The following paper was read :—

I. "Goethe as a Scientist, and his Relation to the Present Position of Evolution and the Doctrine of the Descent of Man." By John Lyell, M.D. (See Transactions, Vol. IV., Part I., page 43.)

7th April, 1904.

HENRY COATES, F.R.S.E., President, in the Chair.

The President delivered the following Address :

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN,-I think my first duty this evening is to thank you for having again elected me your President,-now for the thirteenth time in succession. I find, on looking back over the records of the Society, that the Presidential Chair has not before been occupied so long in one consecutive period, although the late Dr. Buchanan White was President also for thirteen years altogether, in two periods of five and eight years respectively. The longest period covered by any office-bearer in the history of the Society is that of the present Librarian, Mr. James Coates, who has been in office for twenty-two years. Our present Secretary, Mr. S. T. Ellison, comes next, with a record of nineteen years' service.

PROGRESS OF THE SOCIETY.

My second duty is to congratulate the Society very heartily on the exceedingly satisfactory nature of the Annual Reports which were presented at our last meeting. Every department of our organisation shows signs of marked vitality. The Secretary's Report records the highest ordinary and the highest total membership yet attained. The Treasurer's statement shows an increased balance, in spite of abnormal expenditure for printing and furnishing. The Librarian reports the issue of the new Catalogue, containing the names of 1,075 works, or 2,454 volumes, all bearing more or less directly on natural history subjects, and also tells us of increased interest being taken in the Library on the part of students. The Children's Essay Competition also shows a record, both as regards numbers, and in the level of excellence displayed in the essays.

These results are particularly encouraging at the present moment, because I know it was feared by many that the handing over of the Museum to the town, a little more than a year ago, would tend to lessen the interest of the members in the remaining departments of the Society's work, and would inevitably lead to a decrease in the membership. Exactly the opposite, however, has proved to be the case. For this very gratifying result, I think you will agree with me that we are largely indebted to the enthusiasm and energy of the Town's Curator, who is now also our Honorary Curator, and to the way in which he has kept the Museum and the Society in close touch with each other. A further step in the same direction has quite recently been taken by the Museum Joint Committee, in the

appointment of Honorary Curators, from amongst the specialists in the Society, to assist Mr. Rodger in the work of the several departments.

But the prosperity of the past session was also, no doubt, partly due to the three very successful gatherings which took place in our City during the course of the year, on the invitation of the Societynamely, the Photographic Convention of the United Kingdom, in July; the Annual Meeting of the Cryptogamic Society of Scotland, in September; and the first Annual Gathering of the Scottish Photographic Federation, in February of the present year. In connection with the first of these, it is interesting to note that the Perth meeting established a record in the history of the Convention, in regard to attendance, entertainments, scenery, and weather. In regard to the second, we may recall the fact that the last occasion on which the Cryptogamic Society visited Perth was in September, 1875, when the first Annual Conference took place, under the presidency of the late Sir Thomas Moncreiffe, Bart., and with the late Dr. Buchanan White as the Secretary and indefatigable organiser. On that occasion a Fungus Show was held in the City Hall, when probably the greatest collection of Cryptogamic plants was brought together that has ever been seen in this country. Regarding the last of the three organisations which did us the honour to pay us a visit last session, it is only necessary to say that the meeting of the Federation was marked by the holding of the first Scottish National Photographic Salon, when some work of a very high order of merit, from all parts of Scotland, and of great educational value, was displayed in the Picture Gallery of the Sandeman Library.

SEASONAL NOTES.

As the rainfall during 1903 was altogether abnormal, it may be of interest to record what the figures for this district actually were. The following table shows the total amount registered at Pitcullen in each month during the year, the heaviest fall on any one day of 24 hours, and the number of days on which rain fell :

:

If we divide the year into four quarters of three months each, we shall find that during the first quarter 13.57 inches of rain fell; during the second quarter, 3.92 inches; during the third quarter, 11.7 inches; and during the fourth quarter, 10.77 inches.

From these tables it will be seen that although October was, on the whole, the wettest month of the year, yet January, February, and March formed the wettest quarter, while July had the largest number of wet days, and February had the heaviest day of rain in the year. The total rainfall for the two preceding years was as follows::

1901-25.96 inches, fell on 106 days.
1902-28.12 inches, fell on 91 days.

The rainfull of 1903, therefore, shows an increase of 42 per cent. over the rainfall of 1902, and an increase of 54 per cent. over the rainfall of 1901.

It is interesting to note, as showing the irregularity in the distribution of the rainfall throughout the year, that on 8th February more rain fell than during the whole of April or May, and that the rainfall during October was more than a half greater than the rainfall during the second quarter of the year.

The rainfall during the first three months of the present year has been as follows:

I come, in the next place, to speak of last year's Essay Competition, and this I shall do in rather greater detail than usual, in order to take notice of certain points of interest which were raised in some of the essays.

Last year, for the first time, a geological subject was chosen, namely, "The part which Water has played in the breaking down and building up of the Rocks of Perthshire," and most of the essayists seemed to have grasped the central idea of the function of water as a geological agent with wonderful clearness. In doing so, they have laid the foundations for a knowledge of the processes which have gone to the fashioning of the earth's crust, which should serve them in good stead if they care to follow the subject a little deeper in after years. A few years ago, before the teaching of Nature Knowledge became part of our school curriculum, it is impossible to imagine that 186 children, between the ages of 11 and 16, in our County, could have shown the same intelligent interest in what, to the lay mind, has generally been looked upon as an abstruse and uninteresting subject. Yet the essays which were sent in prove,

I think, that it is a subject which can be made not only educationally useful but even attractive to children of elementary school age.

With regard to the general form and structure of the essays, these are, as a rule, surprisingly good, and the argument is generally worked out in logical sequence, with frequent local illustration. The processes of disintegration, denudation, and deposition are carefully differentiated from each other, and the forms under which water acts,-sub-aerial, fluviatile, marine, and glacial,-are each described in turn. Of course, misconceptions have in some cases arisen, but these are by no means of frequent occurrence. One boy, 13 years of age, living at Kinfauns, grasping the initial idea that Change is the keynote in the evolution of the earth's crust, begins his essay as follows:

"The unchanging hills' is a metaphor so familiar to us that it is difficult at first to conceive hills and mountains capable of change. When we look at running water, be the volume large or small, we cannot fail to notice many changes going on. Yet the mountains of Perthshire were carved out and built up, in many cases, by as gradual a process as we see going on in a little stream."

A girl, 12 years of age, expresses the same idea, in closing her essay, by quoting the following well-known but most appropriate lines from Tennyson's "In Memoriam " :

"The hills are shadows, and they flow

From form to form, and nothing stands;
They melt like mists, the solid lands,
Like clouds they shape themselves and go."

A girl of 11, living in Kinnoull, expresses the idea of the ceaseless activity of Nature most beautifully in the following words :

"If you listen to a stream in flood you will hear that pebbles are rattling against the bottom, as they are swept along in the water; this is more easily imagined at the seaside, where every wave that breaks on the shore may be seen to pick up pebbles from the beach and to hurl them forward, and drag them back again."

One girl, of 12 years of age, adopts the itinerary form of composition, and describes the geological phenomena witnessed in the course of an imaginary cycling tour, as follows:

"In a cycle run from Perth to Stirling, the rider has a gentle but steady climb from the city to Crossgates, a rise from sea-level to a height of nearly 500 feet in a distance of five miles. From many places after passing Cherrybank there is to be seen a wide district gently falling from the rounded rising grounds of Kinnoull and Murrayshall on the East to those near Glen Almond on the West. Within this stretch of country can be had building stone, whinstone, and slates

for roofing houses. . . . Perth, therefore, seems a city placed
in a large flood plain, with intervening ridges or terraces
showing the action of the water."

Another girl, 14 years of age, also adopts an imaginative method of description with excellent effect, tracing the history of a pebble from its parent rock in the hillside to the spot by the roadside where it crumbles again into primordial dust at the touch of the erosive forces of the air. The following is the passage: :

"While I was walking along a country road the other day, I saw a small stone which, when it was touched, crumbled away into small pieces, some of it even fell into powder, which became (as it fell) the same as the earth upon which it stood. As I stood and looked at this crumbling stone, it suddenly flashed through my mind that even this stone, which is not the least of God's creations, had its own story to tell. To find where the stone came from, we would have to follow the course of the river back to where the stone was torn from its parent rock, which was possibly on a large cliff up in some Highland glen. After resting there for some time, it had been roughly torn away by the torrent, and knocked about, and bits broken off it as the surging, foaming masses of water rolled and tumbled down the mountain side, over sharp precipices, carrying all before it. . . . But to return to the stone which was lying by the roadside. After being torn from its home on the mother rock and tumbled down by the torrent, it had lain for some little time apart from the heap of debris; but when a sudden flood came, it had been swept into the valley track of the river, and there all the sharp edges were broken off, and it was all smoothed and rounded as it was rubbed among other stones whilst being driven along the bed of the river. Soon, however, it was cast upon a bank, where it lay for some time, but then the great invisible workers of the air set to work to break it down, by dissolving the chemical substance which bound the particles together."

Coming now to the more detailed aspects of the subject, we find, first, sub aerial disintegration exemplified by a girl of 13, living at Ballinluig, as follows:

"In the churchyards of Logierait and Dowally, the inscriptions on the tombstones are slowly losing their legibility. There are at least five marble gravestones in Logierait that have their inscriptions very difficult to read. Indeed their surfaces are gradually crumbling into a fine sand. Even the south-east part of the monument that was erected to the Duke of Atholl in 1865 is already showing signs of wear."

The writer has here evidently grasped the importance of giving precise dates as a measure of geological action. The same essayist