For the last sixty years physiological and other authors have been maintaining two very opposite views in regard to the absorption by the skin of substances dissolved in the water of baths. Some authors holding that such salts as iodide of potassium readily reach the blood through the skin, when applied in the form of a bath containing that salt; while others hold that absorption, under such circumstances, never takes place. Among those who hold the affirmative view, I may mention Braconnot, Madden, O'Henry (fils), Carpenter, Chevallier et Petit; and among those who hold the opposite opinion, Currie, Seguin, Lehmann of Leipzig, Kletzinsky.

Chemists are in the habit of assigning to mannite the formula,

C6H14O6;

but the reasons which have hitherto been given for that formula seem not very conclusive. By a process of fermentation, alcohol and a number of other compounds of well established composition may be obtained from mannite; but inasmuch as disintegration takes place in this process, the formulæ of the products afford no guide to the constitution of the original body.

This apparently little known form of parasitic crustacean has been as yet described only by Retzius and Kröyer. It does not appear, up to this time, to have been recognised as a British species. During the present year, many specimens obtained from the nasal cavity of more than one Rasa batis, caught by the Newhaven fishermen, have been examined by the authors.

Biography, the author said, had never done sufficient justice to Robert Whytt, while it began already to omit his name. Whytt had commonly been represented as a follower of Stahl; and this idea, which was without foundation, had probably been a principal cause why his merits had not always been duly recognised.

It was mentioned in the Memoir, that Whytt was born at Edinburgh, September 6, 1714; he was the son of Robert Whytt of Bennochy, a member of the Scottish bar; he was a posthumous child, born six months after his father's death; he was not yet seven years old when he lost his mother; her name was Murray; she was the daughter of Antony Murray of Woodend, in Perthshire.

The difficulty which the paper discusses is the paradoxical fact discovered by Dr Heberden,—namely, that if there be three exactly similar rain-gauges, and one of them be placed on the ground, the second on the roof of a neighbouring house, and the third on a still higher edifice, then, notwithstanding every variety in the positions of these gauges as respects surrounding objects, and notwithstanding the prevalence of the opposite conditions of high wind and of absolute calm, it is observed that the lowest gauge receives more rain than the middle one, and the middle gauge more rain than the upper one.

The frost of December 1860 caused serious damage to trees and shrubs in the Botanic Garden of Edinburgh. On the morning of 24th December, Fahrenheit's thermometer stood at 6° below zero according to the Kew standard. An account of the injury inflicted has been already published in the Transactions of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh. It has been stated that the great cold in the garden, as compared with other places near Edinburgh, may be accounted for by its low sheltered situation, and the descent of the heavy cold atmosphere from the more elevated localities around.

After referring to a previous communication to the Society, in which the author had given an outline of the chronology of the igneous rocks of Scotland, he proceeded in the present paper to describe in detail the character of the volcanic phenomena in one district—that of the carboniferous system of the Forth basin. The igneous rocks of this district consist partly of doleritic and felspathic lava-form masses, and partly of various kinds of ash or traptuff. These materials present a considerable diversity in their modes of arrangement. But the author had found that all the volcanic hills of the district might be reduced to three types of structure:—1. A simple cone of ash, round and over which the ordinary sedimentary accumulation of the carboniferous period had been deposited. 2. A cone of ash with the crater filled up by a neck or plug of basalt. 3. Sheets of different lavas with intercalated ash or sedimentary matter.

The object of this paper is to show the prejudicial effect which the excess of females has upon the condition and moral well-being of society in this country.

In this paper it was shown that the attraction of the sun causes a deflection of the plummet, having its maximum about the 240th part of a second, and proportional to the size of twice the sun's zenith distance; the deflection is at its maximum when the sun is 45° above or below the horizon, and occurs in the vertical plane passing through the attracting body.

The deflection due to the moon has its maximum about the 60th part of a second, and follows the same law; it is toward or from the attracting body according as the zenith distance is less or more than 90°.

The view, founded on Boscovich's theory, commonly taken of cohesion, whether of solids or of liquids, is, that it results from a force of attraction between the particles of matter, which increases much more rapidly than according to the inverse square of the distance, when the distance is diminished below some very small limit. This view might, indeed, seem inevitable, unless the idea of “attraction” is to be discarded altogether; because the law of attraction at sensible distances—the Newtonian law—demonstrated by its discoverer for distances not incomparably smaller than the earth's dimensions, and verified by Maskelyne and Cavendish in a manner rendering it impossible for any naturalist to reasonably doubt its applicability to the mutual action between particles a few hundred yards or a few inches asunder, seems to give only very small, scarcely appreciable, forces between bodies of such masses as those we experiment on in our laboratories, everywhere placed as close as possible to one another,—that is to say, in contact, and does not seem to provide for any considerable increase of attraction when the area of contact is increased, whether by pressing the bodies together, or by shaping them to fit over a large area.

The experiments described in this paper were all made in 1850 and 1851, upon a plan which was fully explained by the author in letters to Mr Airy and Professor Kelland in the former year. Some notice of them appeared in the British Association Reports for 1851 and 1852, and the apparatus was supplied by a grant from the Association.

The fact that the temperature of the earth increases with the depth below the surface, implies a continual loss of heat from the interior by conduction outwards, through or into the upper crust. Since the upper crust does not become hotter from year to year, there must therefore be a secular loss of heat from the whole earth. It is possible that no cooling may result from this loss of heat, but only exhaustion of potential energy, which in this case could scarcely be other than chemical affinity between substances forming part of the earth's mass. But it is certain that either the earth is becoming, on the whole, cooler from age to age, or that the heat conducted out is generated in the interior by temporary dynamical action (such as chemical combination).

The author stated that it would be difficult to estimate the value of any chemical or mechanical process whereby timber might be rendered permanently impervious to the ravages of the Limnoria terebrans, that small but sure destroyer of timber structures exposed to the action of the sea.

The ravages of that crustacean were first observed in 1810 by Mr Robert Stevenson, the engineer of the Bell Rock Lighthouse, in the timber supports of the temporary beacon used by him in the erection of that work. Having forwarded specimens of the insect, and of the timber it had destroyed, to Dr Leach, the eminent Naturalist of the British Museum, Dr Leach, in 1811, announced it as a “new and highly interesting species which had been sent to him by his friend Robert Stevenson, civil engineer,” and assigned to it the name of Limnoria terebrans (Linnean Trans., vol. xi. p. 370, and Edinburgh Encyclopædia, vol. vii. p. 433).

The author refers to the general equation of the mechanical action of heat which Professor Clausius and he arrived at independently by different methods in 1849, and points out that the form of that equation, which was laid before the Society by him in a paper read on the 4th of February 1850, comprehends, as a particular case, the law which connects the volume of a given weight of steam with its temperature, pressure, and latent heat. He describes the use of that law, with proper numerical data, to compute, in the absence of direct experiment, tables of the density and volume of saturated steam, more accurate than those founded on the assumption of the perfectly gaseous condition, as exemplified in tables which he published in 1855 and subsequently.

Although most of the results deduced in this Note have been long known, I venture to offer it to the Society on account of the extreme simplicity of the analysis employed, and the consequent insight it affords us into the connection of various formulæ. I intend on a future occasion to give large further developments especially bearing on physics. I employ the calculus of quaternions throughout, but where some unusual expressions occur, I have given them in their common Cartesian form, as well as in the quaternion one.