72 
30°. I cannot say that it went to another cloud, hut that 
would most likely he so, as my attention was taken up 
watching the progress of the electric hall. 
E. W. Binney, V.P., F.R.S., said that shortly after the 
meeting of the Society on the 21st January last, when he 
exhibited the singular fossil plants, which were quite new 
to him at the time, and which he thought would have to be 
placed in a new genus, he had received excellent transverse 
and longitudinal sections of similar specimens from Professor 
Renault of Cluny, which were if possible in a more beautiful 
state of preservation than those found in the carboniferous 
strata of Lancashire. On the 4th February Professor W. C. 
Williamson, F.R.S., stated that these specimens w T ere the 
branches or stems of the well-known genus Asterophyllites , 
and he had communicated his views to the Royal Society 
so early as November, 1871, wherein he expressed his 
opinion “ that Asterophyllites is not the branch or foliage of 
a Oalamite, but an altogether distinct type of vegetation 
having an organisation peculiarly its own.” 
Now the distinguished French Professor in his letter to 
me states that he had described this fossil plant in a memoir 
read before the Academy in 1870, and that in his opinion 
it belonged to Sphenophyllum , and an abstract of the 
communication appears in the Comptes Rendus for 1870. 
I am not in possession of the facts from which the two 
learned professors came to such different conclusions, but I 
am inclined to consider the singular little stem as belonging 
to a new genus until the leaves of Sphenophyllum or Aster o- 
phylliies are found attached to it. When this comes to pass 
of course there can be no doubt on the matter. 
Mr. Brockbank, F.G.S., exhibited specimens of iron 
manufactured by the old Bohemian process from hematite 
ores in the south of Europe. Similar iron has also recently 
