous matter from the under- 
lying Till. The granite boulders contained in it were carried to 
where they le by floating ice. 
XIX. Intelligence and Miscellaneous Articles. 
A NEW METHOD OF DETERMINING THE CONSTANT OF GRAVITA- 
TION. BY ARTHUR KONIG AND FRANZ RICHARZ. 
[* the older experiments for determining the constant of gravi- 
tation the pendulum and the torsion-balance were used as mea- 
suring-instruments. Both apparatus were, however, far excelled by 
the balance which was first applied to problems of gravitation by 
Herr von Jolly*. He counterbalanced one and the same mass in 
one case by placing weights in a scale-pan on the same level, and 
in another case by placing weights on a scale-pan at a depth of 21 
metres, and connected with the upper one by a wire. The differ- 
ence represented the decrease of gravity with height. He then 
arranged below the lower pan a lead ball weighing 5775 grammes, 
and again determined the corresponding difference. The increased 
difference represented the attraction of the lead ball on the weights 
in the lower scale; for the lead ball, as experiment showed, exerted 
no measurable action on the upper scale-pan. The most material 
sources of error are the unavoidable differences in temperature 
arising from the height of. the place of observation, as well as the 
friction due to currents of air on the wire of 21 metres. 
Quite independently of each other we have arrived at a method 
in which a fourfold attraction of the mass of lead used in measuring 
by the balance comes into play, and, moreover, differences in tem- 
perature and currents of air can be almost entirely avoided. 
In the middle of the horizontal surface of a parallelopipedal 
block of lead a balance is so arranged that its pans are just over 
the surface. Below each pan the block is bored through vertically, 
and by means of two rods passing through these holes two other 
pans are so suspended from the upper pans that they are just 
below the block. 
* Abh, der Kon. bayer. Akad. der Wiss. II, Class, vols, xiii. and xiv.; 
and Wiedemann’s Annalen, vol. xiv. 
