BRITISH ASSOCIATION MEETING. 
453 
ture in the room, transported a very heavy piano from one side of it to the 
other, and then departed, taking with them most of the articles of furniture of 
a light character. 
Facts of this kind forcibly show how great the encroachments of the sea 
must have been within a comparatively short time. Men do not usually build 
houses in situations thus exposed ; the encroachment of the sea has rendered 
their sites perilous. And though it is happily true that such storms are not of 
very frequent occurrence, nevertheless many of us can remember so many of 
them that we cannot but look for them in the future ; that is to say, we recog- 
nise them as part of the system of nature, not necessarily destructive on every 
coast, but by no means of very limited range, and certainly an important part 
of the machinery now modifying the crust of the earth. 
ON THE EXCESS OF WATEE IN THE EEGION OF THE EARTH 
ABOUT NEW ZEALAND ; ITS CAUSES AND ITS EFFECTS. 
By James Yates, M.A., f.R.S. and G.S. 
(Member of the Geological Society of Manchester.) 
The author, adopting from Professor Guyot (" Earth and Man," translated 
by Mr. Clarke, of Battersea) the terms " land-hemisphere" and " water-hemi- 
sphere" to distinguish the portion of the earth which includes " the four quar- 
ters of the globe" from that portion which consists mainly of water, observed 
that instead of the old distinction between the northern and southern hemi- 
spheres, the cultivators of physical geography have now made a much more 
accurate statement of the facts by assuming a point in the South Pacific Ocean, 
not far from New Zealand, as a centre, around which the entire waters of the 
globe appear to be collected. He referred to the Physical Atlas of Berghaus, 
published in Berlin, as containing the most accurate representation of this view 
of the subject, and thought that this has the highest authority, because, in 
constructing it Berghaus was assisted and directed by two of the most eminent 
of his fellow-citizens in this department of science, Alexander von Humboldt 
and Professor Karl Bitter. The author mentioned that English geographers 
have prepared maps which give the same general \iew, but take London and 
the antipodes of London as the two centres, in order to accommodate English 
conceptions. He exhibited the beautiful Training-school Atlas, just published 
by the Messrs. Philip, of London and Liverpool, as containing the largest and 
best examples of representation. It appeared necessary, however, instead of 
regarding the waters as ramified in every possible way by their distribution 
into oceans, seas, bays, and straits, to collect them in imagination into one ; 
hence, preserving Berghaus' centre, which is situated in the meridian of a 
hundrea and seventy degrees east longitude from Paris, and in about four hun- 
dred and thirty south latitude, the author presented on a diagram "an Ideal 
Section of the Earth in the Meridian of New Zealand." Two points in the 
circumference of this section, named A and B, represented the division between 
the collected land and the collected water, and the author produced statements 
from Professor Rigaud of Oxford, Professor Link of Berlin, Alexander von 
Humboldt, and Sir John Herschell, all tending to show that the entire amount 
of land on the surface of the globe being taken as a hundred, the entire amount 
of water will be two hundred and eighty -nine, or nearly so. He took the exact 
number, two hundred and eighty-nine, because it is the square of seventeen, 
one hundred being the square of ten. He thought that by the adoption of 
these numbers, the points A, B in the diagram might be exactly fixed, and that 
the chord joining them would divide the land (in the section) from the water 
