WELLINGTON PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 4875, 6 November 1876, Page 3

WELLINGTON PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY.

A general meeting of the above sooietv was held in the lecture hall of the Museum on Saturday evening last, the President, 1 I. Buffer. C.M.G., in the chair. , . The minutes of the former meeting having been read and confirmed, the Secretary an* nounced the election of Mr. W. R. E. Brown, Registrar-General, ns a member of the ociety. The first paper read was “ On the Reptilian Beds of New Zealand,” by Mr. A. McKay, of the Colonial Survey department. The author stated that -in March las'- he received instructions to proceed to the Amur! Bluff, for the purpose of making further co lections, and obtaining a measured section of the north-east face of the bluff. In his offic al report of that expedition be had confined himself strictly to the facts observed by him, and now, with Or. Hector’s permission, he had elaborated his views iu the form of a paper for the society. First of all he sketched the progress of the geological exploration of the Waipara and Amur! Bluff beds, after which he explained, at considerable length, hia own observations aud discoveries, and the general conclusions to which a careful study of the subject had led him.

The President said that in the paper just read Mr. McKay had given proof that he was not merely an industrious collector, but a competent geologist and paleontologist. The subject of which the paper treate 1 was a very interesting one, especially as the discovery of the existence of reptilian keds i n New Zealand was of comparatively recent date. To Dr. Hector belonged the credit of having worked out and classified these Saurian remains in a very complete manner, characterising several new genera and describing the forms, some of which are very remarkable. He inv ted discussion on the views put forward in Mr. McKay’s paper. Dr. Hector said he had listened to the paper with great interest, as it gave the author’s own views, gathered from the study of this important section. The Amur! section was valuable, as it was one of the few places in New Zealand where the equivalent beds to our coalfields were fossiliferous. These might be of slightly different relative ages, but the whole belonged to the cretaceous formation, the bitumenous coals of the West Coast being the same or even slightly younger thau the brown coals of the east. The lower part of the Amuri section was of the age of the lower greensand, the middle part the upper greensand, while the upper chalk marks and limestones were the equivalents of the chalk He described and exhibited several characteristic fossils, particularly teeth, two chimceroid fishes from the lower part of the section, and bones of the great fossil penguin ( Palceendypt's Antarcticus, Huxley) ; also bones from the upper marl. He agreed in the view that the whole Amuri series had been involved in the lastmovements, the continuationbeing detached patches of syncline in lines striking right through the country, irrespective of the orographicai features. Mr. Young said he would like to know whether he had understood the author aright that the Saurian remains were confined to the Terti try strata. Mr. MoKat, in reply, said he had only stated that some of these fossils were ‘found in Tertiary beds, not that they were confined to that formation.. There was, however, a distinct break in the sequence. ■ The next paper was “ On the Drainage of Towns,” by Mr. W D. Campbell, Assoc. Inst. C.E. [A digest of this important paper, which was printed in pamphlet form in anticipation of the meeting, has already appeared in our columns ] A very animated discussion, lasting more than an hour, followed the reading of this paper, in which the following gentlemen took partDrs. Hector, Buller, and Newman, Messrs. Carruthers, Higginson, J. H. Wallace, C. O’Neill, Maxwell, Franklaud, Young, and W. R. E. Brown.' There was much diversity of opinion, as to the best system of drainage to be adopted, in the views put forward by the various speakers. . Mr. Campbell, on being called on by the President to reply, said that it had been remarked by several speakers that slop water contained a great part of the decomposable matter, that pails removed only a small portion. Thi« was qnite true, hut as Dr. Newman observed, the pails were removed at the same time as the ashes, which had aln ays to be carted away. The pail system removed the worst objectionable part of the sewage. In the river commissioners’ reports some midden towns are stated to have a discharge from the drains containing a greater amount of impurity than that of many water closet towns. This, however, was due to old and defective drains, and was not a fair comparison. With regard to the separate system, he believed Mr. Carrnthers to have stated that the sizes of sewers would not be smaller than those of a combined system. Now, supposing an area of 26nnacres,say, was sewered to carry off 3 J cubic feet from each person daily, did Mr. Carruthers mean to say that they would not have to be larger in order to carry off the 14 million gallons that Mr. O’Neill hod mentioned would have accumulated in an hour with a J inch rainfall only? When pumping is necessary the advantage of having a regular flow is most apparent. A great number of English towns are now adopting the system, as they find they cannot manage the variable discharge from the combined system, The rain water drains are not provided with-either manholes or lampholes and are laid only feet deep. Storm overflows are necessary in the combined system,the discharge from which very often has more impurities than the ordinary sewage, on account of the sand and sewage mud deposits accumulated for a month or more being then removed. Mr. O’Neil was mistaken in-sup-posing that intermittent filtration was not successful. Mr. Bailey Denton, who introduced it at Merthyr Tydvil, has since treated the sewage of many other towns very successfully, the affluent water proving remarkably pure. Another speaker (Mr. Frankland), described the Zurich mode of scavenging. In Florence an improvement on that was used. The town is drained in o cesspools, which are emptied periodically by a portable exhaust pump attached to an air-tight van, and into which the contents were sucked. Another speaker (Mr. Carruthers) had described the pail system’ns abominable, and useful only when there was no water supply. The objections to the pails were only imaginary, for a person could not detect the slightest smell from the collecting carts when they passed along the streets of Rochdale. The pail system is not the only means when there is no regular water supply; for at Walton-on-Thames the house slops form an efficient vehicle for the contents of the closets, many of the street pipes being only 6 Inch the rainfall is excluded. The subject of currents in the bay had been alluded to. There appear to be none; those alluded to by Mr. George in his account of the Patent Slip appear to be merely an undertow, caused by the heaping up of the water against the shore by a strong wind. The evil effect of drainage into harbors had been experienced at Scarborough and many other English town. Margate, Hastings, Brighton, hod outfalls into the sea near to or opposite the towns, and have had to take steps to have them further away. The Brighton sewage is now taken by a tunnel in the chalk

cl.tf eight miles to the outfall. The cm practice spokell of by Mr. Higginninof carrying the waste water pipe from cisterns into the oil pipe of a Closet wan Very general, and was of course most nlijeoi ionable TIIO PimsiimNT eai the subject under disciisdmi was olio of vast impor anco to the whole comlimiiitv, ami bo was glad that the society could offer a medium for ventilating i.ho views and opinions of those who had studied the question of town drainage. He trusted that such a discussion as the present would have the effect of eating pu lie attunto the subject, and woul 1 have sumo practical oiremno. If there was one town above all others in Now Zealand that had to complain of defective drain igej it was Wellington. The smells and stinks iu some of our thoroughfares h id become a byword and reproach a i over the colony. As the lateness of the hour precluded the reading of Mr. Fraiikland's papers, the meet ing adjourned to Saturday next, at the usual time a'd place. In our rep rt of tho former meeting (October 28), we omitted to mention the following exhibits which were placed on tho table for the inspection of mom hum Bliolographs of the so called “ Moa’s head,'' from Taiiranga, being the skull ol tho gooHchealcud whale of (Epiodon Traverm), exhibited by Dr. Hector; a specimen of r.hu siialcu-worm (Ooiyius aquaticus), from tho Lako District, exhibited by Dr. Buffer ; and a beautiful collection of stone implements from Copenhagen, presented to the Colonial Mu .cum by Captain Rowan.