392 Geological Society : — Anniversary Address, 



POLYTECHNIC SOCIETY OF CORNWALL. 



To the zealous exertions of Sir Charles Lemon, and of many 

 intelligent and active individuals at Falmouth, the county of Corn- 

 wall is also indebted for the establishment of a Polytechnic Society, 

 which, during the few years of its existence, has been attended 

 with extraordinary success. One of its chief objects is to encou- 

 rage, by rewards, the invention and improvement of machinery, of 

 which so large an amount is essential to the working of the mines. 

 Another object is to collect materials for expressing the quantity and 

 value of the mineral and other produce of the county ; and to con- 

 struct tables indicating the diminished longevity, and diseases, 

 which, in a peculiar degree, affect the Cornish miners, and do not 

 prevail amongst those employed in Collieries. It appears, from a 

 paper published in the Sixth Annual Report of this Society (1839), 

 that the average duration of a miner's life is less, by many years, 

 than that of the agricultural labourer in the same district ; the ap- 

 parent causes of this frightful evil being the inevitably imperfect 

 ventilation of many of the veins or lodes in which the miner works ; 

 and, partly, the extreme fatigue of ascending from great depths by 

 ladders, instead of being lifted by machinery, as the workmen are 

 from coal pits : these pits also are usually susceptible of more per- 

 fect ventilation, than the metalliferous lodes in Cornwall. 



The attention of this Society is strenuously directed to the dis- 

 covery of remedies for these tremendous evils, which affect no fewer 

 than a population of 28,000 persons ; that being the proportion of 

 the inhabitants of Cornwall, who are occupied in working the mines, 



LOCAL MUSEUMS. 



Another circumstance which marks the progressive advance- 

 ment of public feeling as to the value of geology, is the increasing 

 disposition to form local museums in our provincial towns. 



At the meeting of the British Association, at Birmingham, in 

 August last, after a strong expression of opinion, in the Section of 

 Geology, as to the benefit likely to accrue to science from the esta- 

 blishment of Provincial Museums, for the local productions of each 

 neighbourhood, the justness of the suggestion was so fully recog- 

 nised, that, in the adjacent town of Dudley, before five days had 

 passed, a public museum had arisen from contributions, out of the ca- 

 binets of private collectors in that town ; presenting to the Asso- 

 ciation a more perfect assemblage than was ever seen, of the exqui- 

 site organic remains found in the limestone of that district, which 

 has long been the classic type of a formation widely and abundantly 

 distributed over the globe. 



About this time also a provincial museum was formed at Brad- 

 ford, in a district abounding in splendid examples of the vegetable 

 remains which pervade the Yorkshire coal field ; where the exten- 

 sive collieries now wrought will furnish abundant materials for a 

 collection, destined to illustrate the history of the extinct forms of 

 vegetable life, which have produced the coal. 



The museum at Leeds, also, possesses a valuable collection of fossil 



