386 Intelligence and Miscellaneous Articles, 



of the Shap blocks was due to floating ice, and referred this to the land- 

 ice crossing the Pennine chain consequent upon greater snow-inter- 

 ception from the progress of the rise : and to the same cause he 

 referred the drift which rises high on the eastern slope of the Pennine 

 ridge north of the Aire. To this crossing of the ice having diverted 

 first a part and then the whole of the ice-supply of the Chalky-clay 

 glacier, he attributed first the shrinking of that glacier into the 

 valleys in East Anglia, and afterwards its dissolution by the agencies 

 always rife in the Greenland ice (but which are there balanced by 

 continual reinforcement), when by this diversion its reinforcement 

 by ice from the Pennine chain ceased. The purple clay of Holderness, 

 being thus in its lowest part in Holderness coeval with the valley- 

 formed portion of the Chalky Clay of Norfolk and Suffolk (or "third 

 Boulder-clay M of Harmer), was the moraine of this invading ice, 

 which, after crossing at Stainmoor, divided against the eastern 

 moorlands of Yorkshire; and one branch going north of these 

 moorlands through the valley of the Tees, sent off an arm down 

 their eastern flank, the moraine from which is the narrow belt of 

 purple clay which skirts the Yorkshire coast north of Holderness, 

 and spreads out wider in Holderness. This arm from the Chalky- 

 clay ice not having, in consequence of the westerly increment of 

 depression, descended the eastern slope of the "Wolds, found sea then 

 covering the basement clay of Holderness, in which sea it stopped 

 between the Humber and the Wash, by means of which the lower 

 part of the purple clay up to the level of about 150 feet, contains 

 intercalated in it beds of sand and gravel, and contains shells and 

 shell-fragments, as does the Lancashire clay similarly extruded 

 beneath the sea. The other branch came south along the western 

 flank of the east moorlands and through the Yale of York, where it 

 ended, and became stationary in the sea as this entered the Trent 

 system on the final dissolution of the chalky- clay glacier. 



The author discovers no trace of any thing like the intercalation 

 of warm periods up to the stage with which he concludes this part 

 of his memoir ; and leaves the description of the later beds, as well 

 as an examination how far arboreal vegetation and the coexistence 

 of Pachyderms and Proboscideans can be reconciled with the con- 

 tiguity of extensive land-ice, for the concluding part of it. 



LI. Intelligence and Miscellaneous Articles. 



ON THE SPECIFIC HEAT AND CONDUCTIVITY OF BODIES. 

 BY M. MORISOT. 



I HAVE the honour to present to the Academy the general method 

 and the principal experimental characters of a study which I 

 have commenced upon specific heat and conductivity. 



Suppose in the centre of an enclosure kept at 0° a body which is 

 a sufficiently good conductor to be admitted as homothermous — that 

 is to say, of equal temperature in all its parts. I call that tempe- 

 rature x ; E is the thermal capacity of the body, p the amount of 

 heat which it loses in a second for an excess of 1° above the sur- 



