39
THE ESSEX FIELD CLUB.
The 144TH Ordinary Meeting,
Saturday, February 3rd, 1894.
The 144th Ordinary Meeting of the Club was held in the Lecture-room of
the Grosvenor House, Walthamstow (by the kind permission of the Committee
of the Walthamstow School of Science and Art) at 6.30 p.m., Mr. T. V. Holmes,
F.G.S., Vice-President, in the chair.
Mr. J. H. Dowsing, M.I.C.E., was elected a member.
The Secretary announced some very important gifts to the Museum (which
are enumerated in the Report of the Council, page 30), and the cordial thanks
of the Club were accorded for these interesting and valuable donations.
Mr. W. Cole exhibited on behalf of Mr. Worthington G. Smith, a photograph
of a section in a clay-pit at Caddington Hill, near Dunstable, showing a layer of
old flint implements (a "Palaeolithic Floor") at a height above O.D. of about 590
feet. Also a photograph of a drawing by Mr. Smith of a Celtic interment in a
round tumulus on Dunstable Downs, with skeletons of a woman and child,
surrounded by a double or triple row of fossil Echini, which must have been
collected in Celtic times and put in the grave round the bodies, as shown in the
drawing. These observations of Mr. Smith's will be given in his forthcoming
book, entitled "Man: The Primeval Savage—His Haunts and Relics from the
Hill-tops of Bedfordshire to Blackwall."
Mr. Walter Crouch exhibited the interesting old Sheet Almanack mentioned
in his paper on "Astronomy in Wanstead" (vide Essex Naturalist, vii., p.
160). In this is shown the alteration of style in 1752, when eleven days, from the
3rd to the 13th September were omitted from the Calendar, so that "ye Month
contains but 19 days."
Mr. Crouch also exhibited two specimens of a new Murex (Ocinebra) from the
Mauritius, which had recently been figured and described, with other new forms
from that locality, by Mr. G. B. Sowerby, F.L.S , etc., under the specific name of
M. crouchi, in a paper read before the Malacological Society on the 10th No-
vember, 1893 (vide Proc. Mala, Soc, vol. i., p. 41). At present only four shells
of this small but prettily sculptured species are known : the type, and one of a
bright red colour, var. rufescens, in the collection of Mr. Crouch, and two in the
British Museum collection.
PHOTOGRAPHY AS AN AID IN PHYSICAL AND
NATURAL SCIENCE.
[Abstract.]
Prof. R. Meldola, F.R.S. (Vice-President), then delivered a lecture on the
above subject. The lecture was illustrated by a large number of photographic
slides shown by the oxy-hydrogen lantern, many of them having been lent 10
Prof. Meldola by the Secretaries of the British Association Committees established
for collecting, and encouraging the production of, Geological and Meteoro-
logical Photographs.1
Prof. Meldola emphasised the historical fact that science had advanced con-
currently with the invention of methods for extending the perceptibility of the
senses, instancing the balance, the telescope, the microscope, and the spectroscope
1 The Editor gladly acknowledges his indebtedness to the excellent report of the lecture in
"Photography" for the basis of the following abstract.