390.-Do you think it a disadvantage to a singer that he should be able to play the pianoforte ?-Oh, no. 391. Or that he should understand the principles of 376. Supposing you failed in making Parliament as harmony?-Certainly not. But if a pupil enters for the enthusiastic as yourself on this subject, would you violin, I do not see the advantage of his being compelle abandon all efforts to improve the existing institution?-to learn the pianoforte or the bassoon to eke out th I have a great notion that what was said during the dis-orchestra. cussion upon my paper here is true, that it is no use to mend an old coat.

404. But there must be a governing body of the Academy of some sort. What in your opinion should be the action of the governing body? Should the government be in one person or in a committee?- A small committee consisting of as few members as possible.

405. About the same number as there are trustees of the National Gallery ?-Something of that kind, perhaps; as limited as possible.

406. Would you consider it beyond human power to obtain a new charter for the Academy?-There is no telling what human power could do.

407. You would not object to the title of "Royal Academy of Music ?"-Surely not.

round the standard which they carried so far into the fields of knowledge. And when, on other occasions, we meet in quiet colleges and academic halls, how gladly welcome is the union of fresh discoveries and new inven

tions with the solid and venerable truths which are there treasured and taught. Long may such unions last-the fair alliance of cultivated thought and practical skillfor by it labour is dignified and science fertilised, and the condition of human society exalted!

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Through this happy union of science and art, the young life of the British Association-one-third of a century-has been illustrated by discoveries and enriched by useful inventions in a degree never surpassed. How else could we have gained that knowledge of the laws of nature which has added to the working strength of a thousand millions of men the mightier power of steam, extracted from the buried ruins of primeval forests their treasured elements of heat and light and colour, and brought under the control of the human finger, and converted into a messenger of man's gentlest thoughts the dangerous mystery of the lightning."

408. Is it your opinion that there should be a head and responsible professor in each department? Do you think, for instance, there should be a head singing master?-I think that the professors should be responsible for their pupils till their education is finished; and that when the pupils go to receive their lessons they ought always to find the professors who undertake to teach them there, and that no change from caprice should be allowed on one side or the other.-I think the pupils The President discussed the question of the velocity of should not be allowed to evade lessons by taking en-light, and explained why" the distance of the earth from gagements elsewhere.—I think there should be perfect the sun must be reduced from above ninety-five to less order and system in the instruction, and the lessons than ninety-three millions of miles, and by this scale the should be given with the greatest regularity; and there other space-measures of the solar system, excepting the should be a person in general authority resident in the diameter of the earth and the distance and diameter of Academy to whom appeal could be made both by pro- the moon, would be corrected." fessors and students.

I cannot permit this revised report of my evidence to go out to the public without respectfully stating that I met the committee without the slightest idea of being put under examination, and that while I have not altered or modified a single opinion which I felt it my duty to offer, on the spur of the moment merely confining myself to the correction and removal of verbiage, and to an addition or two made for the sake of distinctness -I feel the incompleteness of my testimony on many points which I consider of importance. HENRY F. CHORLEY.

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Spectral analysis, that new and powerful instrument of chemical research for which we are indebted to Kirchhoff, has been taught by our countrymen to scrutinise not only planets and stars, but even to reveal the constitution of the nebula, those mysterious masses out of which it has been thought new suns and planets might be evolved. The latest results of spectral analysis of stars and nebula by Mr. Huggins and Professor W. A. Miller, show that the nebula are indeed found to have in some instances stellar points, but they are not stars; the whole resembles an enormous mass of luminous gas, with an interrupted spectrum of three lines, probably agreeing with nitrogen, hydrogen, and a substance at present unknown. Stars tested by the same accurate hands are found to have a constitution like that of our own sun, and, like it, to show the presence of several terrestrial elements-as sodium, magnesium, iron, and very often hydrogen.

"To aid researches into the condition of celestial bodies,

BRITISH ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCE- the new powers of light, discovered by Niepce, Daguerre,

MENT OF SCIENCE.
BIRMINGHAM, 1865.

The thirty-fifth meeting of the British Association commenced on Wednesday, the 6th instant, under the presidency of John Phillips, M.A., F.R.S., Professor of Geology in the University of Oxford.

A meeting of the General Committee was held at one o'clock, Sir Charles Lyell (the retiring President) in the chair. The financial report showed that the receipts of the Association for the past year were £3,831, and that there was an available balance of £759 in the treasurer's hands. A long discussion took place on a motion made by Dr. Hunt, and seconded by Sir Edward Belcher, to the effect that a separate section be formed, to be devoted to the Science of Anthropology. The motion was ultimately negatived.

At the general meeting in the evening the President delivered the opening address, of which the following are some of the most interesting portions:

"Assembled for the third time in this busy centre of industrious England, amid the roar of engines and the clang of hammers, where the strongest powers of nature are trained to work in the fairy chains of art, how softly falls upon the ear the accent of science, the friend of that art and the guide of that industry! Here, where Priestley analysed the air, and Watt obtained the mastery over steam, it well becomes the students of nature to gather

and Talbot have been employed by Bond, Draper, De la
Rue, and other astronomers. To our countryman, in par-
ticular, belongs the honour of successful experiments on
the rose-coloured flames which extend from certain points
of the sun's border during an eclipse; as well as of "valu-
able contributions through the same agency to that
enlarged survey of the physical aspect of the moon,
which, since 1852, the Association has striven to pro-
mote."
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"As we ascend above the earth, heat, moisture, and magnetic force decrease, the velocity of wind augments, and the proportion of oxygen and nitrogen remains the The decrease of heat as we rise into the air is no same. new subject of inquiry, nor have the views respecting it been very limited or very accordant. Leslie considered it mathematically in relation to pressure; Humboldt gave the result of a large inquiry at points on the earth's surface, unequally elevated above the sea; and finally, Mr. Glaisher and Mr. Coxwell, during many balloon ascents to the zones of life-destroying cold, far above our mountain tops, have obtained innumerable data, in all seasons of the year, through a vast range of vertical height. The result is to show much more rapid decrease near the earth, much slower decrease at greater elevations. The proportion of carbonic acid gas in the atmosphere at great heights is not yet ascertained."

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"Researches of every kind have so enriched meteorology since our early friend, Professor J. Forbes, printed his suggestive reports on that subject: and so great have been the benefits conferred on it by the electric telegraph, that at this moment in M. Leverrier's observatory at Paris, and the office so lately presided over by Admiral Fitzroy in London, the messages are arriving from all parts of Europe to declare the present weather, and furnish grounds for reasonable expectation of the next probable change. The gentle spirit which employed this knowledge in the cause of humanity has passed away, leaving an example of unselfish devotion in a work which must not fail through any lack of energy on the part of this Association, the Royal Society, or the Government."

Having touched on various other subjects, the President passed on to the consideration of the present state of geological science. On the question of the antiquity of organic life on the earth, he said :—

"Was the earth ever uninhabited, after it became a globe turning on its axis and revolving round the sun? Was there ever a period since land and sea were separated -a period which we can trace-when the land was not shaded by plants, the ocean not alive with animals? The answer, as it comes to us from the latest observation, declares that in the lowest deposits of the most ancient seas in the stratified crust of the globe, the monuments of life remain. They extend to the earliest sediments of water, now in part so changed as to appear like the products of fire. What life? Only the simpler and less specially organised fabrics have as yet rewarded research among these old Laurentian rocks-only the aggregated structures of Foraminifera have been found in what, for the present at least, must be accepted as the first deposits of the oldest sea.

"Then step by step we are guided through the old Cambrian and Silurian systems, rich in Trilobites and Brachiopoda, the delights of Salter and Davidson; with Agassiz and Miller and Egerton we read the history of the strange old fishes of the Devonian rocks; Brongniart, and Göppert, and Dawson, and Binney, and Hooker unveil the mystery of the mighty forests now converted to coal; Mantell and Owen and Huxley restore for us the giant reptiles of the Lias, the Oolite, and the Wealden; Edwards and Wright almost revive the beauteous corals and echinodermata; which with all the preceding tribes have come and gone before the dawn of the later periods, when fragments of mammoths and hippopotami were buried in caves and river sediments to reward the researches of Cuvier and Buckland, Prestwich and Christy, Lartet

and Falconer.

"And what is the latest term in this long series of successive existence? Surely the monuments of everadvancing art-the temples whose origin is in caverns of the rocks; the cities which have taken the place of holes in the ground, or heaps of stones and timber in a lake; the ships which have outgrown the canoe, as that was modelled from the floating trunk of a tree, are sufficient proof of the late arrival of man upon the earth, after it had undergone many changes and had become adapted to his physical, intellectual, and moral nature. Compared with the periods which elapsed in the accomplishment of these changes, how short is the date of those yet standing monoliths, cromlechs, and circles of unhewn stone which are the oldest of human structures raised in Western Europe, or of those more regular fabrics which attest the early importance of the monarchs and people of Egypt, Assyria, and some parts of America! Yet tried by monu. ments of natural events which happened within the age of man, the human family is old enough in Western Europe to have been sheltered by caverns in the rocks, while herds of reindeer roamed in Southern France, and bears and hyænas were denizens of the South of England. More than this, remains of the rudest human art ever seen are certainly found buried with and are thought to belong to races who lived contemporaneously with the mammoth

and rhinoceros, and experienced the cold of a Gallic or British winter, from which the woolly covering of the wild animals was a fitting protection."

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"Various questions of romantic interest in the study of the distribution and languages of the family of man are part of a large circle of the inquiry which finds sympathy in several of our sections, especially those devoted to Zoology, Physiology, and Ethnology. Let us not expect or desire for them a very quick, or, at present, a very definite settlement. Deep shadows have gathered over all the earlier ages of mankind, which perhaps still longer periods of time may not avail to remove."

After further enlarging on the question of the antiquity of man, the President passed to the consideration of the analogy existing among all parts of the animal kingdom, and in a general sense among all the forms of life, which had become more and more the subject of special study. "Whether what we call species are so many original creations or derivations from a few types or one type, is discussed at length in the elegant treatise of Darwin,* himself a naturalist of eminent rank. It had been often discussed before. Nor will any one think lightly of such inquiries, who remembers the essay of Linnæus," De Telluris orbis incremento," or the investigations of Brown, Pritchard, Forbes, Agassiz, and Hooker regarding the local origin of various species, genera, and families of plants and animals, both on the land and in the sea. Still less will he be disposed to undervalue its importance. when he reflects on the many successive races of living forms more or less resembling our existing quadrupeds, reptiles, fishes, and mollusca, which appear to have occupied definite and different parts of the depths of ancient time.

Is the living elephant of Ceylon the lineal descendant of that mammoth which roamed over Siberia and Europe, and North America, or of one of those sub-Himalayan tribes which Dr. Falconer has made known, or was it a species dwelling only in circumpolar regions? Can our domestic cattle, horses, and dogs, our beasts of chace and our beasts of prey, be traced back to their source in older types, contemporaries of the urus, megaceros, and hyæna on the plains of Europe? If so, what range of variation in structure does it indicate? if not so, by what characters are the living races separated from those of earlier date?

Specific questions of this kind must be answered, before the general proposition, that the forms of life are indefinitely variable with time and circumstance, can be even examined by the light of adequate evidence. That such evidence will be gathered and rightly interpreted, I

for one neither doubt nor fear.

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"How important, in the view of this and many other questions, is that never-tiring spirit of geographical and maritime discovery, to which through four hundred years Europe has sent her noblest sons and her most famous expeditions; sent them, alas! too often to an early grave. Alas! for Franklin, who carried the magnetic flag into the iey sea from which he had already brought trophies Alas! for Speke, who came home with to science! honour from the head waters of the Nile! Forgotten they can never be, whenever on occasions like this, we mourn the absence of our bravest and our best; praise, never-ending praise be theirs, while men retain the generous impulse which prompts them to enterprises worthy of their country and beneficial to mankind."

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"Waves-their origin, the mechanism of their motion, their velocity, their elevation, the resistance they offer to vessels of given form, these subjects have been firmly kept in view by the Association, since first Professor Challis reported on the mathematical problems they suggest, and Sir J. Robinson and Mr. Scott Russell undertook to study them experimentally. Out of this inquiry has

* On the Origin of Species, 1859.

come a better knowledge of the forms which ought to be given to the lines' of ships, followed by swifter passages across the sea, both by sailing vessels and steamers, of larger size and greater lengths than were ever tried before."

After referring to the labours of the British Association in various other directions, particularly in the promotion of meteorological science, the President went on to say :"When we enter the domain of practical art, and apply scientific methods to test a great process of manufacture, we do not fail of success; because we are able to join in united exertion the laborious cultivators of science and the scientific employers of labour.

"Am I asked to give an example? Let it be iron, the one substance by the possession of which, by the true knowledge and right use of which, more than by any other thing, our national greatness is supported. What are the ores of iron-what the peculiarities and improvements of the smelting processes-what the quality of the iron-its chemical composition-its strength in columns and girders as cast-iron; in rails and boiler plate, in tubes, and chains, as wrought iron-what are the best forms in which to employ it, the best methods of preserving it from decay;-these and many other questions are answered by special reports in our volumes, bearing the names of Barlow, Mallet, Porter, Fairbairn, Bunsen, Playfair, Percy, Budd, Hodgkinson, Thomson; and very numerous other communications from Lucas, Fairbairn, Cooper, Nicholson, Price, Crane, Hartley, Davy, Mushet, Hawkes, Penny, Scoresby, Dawes, Calvert, Clark, Cox, Hodgkinson, May, Schaf haeutl, Johnston, Clay, and Bontigny. Beyond a question, a reader of such of these valuable documents as relate to the strength of iron, in its various forms, would be far better informed of the right course to be followed in experiments on armourplated ships and forts to resist assault, and in the construction of ordnance to attack them, than he is likely to be from merely witnessing a thousand trials of the cannon against the target. Anyone who remembers what the iron furnace was forty years ago, and knows its present power of work; or who contrasts the rolling mills and hammers of other days with the beautitul machines, which now, with the gentlest motion but irresistible force, compel the strong metal to take up the most delicately moulded form; will acknowledge, that within the period since the British Association began to set itself to the task of reconciling the separated powers of Theory and Experience, there has been a total change in the aspect of each, to the great advantage of both."

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The President concluded as follows:

"Such, gentlemen, are some of the thoughts which fill the minds of those who, like our Brewster, and Harcourt, and Forbes, and Murchison, and Daubeny, stood, anxious but hopeful, by the cradle of this British Association; and who now meet to judge of its strength and measure its progress. When, more than thirty years ago, this Parliament of Science came into being, its first child-language was employed to ask questions of Nature; now, in riper years, it founds on the answers received further and more definite inquiries directed to the same prolific source of useful knowledge. Of researches in science completed, in progress, or in beginning, each of our annual volumes contains some three hundred or more passing notices, or full and permanent records. This digest and monument of our labours is indeed in some respects incomplete, since it does not always contain the narrative or the result of undertakings which we started, or fostered, or sustained; and I own to having experienced on this account once or twice a feeling of regret. But the regret was soon lost in the gratification of knowing that other and equally beneficial channels of publication had been found, and that by these examples it was proved how truly the association kept to the real purpose of its foundation, the advancement of science,' and how heartily it rejoiced in this advancement without looking too closely to its own share

in the triumph. Here, indeed, is the stronghold of the British Association. Wherever and by whatever means sound learning and useful knowledge are advanced, there to us are friends. Whoever is privileged to step beyond his fellows on the road of scientific discovery, will receive our applause, and, if need be, our help. Welcoming and joining in the labour of all, we shall keep our place among those who clear the roads and remove the obstacles from the paths of science; and whatever be our own success in the rich fields which lie betore us, however little we may now know, we shall prove that in this our day we knew at least the value of knowledge, and joined hearts and hands in the endeavour to promote it."

ON THE COMMERCIAL USE OF FLOWERS.
BY EUGENE RIMMEL.

(Author of the "Book of Perfumes," &c.)
(Continued from page 649.)

The number of flowers used for perfumery purposes has hitherto been limited to seven, viz., rose, jasmin, orange, violet, jonquil, tuberose, and cassie. The rose used is the hundred-leaved rose (Rosa centifolia), the jasmine is the Jasminum grandiflorum, the orange is the bitter orange (Citrus bigaradia), and the violet the Viola odorata, or double parma violet.

Out of those flowers four only are distilled and yield essential oils, viz., rose, orange, jasmine, and cassie. Rose gives the far-famed otto, which is principally made in Turkey, near Adrianople. Orange flowers produce what is called neroly, a name derived from nero olio, dark oil, and not, as some people have imagined, from its having been discovered in the time of Nero. for the Romans were totally ignorant of the art of distillation. Jasmine and cassie are only distilled, to my knowledge, in Northern Africa (Algeria and Tunis) and in India, European flowers not possessing a sufficiently intense fragrance.

The aroma of the other flowers is extracted by means