president's address. 
145 
University. 
At the Biological Laboratory of the University, Mr. J. P. Hill 
is working at the development of the teeth of the bandicoot. At 
the laboratories of the Medical School Professor Wilson is 
studying the same subject in collaboration with Mr. Hill, and 
also the development of the teeth of the platypus. Dr. C. J. 
Martin is still continuing his investigations on the subject of snake 
poison, and is working out the general development of the 
platypus. At the Macleay Museum Mr. George Masters is still 
employed at his task of classifying the collections of foreign 
Orthoptera and Coleoplera, and has mounted on ground glass all 
the collections of Australian and foreign birds' eggs and a large 
number of marine and land mollusca. 
Scientific Papers, &c. 
It would, of course, be quite beyond the scope of this address 
to review the principal papers of scientific interest which were 
published by Australian Societies last year. A few publications, 
however, relating to my own subject will be referred to. The 
very important paper by Mr. P. L. Jack, at the Brisbane meeting 
of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, 
showed that his geological survey of the intake beds of the 
cretaceous formation proved that the supply of rain water 
draining into the beds was fully forty times as much as had been 
previously estimated. On the assumption, therefore, that a total 
of about one hundred million gallons flow now daily from the 
Queensland artesian bores, it should be possible to draw at least 
forty times as much as the above amount of water out of the beds 
without encroaching on the supply. The geological explorations 
by Mr. E. F. Pittman, the Government Geologist, during the past 
year, on the cretaceous rocks of the Upper Darling and in the 
Parish of Bidura, Balranald district, have shown that it is very 
probable that the artesian basin may extend far to the south-west 
of Wilcannia, possibly underneath the overlying Tertiary deposits 
of West Victoria and South-East South Australia to the coast. 
K 
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