THIS Society held its forty-first annual general meeting in the theatre of the Institution of Civil Engineers on Thursday and Friday of last week. After the Annual Report had been presented and accepted, Mr. John Richards' paper “On Irrigating Machinery on the Pacific Coast” was read and discussed. The need of irrigation in this district arises from three causes: the lack of rain, which ceases altogether along the coast in summer-time; the want of surface-water; and the free percolation into the sandy soil beneath. The whole of the land in the country, excepting the low-lying sedimentary plains near the mouths of the rivers, and around the Bay of San Francisco, where water reaches the surface by capillary saturation, requires irrigation. Nearly all the land upon which water can be led, either by training small mountain streams, or by leading long canals from the rivers, has been occupied, so that the only remaining resource for getting water will be by lifting it from the rivers or the gravel strata by machinery. The paper is descriptive of the various pumps and hydraulic rams employed, and was illustrated by means of thirty-five figures.