319 
cross at right angles, and the instrument with which Philadelphia was laid 
out is still hi existence ; yet the whole city of Philadelphia has moved in 
accordance with this law. The bases of all churches, laid out east, west, 
north, and south, have changed. There is not a single observatory in the 
world in which an astronomer has taken his latitude where such astronomer 
does not differ from his predecessor ; and that this does not arise from errors 
is proved, because the difference is always in one way. It is very extra- 
ordinary that all the “ errors ” run one way, and in every place, according to 
this law. In our own country, on the plains of Norbury, in Wiltshire, the 
Druids erected their stones in an ellipse, to receive the rays of the sun at 
the period of the summer solstice ; but it is now 12^ degrees from that 
position. You can get any number of facts to prove the soundness of Mr. 
Evan Hopkins’s views, that the rocks are perpendicular, and that changes of 
position take place ; and that not so much time as millions of years is 
required, as some suppose. It would not take 500 years, under certain 
circumstances, to change the whole country altogether, or even to raise the 
whole of the bed of the Pacific Ocean. Geologists tell me that insects are 
there building upwards from the bottom at the rate of 4| inches a year. 
Fancy insects doing this over the entire bed of the Pacific ! No. It is the 
foundation rising. We are gradually going out of our present latitude ; and 
so our climates change, and everything else changes in accordance. 
Captain Fishbourne.— I may mention a fact which Is rather relevant to 
this discussion. When, in the reign of the Empress Catherine, the city 
of Krasnajask was discovered in Siberia (it is some twenty-five years since I 
read the narrative, but to the best of my recollection that was the name), 
M. Pallas, a Frenchman, was sent to report upon the discovery • and he 
found amongst other things sun-dials, but the gnomons were not set at an 
angle to suit the latitude. His explanation was that these sun-dials had 
been imported from a previous centre of civilization, and that the people 
were ignorant of their inaccuracy. But that, of course, is not likely ; for if 
they used them they would have found that they would not give time cor- 
rectly. This would quite agree with the supposition of Mr. Byrne, that the 
situation itself had altered in latitude ; and so that the sun-dials found 
there were suitable to the place— to the city of Krasnajask, when it was in 
its original position, and when founded. 
Mr. Reddie. — As bearing upon some of the views put forward in the 
paper read by Mr. Hopkins, I will quote a paragraph which I observed in 
the Dublin Daily Express of the 20th of November. It states, that at a 
meeting of the Boyal Dublin Society, 
u Mr. Robert H. Scott read his translation of a paper by Professor Oswald 
Heer, of Zurich, ‘ On the Miocene Flora of Atane-kerdluk and North 
Greenland.’ The paper was interesting both from a botanical and geological 
point of view, and it went to prove from fossil specimens of forest trees at 
Atane-kerdluk, in North Greenland, especially the Sequoia sempervirens 
(red-wood), that the climate of Greenland had formerly been thirty degrees 
higher than at present ; the ordinary temperature of the locality being now" 
twenty-one degrees, while the most northern latitude in which that plant 
2 a 2 
