398 Geological Society : — 



very severe superheating to get the aluminium compounds to near 

 four volumes, whereas it required very ingenious devices to get nitric 

 peroxide out of the four- volume state. 



Such guiding principles as we have acquired in chemistry are 

 the noblest fruits of the accumulated labours of numberless patient 

 experimentalists and thinkers ; and when any new or old fact ap- 

 pears to be at variance with those principles, we either add to our 

 knowledge by discovering new facts which remove the apparent incon- 

 sistency, or we put the case by for a while and frankly say that we do 

 not understand it. 



The decision of the atomic weight of aluminium has involved 

 greater difficulty than was encountered in the case of most other 

 metals, owing to the fact of our knowing only one oxide of the 

 metal, and salts corresponding to it ; but the analogies which con- 

 nect aluminium with other metals are so close and so numerous, 

 that there are probably few metals of which the position in our clas- 

 sification is more satisfactorily settled. We may safely trust that 

 the able investigators who are examining these interesting com- 

 pounds will bring them more fully than now within the laws which 

 regulate the combining proportions of their constituent elements ; 

 for, as it now stands, the anomaly is far less than many others 

 which have been satisfactorily explained by further investigations. 



Meanwhile aluminium is a metal singular for only appearing in 

 that pseudo-triatomic character in which iron and chromium appear 

 in their sesquisalts. 



GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



[Continued from p. 326.] 



January 25, 1865. — W. J. Hamilton, Esq., President, in the Chair. 



The following communications were read : — 



1. " Notes on the Climate of the Pleistocene epoch of New Zea- 

 land." By Julius Haast, Ph.D., F.G.S. 



The main feature in this communication was a notice of the oc- 

 currence of bones of the Dinornis in the moraines of the extinct 

 glaciers of New Zealand. In support of the author's opinion that 

 the extinction of that bird was due. to the agency of man at a some- 

 what recent date, it was observed that the present Alpine flora 

 furnished a large quantity of nutritious food quite capable of 

 sustaining the life even of so large a creature ; and as the fruits of 

 these plants were at present applied to no apparent purpose in the 

 economy of nature, the author argued the former existence of an 

 adequate amount of animal life to prevent an excessive development of 

 vegetation. This part, he considered, was played by the Dinornis. 



2. " On the Order of Succession in the Drift-beds in the Island 

 of Arran." By James Bryce, M.A., LL.D., F.G.S. 



In a paper read last year before the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 

 the Rev. R. B. Watson described all these beds as Boulder-clay, 

 and did not assign the Shells which he had discovered in them to 

 any particular part of the deposit. Dr. Bryce dissented from this 

 view, and in this paper pointed out the various causes of error likely 



