214 
REPORTS OF SOCIETIES. 
in the country. The exports of the United States, mainly 
grain and cotton, amounted last year to 750,000,000 dollars, 
or nearly £150,000,000. The total exports and imports of 
India last year amounted to £181,000,000, and of this 
materially over £100,000,000 belonged directly to the 
Vegetable Kingdom in one form or another. 
The Future of the Anglo-Saxon Race. 
Consider, also, to what a large extent the future fortunes 
of the British Empire depend upon a proper development of 
the capabilities of our Colonial possessions to produce the 
vegetable crops that are useful to the human race for food, 
clothing, medicine, and other economic uses. Our population 
is now 850 millions ; what will it be in a hundred years time ? 
Notwithstanding emigration, the population of Great Britain 
has doubled in the last half-century, whilst that of France, 
which in the seventeenth century amounted to 38 per cent, of 
the whole population of Europe, now hardly attains 13 per 
cent. To 350 millions add fifty millions for the population of 
the United States, which has increased above 20 per cent, 
during the last ten years. The estimate recently put forward 
by Mr. Gladstone does not seem at all an extravagant one, 
that in a hundred years’ time it is not improbable that the 
English-speaking race and its subjects will amount up to a 
population of 1,000 millions. How all these men and women 
and children are to be supplied with needful food and clothing 
is a problem that will try to the very uttermost the knowledge 
and the foresight, and the energy and the enterprise, of the 
generations that are to follow our own. 
(To be continued.) 
leporls of Roddies. 
BIRMINGHAM NATURAL HISTORY AND MICROSCPICAL 
SOCIETY.— Microscopical Section, June 6th. Mr. J. F. Goode 
read a paper entitled, “ Notes on some Foraminifera, collected and 
mounted by Mr. E. W. Burgess, from Material obtained near Oban by 
the Society, during their dredging excursion in 1883,” illustrated by 
specimens in microscopes and by a fine series of micro-photographs by 
J. Edmonds, exhibited in the oxy-hydrogen lantern, by Mr. C. 
Pumphrey. Mr. Pumphrey afterwards gave by the same lantern an 
interesting exhibition of fine photographs of flowers and other 
objects.— Microscopical Section, July 3rd, Mr. W. B. Grove, B.A., 
exhibited Peziza claims and P. ebuli (new to the district), Ascobolus 
immersus and Sordaria discospora from Clent Hills ; and also (for Miss 
Gingell) Ag. gambosus , Ag. carneus, and Peziza acetabulum from Dursley. 
