Series Of Memoirs Research Articles

Charles Sainte-Claire Deville

M. CHARLES SAINTE-CLAIRE DEVILLE, the distinguished geologist and meteorologist, and brother of M. Henri Sainte-Claire Deville, the well-known chemist, was born of French parents in 1814, at St. Thomas, in the West Indies. At the age of 19 he was enrolled a pupil of the School of Mines, in Paris, and after acourse of study there undertook, at hisown expense, a scientific expedition extending from 1839 to 1843, to the Antilles, Teneriffe, and Cape Verd Islands. He spent upwards of a year investigating the geology of Guada-loupe, and wrote a detailed account of the terrible earthquake which laid waste that island in 1843. The results of this expedition he published in two series of memoirs, the one appearing from 1856 to 1864, on the geology of the Antilles, Teneriffe, and Cape Verd Islands, and the other from 1861 to 1864, principally on the meteorology of the Antilles. He was sent by the Institute to Italy in 1855 to examine the great eruption of Vesuvius which occurred in that year. After attentively following and investigating the eruption through all its phases, he wrote a description of it in a series of letters addressed to M. Élie de Beaumont, which were published in the Comptes Rendus and the Moniteur during 1856. He also, in 1858, published an interesting account of the volcanic eruptions of Stromboli, in the Lipari Isles, and in later years, various papers on other volcanic eruptions. Several memoirs on different points in chemistry and physics were written by him about 1852, and for several years he filled with distinction the chair of geology in the College of France, formerly held by the illustrious Élie de Beaumont. On December 28, 1857, he was elected a member of the French Academy of Sciences in the place of Dufrenoy, and on August 13, 1862, was made an officer of the Legion of Honour.

Handbook of British Fungi

THE study of Fungi in this country has gradually attained an importance which is sufficiently indicated by the appearance of the present much-needed work, comprising as it does the characters of no less than 369 genera and above 2,800 species. The works of Bolton and Sower by at the latter end of the last and the commencement of the present century had laid a solid foundation for a study which, however, attracted but comparatively few students. There was, however, no genera treatise on fungi, in our own language, to which refereneel could be made, till 1821, when Gray's “Natural Arrangement of British Plants”gave the English botanist an opportunity of becoming acquainted with the labours of Nees von Esenbeck and other continental botanists, a very important share of the labour having been undertaken by Dr. J. E. Gray. A storm of opposition was raised against it because of its recommendation of a natural system, a recommendation which was then thought sufficient to justify an exclusion from well-deserved honours; a virulent attack was made in the British Critic, and the work fell in consequence, notwithstanding its merits, almost dead from the press. Some ten or fifteen years later, Sir W.J. Hooker undertook the completion of the English Flora, which had not gone beyond the higher Cryptogams, his own “Scottish Flora,” Greville's “Flora Edinensis,”and the “Scottish Cryptogamic Flora” having already done much for fungi, when the preparation of the part of the work relating to those plants was entrusted to the Rev. M. J. Berkeley, who had made an especial study, especially of the higher Fungi, and had already discovered the true structure of the hymenium, which had, however, long before been indicated under Agaricus comatus in the “Flora Danica.” From the time of the publication of his volume, continual accessions were made, especially by Mr. C.E. Broome and Mr. G.H.K. Thwaites, who has since done so much for this interesting tribe as well as in the higher orders of plants in Ceylon, and which have been incorporated in a series of memoirs in the “Magazine and Annals of Natural History,” either singly by Mr. Berkeley or jointly with Mr. Broome; nor must we omit Mr. Currey's very important contribution to the knowledge of our British Sphæriæ, of which it is scarcely possible to overrate the value as regards the characters of the fructification. It was then proposed by Messrs. Reeve to publish Outlines of British Fungology, confining, however, the description to those species which did not require much microscopic aid but adding a list of all the known species so far as the existing state of information went. Mr. Broome and Mr. Currey, with several others, have persistently carried on the study of these plants, the knowledge of which is every day advancing, and as Mr. Berkeley's work was confessedly imperfect, we have great reason to be thankful to Mr. Cooke for undertaking the very laborious, and, we fear, scarcely remunerative labours which he has so successfully accomplished. No student of Fungi can be without the two volumes, and they certainly ought to have a place in every botanical library of the slightest pretension. The work has throughout been conducted in the most conscientious way, and infinite pains have been taken to verify the obscurer species, in which the author has had the ready assistance of those botanists in this country who have paid most attention to these difficult plants.

Edouard René Claparède

Edouard René Claparède

1. On the Tertiary Volcanic Rocks of the British Islands

This paper was in continuation of the series of memoirs on the volcanic rocks of Scotland previously read by the author before the Society, and contained the first portion of the results of a survey of the western region, extending from the south of Antrim to the north of Syke. The districts more especially dwelt upon were the islands of Mull, Eigg, and Staffa. After alluding to the writings of previous geologists upon these tracts, more particularly to the discovery by the Duke of Argyll of tertiary leaves under basalt at Ardtun Head, in Mull, the author remarked that up to this time the great mass of volcanic rocks in the Western Islands has been usually regarded as of Oolitic age—an opinion in which he himself had shared. His object in the present communication was to show that as regards Mull and the adjoining islets this opinion was erroneous, that the enormous volcanic accumulations of these islands belonged in reality to the Miocene period, and that, in all likelihood, the long chain of basaltic masses, extending from the north of Ireland along the west coast of Scotland to the Faroe Islands, and beyond these to Iceland, was all erupted during the same wide interval in the Tertiary periods.

1. On the Theory of the Motion of Waves

The author proposes, in a series of memoirs on this subject, to investigate the different problems of Hydrodynamics, in a manner which shall carry theory along with experiment. From the great attention that has been of late years bestowed on the question of the motion of the tide-wave, any mathematical investigation which does not assume some process of approximation, is extremely interesting. Whilst the more recondite problems of motion derived from impulses, &c. have been carefully examined by the greatest philosophers of the present day, the more simple and easy ones have been left almost untouched.

2. On General Differentiation. Part I

“As early as the time of Leibnitz, it was suggested that a general form might be discovered for differential coefficients, somewhat in the same way as that which applies to expansions. Notwithstanding this suggestion, the difficulty of the subject appears to have deterred mathematicians from engaging in it, until a few years since M. Liouville published a series of memoirs, in which its principles are developed, and theorems deduced applicable to the solution of a variety of difficult and important problems. Amongst a mass of particular results, the generalization of each of which would probably give a distinct aspect to the science, M. Liouville appears to have selected that one which is the most readily applicable to practice, and which, at the same time, affords conclusions remarkably convincing of its completeness.

XXVI.—On the Theory of Waves. Part I

It is my intention to undertake a series of Memoirs on that branch of Hydrodynamics which treats of the transmission of reciprocating motion. It may appear superfluous at first, that any further investigation should be bestowed on the general problem, when it is remembered that two of the most able mathematicians of the present age, M. Poisson and M. Cauchy, have devoted so much of their talents and attention to the subject. Yet, when advances are rapidly making in our experimental knowledge, we generally find that the complex and apparently general results, deduced by those who have paid the greatest attention to the science as it presented itself to their view, are in reality only particular cases, when they have to be applied to experiments in their actual form. This circumstance detracts greatly from the value of almost all general investigations; and in this instance it does so in a remarkable degree. The prosecution of the research has been extended in one direction—the prosecution of experimental knowledge has taken another; and thus, in order to meet the challenge of experimenters to keep pace with them, it behoves the theorist frequently to return on his path, and cross over to the line of their march.