WELLINGTON PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY.

Wellington Independent, Volume XXVI, Issue 3332, 30 October 1871, Page 2

WELLINGTON PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY.

A meeting of this Society was held on Saturday evening. Messrs. J. Brogden and Reid were elected members. The Hon Mr Mantell was chosen electing member of the Board of Governors for the ensuing year. Mr Travers, chairman, called attention to a series of valuable publications that hud been presented by Professor Agassiz, and read the following extract from a letter addressed to Dr Hector, which aocompanied them : — " I have just received the diploma of membership of the New Zealand Institute, which you have forwarded to me. Please present my thanks to your learned society for this distinction. I have been more delighted in re» ceiring if; than I can express. Certainly, when remembering the recent date of the colonisation of New Zealand, there can be no more surprising evidence of the rapid progress of modern civilisation than such a publication. Not that the printing of a book in any part of the world is now-a-days any marked event ; but the volume before me is more instructive, and better put together, than the proceedings of most learued societies of a long standing. I have roquested my friend, Mr T. GK Cary, who takes care of the affairs of the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, to forward to you a series of the publications of our institution ; and I would now take the liberty of requesting you to send me also the first and second volumes of your transactions and proceedings. With our volumes you will also receive a set for each of your associated societies, which I beg you to forward. Allow me also to request yon to send me whatever specimens of living and fossil animals you can spare, and to let me know what I could send you in return. I have a series of casts of Mastodian heads, of different ages, which might be interesting, and can offer any of the natural productions of North America you may wish, or at least procure them shortly, if they are not at hand. It is my earnest desire to secure for our Museum as complete a representation of the living and extinct fauna of New Zealand as possible, before the progress of your settlement has made it impossible to bring together complete collections of the original fauna of your islands. I would particularly value specimens of all the species described in your proceeding. I need scarcely add that specimens of tho fishes described and figured by you would have a special interest for me. I shall direct my assistants in the different departments of the Museum to write to members of your institute who work in the same field, and beg you may secure for them a friendly response." After a paper by Mr Travera on the methode ! of landscape photography which he adopt?, and a chemical paper by Mr Skey, Dr Kiiox exhibited and described a white eel which had been caught in the Ngahauranga stream, and which he considered to be a true albino fish. Dr Heotor read a letter from Dr Thomson, of Clyde, giving the account of an exploration of the cave in whioh the moa's neck was found some months ago. It is an irregular fissure in mica-schist rock, about 50 feet in depth, with three shelf-like ledges or floors on whioh the bones have lodged. There are two entrancea — one on the hill side, and another by a fun-nel-shaped depression in an alluvial fiat. On the first or upper floor were fond traces of a fire and charred bones. On the second, by sorapingaway the loose dust to the depth of two feet, leg- bones, ribs, vertebrae, a pelvis, toe bones, trachyl rings and pieoes of skin and muscle were found. At the lowest level werefcund fragments of egg shell and the bones of a bird with a keeled sternum. Dr. Thomson has obtained bones of at least eight birds, and a perfect skull with lower jaw and trachea attached, and a fomur, with well preserved muscular tissue, was also obtained at the spot where the neck was formerly found. The position of the cave is opposite Aloxandra, at the foot of the Obolus raDges. From another locality in the same district, Dr Thomson also sont twenty feathers of the Moa that wore obtained by a digger eighteen feet below the surface in recent allu* vium. These feathers were exhibited and described by Captain Hutton, who showed that, while they had the form peculiar to s struthious birds, they were quite different to any known species, and that they show that the bird to which they belonged was allied more to the American Rhea than to any of the struthious birds of the Old World. In the course of the discussion which followed Mr Travers, and also Mr Mantel', alluded to the injustice that had been done to the late Mr Rule, of Nelson, who took the first Moa bone to Professor Owen, and who had been represented as befog an illiterate seaman, ignorant of such matters, whereas he was an educated medical man who was perfeotly aware that the bone waß that of a bird when he took it to England.

It is a queer woman who asks no questio^ but the woman who does is the querist. Women do not talk more than men. They're listened to more, that is all.