Reviews and Notices of Books. 133 
tenor of the book would greatly outbalance the few rightly directed 
shafts that remained, and show our author to be much more of a 
Darwinite than he appears to suspect himself. 
Before concluding our shert notice of this on the whole capital 
little work, which, by the way, is got up with great taste and 
finish, we would call attention to the theory (mentioned at page 
191), that successive cycles of cold and warmth are indicated by 
the alternating character of formations, and which was advanced 
some years ago by the author to a Philosophical Society at St 
Andrews. It is ingenious, but is clearly dependant on the geo- 
graphical areas in which we group the formation. 
PROCEEDINGS OF SOCIETIES. 
Royal Society of Edinburgh. 
Monday, 4th March 1861.—Proressor CHRISTISON, 
Vice-President, in the Chair. 
The following Communications were read :— 
1. Memoir of the late Rev. Dr John Fleming. By Alexander 
j Bryson, Esq. 
2. On Zoological Classification, and the Parallelism of the 
Mammal, Marsupial, and Ornithic Classes. By Professor 
Macdonald. 
Monday, 18th March 1861.—The Hon. LORD NEAVES, 
Vice-President, in the Chair. 
The following Communications were read :— 
1. On the Properties of the Secretion of the Human Pancreas. 
By William Turner, M.B. (Lond.), Senior Demonstrator of 
Anatomy, University of Edinburgh. 
The author obtained the pancreatic secretion at a post mortem 
examination which he made of the body of a patient of Mr Spence, 
who had died with a medullary tumour in the head of the pancreas, 
which, by compressing the biliary and pancreatic ducts, had pro- 
