OTAGO INSTITUTE.

Otago Witness, Issue 2424, 30 August 1900, Page 10

OTAGO INSTITUTE.

The monthly meeting of the Otago Institute! was held at the Museum on the 14th. Mr B: ; Melland (president) -occupied the chair, and there was a representative gathering of mem.« bers. Professor Benham opened the business olj the evening by giving particulars of- a young whale which had been caught near the OtagdJ Heads by some fishermen, was towed up t6 Dunedin, and secured for the Museum. The whale was 10ft long. As would be readily, recognised, it was not often that a freshlycaught whale was available for dissection and examination. This specimen was a rorqual, and one of its character ietics was a mass of furrows in the skin covering the throat anil chest, which distinguished it from the ordinary whalebone whale. It was not at all certaini what these furrows were for. The rorqual fed on fish, and not on the minute organisms that served for the food of the ordinary, whale. It had been suggested that these furrows enabled it to detect the proximity of fish by the motion of the water", but he did not know that there was any evidence to swpport this view. It seemed more likely that;' they related "to the distension of the throat. The rorqual was practically of no commercial value, and did not yield" an abundance of blubber. Professor Benham laid on the table his paper on " The Marine Annelids of. the Nbw, Zealand Shores." In doing co lie said it wag rather peculiar that although most groups oE our native animals had been studied more or less, the marine annelids had been entirely neglected. Captain Hutton, who studied! every group of the animal kingdom, left themi reierely alone. The only description of tho marine annelids dated back as far as 1860. Since then only one new species had been de« scribed in the Transactions of the institvite. That was described by Mr Kirk in 1878. The speaker had gathered together a considerable amount of material, some of which he found in^the Museum collected by Captain Hutton, others by Professor Parker, and a good quantity he had collected himself from time to time. He hoped some day to publish an account of his work. •Mr T. D. Pearce gave an interesting and philosophical account of "The Knowledge of Animals in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries." He showed how slavishly the doctrines of Pliny and Aristotle were adlieredi to till Bacon arose, and that if Bacon made no discoveries, he, at any rate, impressed upon. the coming scientific men the absolute necessity of observation in drawing their conclusions. Having done thit, Mr Pearce gave several very interesting examples of the curious theories held by scientific men in the period referred to regarding animals. The paper was listened to with close attention, and in the course of soms remarks, during which he referred to the address in terms of praise, Air A. Wilson expressed a hope that Mr Pearce would bring the subject up to the present time at a future meeting of the institute.