NOTES BY THE EDITOR

ON THE

PROGRESS OF SCIENCE FOR THE YEAR 1859.

THE thirteenth meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science was held at Springfield, Mass., August 3-9, 1859 - Prof. Stephen Alexander, of Princeton, N. J., in the chair. The attendance of members was large, and the meetings harmonious and interesting. The whole number of papers registered for presentation was 108.

The following gentlemen were elected officers for the ensuing year: President, Isaac Lea, of Philadelphia; Vice President, Dr. B. A. Gould, jr., of Cambridge; Secretary, Prof. Joseph LeConte, of South Carolina; Treasurer, Dr. A. L. Elwyn, of Philadelphia.

The Standing Committee recommended that a Winter Session be held in some Southern city in the winter of 1860-1.

A new expedition, by Lieut. Gillies, to South America, for the more accurate determination of the Solar Parallax, was recommended, and a committee of seven appointed to confer with him, and further the enterprise.

The Association adjourned to meet in Newport, R. I., August 1st,

1860.

The twenty-ninth annual meeting of the British Association for the Promotion of Science, was held at Aberdeen, Scotland, September 1859 Prince Albert in the chair. The attendance on the part of the members and the public was unusually large, and the communications numerous and important.

The meeting for 1860 was appointed to be held in Oxford, Lord Worthlesley being the President elect.

From the report of the Council, we learn that the difficulties which have hitherto presented themselves in the way of a daily photographic record of the sun's disk, have been almost entirely surmounted.

"It has been found, after repeated trials, that the best photographic definition is obtained when the sensitized plate is situated from 1-10th

to 1-8th of an inch beyond the visual focus in the case of a 4-inch picture; and that when the adjustment is made, beautiful pictures are obtained of the sun four inches in diameter, which still bear magnifying with a lens of low power, and show considerable detail on the sun's surfaces besides the spots, which are well defined. Mr. De la Rue, by combining two pictures obtained by the Photoheliograph at an interval of three days, has produced a stereoscopic image of our luminary, which presents to the mind an idea of sphericity. Under Mr. De la Rue's direction, Mr. Beckley is making special experiments, having for their object the determination of the kind of sensitive surface best suited for obtaining perfect pictures; for it has been found that the plates are more liable to stains of the various kinds, known to photographers, under the circumstance of exposure to intense sun-light, than they could be if employed in taking ordinary pictures in the camera. Now that the photographic apparatus has been brought to a workable state, Mr. De la Rue and Mr. Carrington, joint Secretaries of the Astronomical Society, propose to devote their attention to the best means of registering and reducing the results obtained by the instrument."

The customary review of the recent progress of science having been omitted from the annual address by the president, the deficiency was supplied, in part, by addresses from the presiding officers of the sections, on assuming their respective chairs.

Prof. Owen, in assuming the chair of the section on Zoology, etc., noticed the progress of Natural Science in Australia and the United States, as follows:

"But it is in the younger countries where we see an advance more evident. Australia and Van Diemen's Land, now that wealth permits time and luxury, have attended to science, and in most of the journals of those countries we have original observers, and by-and-by we shall have the results of the study of the remarkable productions of these lands made where they live and grow. New Zealand also has its scientific journal. It is, however, in the New World where the greatest activity at present prevails. She has already, with credit to herself, sent out scientific expeditions of a general character, and those of Wilkes and Rae and Kane are well known, and huge works have sprung from each. But the boundings of territory now claimed by the American people have given rise to surveys and exploratory expeditions at home, and these are proceeding in all directions to fix the boundary lines, and the best railway routes to the Pacific. ralists and draftsmen accompany each expedition, the results of which are published in reports to Congress, in which they are assisted by the Smithsonian Institution of Washington.. But the work of the greatest magnitude and importance to America is, Contributions to the Natural History of the United States,' by Agassiz, advertised to be completed in ten large volumes. Two volumes for the first year,

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on the Testudinata or Tortoises, have been published, illustrated by thirty-four plates. An important part of these volumes is an introductory essay, which has been re-published separately in an 8vo volume. Louis Agassiz's Essay on Classification,' embraces the whole range of the subject, which he treats in a wider and more comprehensible and less mechanical manner than has hitherto been done. But while I thus praise the work, and the manner in which it is treated, and agree with a great many of the positions he has taken up, I must warn its readers that some subjects are treated in a way Prof. Agassiz will not be able to maintain; and that, to those who are unable or unwilling to think for themselves, the author's reputation will prove a guarantee not altogether to be trusted. It must be studied with great care and great caution. Nevertheless, I look upon it as the remarkable book of the year. There is another work, upon a similar subject, advertised, from which we may expect some curious reasonings, On the Origin of Species and Varieties,' by Charles Darwin."

At the opening of the Geological section, Sir Charles Lyell reviewed the subject of the "Geological Age of Man," with special reference to the researches which have been recently brought before the public.

"No subject," he said, "has lately excited more curiosity and general interest among geologists and the public than the question of the antiquity of the human race, - whether or no we have sufficient evidence to prove the former coëxistence of Man with certain external mammalia, in caves, or in the superficial deposits commonly called drift,' or 'deluvium.' For the last quarter of a century, the occasional occurrence, in various parts of Europe, of the bones of man, or the works of his hands, in cave-breccias and stalactites, associated with the remains of the extinct hyæna, bear, elephant, or rhinoceros, have given rise to a suspicion that the date of man must be carried further back than we have heretofore imagined. On the other hand, extreme reluctance was naturally felt, on the part of scientific reasoners, to admit the validity of such evidence, seeing that so many caves have been inhabited by a succession of tenants, and have been selected by man as a place not only of domicile but of sepulture, while some caves have also served as the channels through which the waters of flooded rivers have flowed, so that the remains of living beings which have peopled the district at more than one era may have subsequently been mingled in such caverns, and confounded together in one and the same deposit. The facts, however, recently brought to light during the systematic investigation, as reported on by Falconer, of the Brixham Cave, must, I think, have prepared you to admit that skepticism in regard to the cave-evidence in favor of the antiquity of man, had previously been pushed to an extreme. from what I now consider was a legitimate deduction from

To

escape

the facts already accumulated, we were obliged to resort to hypotheses requiring great changes in the relative levels and drainage of valleys, and, in short, the whole physical geography of the respective regions where the caves are situated changes that would alone imply a remote antiquity for the human fossil remains, and make it probable that man was old enough to have coëxisted, at least, with the Siberian mammoth. But, in the course of the last fifteen years, another class of proofs have been advanced, in France, in confirmation of man's antiquity, into two of which I have personally examined in the course of the present summer, and to which I shall now briefly advert. First, so long ago as the year 1844, M. Aymard, an eminent palæontologist and antiquary, published an account of the discovery, in the volcanic district of Central France, of portions of two human skeletons the skulls, teeth, and bones - imbedded in a volcanic breccia, found in the mountain of Denise, in the environs of Le Puy en Velay,- a breccia anterior in date to one, at least, of the latest eruptions of that volcanic mountain. On the opposite side of the same hill, the remains of a large number of mammalia, most of them of extinct species, have been detected in tufaceous strata, believed, and I think correctly, to be of the same age. The authenticity of the human fossils was from the first disputed by several geologists, but admitted by the majority of those who visited Le Puy, and saw with their own eyes the original specimen now in the museum of that town. Among others, M. Pictet, so well known to you by his excellent work on Palæontology, declared, after his visit to the spot, his adhesion to the opinions previously expressed by Aymard. My friend Mr. Scrope, in the second edition of his Volcanoes of Central France, lately published, also adopted the same conclusion, although after accompanying me this year to Le Puy, he has seen • reason to modify his views. The result of our joint examination a result which, I believe, essentially coincides with that arrived at by MM. Hebert and Lartet, names well known to science, who have also this year gone into this inquiry on the spot - may thus be stated. We are by no means prepared to maintain that the specimen in the museum at Le Puy.— which, unfortunately, was never seen in situ by any scientific observer-is a fabrication. On the contrary, we inclineto believe that the human fossils in this, and some other specimens from the same hill, were really imbedded by natural causes in their present matrix. But the rock in which they are entombed consists of two parts, one of which is a compact, and, for the most part, thinly laminated stone, into which none of the human bones penetrate; the other, containing the bones, is a lighter and much more porous stone, without lamination, to which we could find nothing similar in the mountain of Denise, although both M. Hebert and I made several excavations on the alleged site of the fossils. M. Hebert, therefore, suggested to me that this more porous stone, which resembles in color

and mineral composition, though not in structure, parts of the genuine old breccia of Denise, may be made up of the older rock, broken up, and afterwards re-deposited, — or, as the French say, remané, and therefore of much newer date; an hypothesis which well deserves consideration; but I feel that we are, at present, so ignorant of the precise circumstances and position under which these celebrated human fossils were found, that I ought not to waste time in speculating on their probable mode of interment, but simply state that, in my opinion, they afford no demonstration of Man having witnessed the last volcanic eruptions of Central France. The skulls, according to the judgment of most competent osteologists who have yet seen them, do not seem to depart in a marked manner from the modern European, or Caucasian, type, and the human bones are in a fresher state than those of the Elephas meridionalis and other quadrupeds found in any breccia of Denise which can be referred to the period even of the latest volcanic eruptions. But, while I have thus failed to obtain satisfactory evidence in favor of the remote origin assigned to the human fossils of Le Puy, I am fully prepared to corroborate the conclusions which have been recently laid before the Royal Society by Mr. Prestwich, in regard to the age of the flint implements associated in undisturbed gravel, in the North of France, with the bones of elephants at Abbeville and Amiens. These were first noticed at Abbeville, and their true geological position assigned to them by M. Boucher de Perthes, in 1849, in his 'Antiquités Celtiques,' while those of Amiens were afterwards described in 1855, by the late Dr. Rigollot. For a clear statement of the facts, I may refer you to the abstract of Mr. Prestwich's Memoir, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society for 1859, and have only to add that I have myself obtained abundance of Flint Implements (some of which are laid upon the table) during a short visit to Amiens and Abbeville. Two of the worked flints of Amiens were discovered in the gravel-pits of St. Acheul- one at the depth of ten, and the other of seventeen feet below the surface, at the time of my visit; and M. Georges Pouchet, of Rouen, author of a work on the Races of Man, who has since visited the spot, has extracted with his own hands one of these implements, as Messrs. Prestwich and Flower had done before him. The stratified gravel resting immediately on the chalk in which these rudely fashioned instruments are buried, belongs to the post-pliocene period, all the freshwater and land shells which accompany them being of existing species. The great number of the fossil instruments, which have been likened to hatchets, spear-heads, and wedges, is truly wonderful. More than a thousand of them have already been met with, in the last ten years, in the valley of the Somme, in an area fifteen miles in length. I infer that a tribe of savages, to whom the use of iron was unknown, made a long sojourn in this region; and I am reminded of a large Indian mound, which I saw in St. Simond's Island, in