1879. | Scientific News. 727 
_ — The papers read before the British Association at its last meet- 
ing, so far as reports in Nature and elsewhere show, comprised 
nothing especially noteworthy. The address of Prof. St. George 
Mivart before the Biological Section was on Buffon; that of Prof. 
Lankester was on Degeneration, an extension of some specula- 
tions made by Dr. Dohrn, while in anthropology the address of 
r. Tylor was interesting and useful. The meeting of the French 
Association was not characterized by any papers of a high degree 
of interest. The sixty-second meeting of Swiss Naturalists at 
St. Gall, was well attended, and Prof. Vogt, in a brilliant lecture, 
exhibited very good photographs of the second more perfect 
Specimen of Archeopteryx found at Solenhofen, which, according 
to the report in ature, “ proves undoubtedly that we have to do 
with a bird-like reptile of the size of a pigeon, which had both 
seales and feathers, a beak provided with teeth, armed wings, 
bird-like feet with nails and a reptile tail consisting of twenty 
vertebre.” On the whole the Saratoga meeting of the American 
Association was characterized by apparently quite as able papers 
as those read at Sheffield, or Montpellier, or St. Gall. The Brit- 
ish and French Associations made large grants for scientific re- 
search, an example which might be followed to better advantage 
to science by our association, than by printing a volumne of trans- 
actions for gratuitous distribution, and maintaining a library, and 
paying office rent, and clerical assistance. 
— Prof. Archibald Geikie is now delivering, in Boston, a course 
of Lowell lectures on earth-sculpture. He is well known in this 
of the Geological Survey of Scotland in 1867, and in December, 
1870, to the new chair of mineralogy and geology in the Univer- 
sity of Edinburgh, established by Sir Roderick Murchison and 
the Crown. He has written many important memoirs on geology 
and kindred subjects. He published the Story of a Boulder in 
1858, and the Life of Edward Forbes in 1861; the Phenomena 
of Glacial Drift in Scotland in 1863; Scenery of Scotland, &c., in 
1865; Memoirs of Sir Roderick Murchison, in two volumes, in 
1874, with several elementary text books on geology and physi- 
cal geography; articles in Quarterly Journal of Geological 
Society of London and other societies; in the Quarterly and 
North British Reviews. He has recently received a gold medal 
from the Royal Society of Edinburgh, for his memoirs on the 
Old: Red Sandstone of Western Europe. He arrived in New 
York and started for the West August 12th, visiting the Yellow- 
stone Park, Salt Lake, Wasatch and Uinta mountains, to study 
the glacial phenomena of those regions, returning East, Oct. Ist. 
— The U. S. Geological and Topographical Survey, under the 
direction of Clarence King, has been fully organized, and has been — 
