1890.] Proceedings of Scientific Societies. :991 
This committee, instead of investigating the propriety, and without 
making any report on the subject of the propriety, actually created 
and set into operation the congress; which in turn, after being organ- 
ized, proclaimed the committee’s members the ** comité fondateur,” 
and one of the constituent parts of the congress's council. With this 
act the A. A. A. S. had nothing to do, and could neither add to nor 
take from the comité fondateur its function thus recognized. The only 
question is whether the congress chose to apply the advantages pertaining 
to membership in this committee to the original persons who comprised 
the comité fondateur, or preferred to admit to these privileges all who 
were named from time to time on the ‘‘ propriety ’’ committee by the 
American Association. 
The congress's decision on this point is seen in the action which it 
took during the Bologna session; but in the meantime there is no 
doubt that as long as the congress does not rescind its act, there exists 
an integral—the first-named— part of its council, called the comité 
fondateur, which at this time coincides with the present membership of 
the American committee. 
President Capellini, the editor of the proceedings of the Bologna 
meeting, opens that splendid volume with a somewhat more accurate 
statement of the origin of the congress than that given by President 
Hebert or General Secretary Jannettaz, which he rightly attributes to 
a motion made in the A. A. A. S., and states the facts virtually as they 
have been given above. (Bologna Volume, pp. 3, 4, and 5). 
But it must not be imagined that because Prof. Capellini inserted 
into his account of the history of the congress the motion before the 
A. A. A. S. that he interpreted it differently from MM. Hébert and 
Jannettaz in the Paris Congress. This is his understanding of the 
case, given in his presidential address: ‘At the termination of the 
World's Fair in Philadelphia a group of geologists assembled in Buffalo 
constituted a committee for the organization of an international geolo- 
gical congress at Paris in 1878 : : 
«The committee created in America took the name of the * Comité 
Fondateur de Philadelphie,’ to recall its initiative and the exposition 
which had been the occasion of it.” 
Again, the committee of organization adopted the following (Art. 
5): ‘The council shall be composed (1) of the members of the comite 
fondateur; (2) of the members of the committee of organization ; 
(3) of the members of the bureau of the congress ; (4) of the actual 
presidents of geological societies and the directors of large geological 
surveys; (5) of those members of the congress whom it should invite 
to sit with it.” 
