London. Royal Microscopical Society, June 21.—Prof. F. J. Cheshire, president, in the chair.—A. Chaston Chapman: The use of the microscope in the brewing industry. The use of the microscope for research and control purposes has been directly responsible for greater technical advances and, indirectly, for more far-reaching discoveries in brewing than in any other industry. The larger breweries have laboratories in which both chemical and biological tests are carried Out and much time is devoted to the examination of yeast, to the forcing of beers as a test of stability, to the testing of the efficiency of the air-filters, etc. The successful conduct of brewing operations depends almost entirely on such control work. The introduction of the microscope into the brewery as the result, chiefly, of Pasteur's investigations, has been responsible for the replacement of empirical methods by processes based on scientific knowledge.—J. Strachan: The microscope in paper-making. The microscope was introduced into the industry by amateur microscopists more than a century ago, and during the past twenty-five years, which have witnessed the application of exact scientific methods to paper-making, the technologist found the microscope already in common use. The microscope is used in the paper-mill chiefly for the analysis of paper and of its raw materials and in controlling the blending and preparation of these substances. It has also been applied to the beating process, which is largely a matter of colloid physics, and to sizing, dyeing, impurities in air and water, the valuation of new raw materials, etc. In spite of recent research work, which indicates that the cellulose basis of plants is of a uniform chemical composition, and that X-ray spectrographs methods have proved this substance to be of definite crystalline character, the constitution of cellulose remains unsettled. No important work had been done on its refractive index (about 1.555). Microscopic work on this matter and the application of the polariscope and ultra-microscope would probably yield important evidence.