threshold was thought in old times to be an evil omen. When, in the same sentence, he professes to correct my memory, he has perhaps shown some lack of memory himself; for I did not simply state (in my letter to the Editors of the Philosophical Magazine and Journal, August 20, 1854) "that the Council refused to publish my paper;" I expressly added the facts, of which he generously reminds me (as if I had studiously kept them back or forgotten them): viz. "that the Council were willing to print my paper after suppressing the discussion on classification and nomenclature." Was I called upon (in the letter just quoted) to make any allusion to Mr. Hamilton's mistakes in the previous month of May, or to the correspondence that had arisen out of them? think the very contrary; and that I should have done much wrong had I entered upon the facts of the case more fully than was done in my letter of August 1854. To the facts given in the latter portion of the previous extract I have nothing to oppose, and I only wish to deal with the conclusions that are drawn from them. At the time my paper was sent to the Editors of this Journal (August 20, 1854), I did not believe that any part of it had been read in extenso before the Geological Society; I did not believe that it had been accepted by the Council in its integrity; neither did I believe that it had been publicly discussed or submitted to a Referee. To have stated all this in my introductory letter would have been, I thought, disrespectful to the Geological Society; and the Editors will not, I trust, blame me for the omission. That I made some mistakes respecting the acceptance of my paper by the Council of the Geological Society, I now fully admit. But who led me into these mistakes? Mr. Hamilton himself, as I am prepared to prove by a bare enumeration of facts. Early in October 1853 I drew up the paper above mentioned, and when it was finished, I wrote to the Secretary of the Geological Society, stating my earnest wish that it might be read at their first autumnal meeting*. Soon afterwards, I was informed by Prof. E. Forbes, that (for reasons fully stated in his reply) my wishes could not then be complied with. This was a great disappointment to me: and before the expiration of the laborious work of the Michaelmas term I was attacked by a lingering illness, which made it impossible for me to attend any meeting of the Society during the following winter and spring. Early in March 1854 I, however, revised several sheets of my paper; and on the 12th of March they were forwarded to the Secretary of the Geological Society, along with a note in which I stated that the sequel of the manuscript would follow in a few It was the only meeting during the Michaelmas term of 1854 that I could attend compatibly with my engagements at Cambridge. days. But the languor of ill-health so much retarded the simple task of revision (undertaken in the hope of making a very illwritten MS. legible in my absence), that the concluding sheets of my paper were not received by the Secretary before the 27th of March. It was finally brought before the Society on the 3rd of May, while I was in residence at Norwich, and incapable of leaving it for so much as a single day. I make no complaint on account of this long delay. Nay, I am willing to believe that the delay was meant in courtesy to myself, and that the President waited in the hope that I might at length be enabled to attend the meeting when my paper was to be read. Very soon after the 3rd of May I had a letter from Mr. Hamilton, informing me that my first paper had been laid before the Society, but that my second paper had not been read, and could not be published in the Journal. It appeared to me at the time (and I think quite naturally), that in this letter there was an insinuation of something very like unfair dealing on my part viz. that while professing to send a paper which I had offered to the Society for their first meeting in November 1853, I had virtually changed its character by tacking to it a large and unacknowledged addition. Under this impression I sent an angry reply to Mr. Hamilton's letter; and in his rejoinder he made an ample and courteous apology for "his mistake,"-stating among other matters that he had been misled by the word sequel in one of my former notes, which was addressed (as before stated) to the Secretary of the Geological Society. He may also, I think, have been misled by the interval of fifteen days which elapsed between the reception of the earlier and latter portion of my MS. During those days I was, however, in a condition which left me neither the will nor the power to add much matter to my paper; and as a simple fact, it was sent (with the exception of such verbal corrections as every author is allowed to make during the revision of his MS.), word for word, as I had first drawn it up for the Society in October 1853. What took place after Mr. Hamilton's rejoinder requires no long comment. In neither of his letters written after the 3rd of May, was there the least hint that any part of my paper had passed through the usual form of reference; nor was it possible for me to conclude that the whole of it had been accepted by the Council. How was I to believe that he could ever think of concealing from the Council the fact that I had sent them two papers instead of one; or, perhaps more correctly, that I had so doctored my old paper (to borrow a graphic expression from Mr. Babbage) as to deprive it of its identity? In the four pages making the conclusion of my paper, I knew that there was matter to which the Council might perhaps object; and when they had learnt (through Mr. Hamilton's mistake) that not only the conclusion, but also the corrected and detailed tabular view (now filling eight pages of the Philosophical Magazine), had been surreptitiously tacked by me to an old paper, I became morally certain that (while they were under that mistaken belief) all the concluding portions of it must have been deservedly, and perhaps contemptuously, rejected by them. Whether right or wrong, this was exactly my conviction and full belief when my paper was sent (in August 1854) to the Editors of the Philosophical Magazine. I do not therefore base my vindication from the charges brought against me in the previous extract, by the admission of any blunder or oversight on my own part for which I was responsible. I make no apology to the Society beyond a plain enumeration of dates which I have derived from the kindness of their Assistant Secretary, and of facts which are not denied by Mr. Hamilton. If a mistake was committed, I still hold myself clear of all reasonable blame for it. The mistake was not mine. It was impossible for me (on Mr. Hamilton's own showing) to believe that my paper had been accepted in its integrity by the Council, and under such erroneous acceptance it never could become their literary property for I utterly repudiate the notion that any Society has a right of property in a paper submitted to them, unless it has been first accepted in its integrity. Why was I not informed by the Council (during the five weeks my paper remained in their hands before it was read) that I had sent them two papers instead of one, and that my latter paper could not be accepted or laid before the Society? I could then have set them right on a point of fact; or I could have suppressed the conclusion, which fills but four pages in its printed form; or, if I thought it better, I could have asked them to return. my paper before they had technically deprived me of any part the rights of authorship. Mr. Hamilton has stated the facts incorrectly when he asserts that it was only the "conclusion, viz. the controversial portion, which the Society objected to publish." The Tabular View was not a mere reprint of anything I had before published. It was both an expansion and correction of my former views; its compilation cost me more thought than any other part of my paper, and without it the previous sections would have had little or no value. To call the dry Tabular View controversial would be, I think, downright nonsense. If it had been rejected because it reached the Secretary in my second parcel, I could then account for its rejection arising out of Mr. Hamilton's unfortunate and acknowledged mistakes. But I will no longer dwell upon my defence. What I have written must, I think, with any man of common sense, put my conduct towards the Society in a very different light from that in which it appears in the extract from the Anniversary Address. In concluding my comment on this extract, I have to apologise for one great mistake of omission, for which I hereby express my sincere regret.I ought to have thanked Mr. Hamilton for his ample and courteous apology, made after he had discovered his mistake about the integrity of my paper. Not that I then grudged the grateful words of courtesy; for I have ever regarded him as a well-informed, honourable, and truth-loving man; and spite of my plain and homely words, he will not, I trust, think me guilty of any personal disrespect towards him. If I differ from a truth-loving man on questions of fact or opinion, the greatest respect I can pay him is to tell him plainly what are the points on which we differ. My apology for the fault of omission is, that I was suffering during the whole month of May 1854 from the lassitude of long-continued ill-health. I had been worried by what I thought a very perverse misinterpretation of my conduct; writing was hateful to me; and when my paper came back I threw it on one side, after just turning over its pages, and then dismissed the subject from my thoughts. Except as a bar against some future charge of doctoring, I do not believe that it would again have seen the light, especially as I had before me the materials for a second paper on the Paleozoic System of England*; and I declare, in all sincerity and without reserve, that after the paper (which was read on the 3rd of May) was returned to me by Mr. Hamilton, I regarded it as my undoubted property; and it never crossed my thoughts that any member of the Council (however stern a vindicator of the rights of the Geological Society), and least of all that Mr. Hamilton, could ever dream of censuring me for publishing my paper, should I afterwards think fit to do so. The reader may perhaps think that I have dwelt upon the previous question at too much length. To him it may be a matter of small moment; but to me it is of deep personal interest, for it involves the question of my fair and honest dealing with a public body. *I may remark, that when the substance of the second paper (here alluded to) was read before the British Association in 1854, the charge of previous doctoring was insinuated against me somewhat uncourteously. If my second paper, drawn up in 1854 (and published in the December Number of the Philosophical Magazine), was any improvement upon the previous paper (drawn up in 1853), the improvement was due exclusively to my own renewed field work. Not an atom of it was borrowed from any of my opponents. The chief advantage I gained in the summer of 1854 was the clearing away (by my own field work along with Prof. M'Coy) what I thought the misinterpretation of certain sections in South Wales which had been made by my opponents. BER XXX. Chemical Notices from Foreign Journals. [Continued from p. 125.] ERTAGNINI* has succeeded in producing cinnamic acid artificially. He was led by the consideration that cinnamic acid decomposes into benzoic and acetic acids, to the idea that the atomic groups contained in those acids entered into its constitution. It might be a copulated compound of common aldehyde with benzoic acid, or of benzoic aldehyde with acetic acid. The latter appeared the most probable, since benzoic aldehyde is produced by the oxidation of cinnamic acid. Bertagnini accordingly mixed equivalents of chloride of acetyle with pure oil of bitter almonds, and heated them in a closed tube to a temperature of 120°-130° for twenty to twenty-five hours. At 'the expiration of that time the liquid in the tube had become brown and viscous, and on the sides were deposited crystals. On opening the tube a large quantity of hydrochloric acid was given off, and the mass became quite tough. On heating this mass with boiling water and filtering, white lustrous needles were obtained which had all the properties of cinnamic acid. An analysis of the silver salt gave numbers quite coincident with those required by the theory. The formation of cinnamic acid is thus expressed : C14 H6 O + C4 H3 CI 02 = C18 H8 04 + HCl. Oil of bitter almonds. Chloride of acetyle. Cinnamic acid. Goessmann described, some time ago, a general method for the formation of bases by distilling at high temperatures the compounds of certain aldehydes and bisulphite of ammonia along with hydrate of lime. From common aldehyde he obtained æethylamine; and from benzoic aldehyde, lophine and amarine. He has now investigated cinnamic aldehyde in this direction, and has obtained from it a new base which he names triphenylamine. It is not easy to be obtained pure, from the difficulty of getting the compound of cinnamic aldehyde with bisulphite of ammonia pure, and from the ready decomposability of the base. When pure it is oleaginous and colourless, but readily changes into red. It is easily soluble in alcohol and in æther, but more difficultly so in water. It has the formula C36 H15 N. Its salts are readily changeable, and difficult to crystallize. The hydrochlorate forms lustrous plates with a somewhat reddish tint; with bichloride of platinum it forms a compound of the formula C36 H16 NC1, +Pt C12. The base also forms with bichloride of platinum a compound, C96 H15 N, Pt Cl2. The base *Il Nuovo Cimento, vol. iv. p. 46. + Liebig's Annalen, October 1856. Liebig's Annalen, October 1856. |