anything, or for the instruction of anyone. They have grieved Mr. Thomson very much, and they have initiated a controversy which can hardly be pleasantly conducted, and which, therefore, forms an undesirable element in the proceedings of a Society like ours. Yet place was bound to be given to what Mr. Thomson desired to say. As Dr. Hector's reply to Mr. Thomson's paper has not been communicated to this Institute, I take leave to express the hope that the "Transactions of the New Zealand Institute" will include nothing further on the subject. We shall all, I am sure, look forward with much interest to the determination which should soon be made of the difference of longitude between Sydney and Wellington by the aid of the cable now about to be laid. That made by Captain Nares gives a longitude nearer by 3·51 sec. to the results obtained by our New Zealand observers—Carkeek, Jackson, and Thomson—amongst whom the nearness of agreement is very striking. I understand that Mr. Jackson has obtained from Greenwich the means of correcting the figures given by the Nautical Almanac, which were used in reducing his observations. This information will enable him to eliminate from his calculations those errors of the Lunar Tables to which Dr. Hector refers in his memorandum. For my own part, when I note the very close agreement between our three New Zealand observers, each working independently at his own observatory, I cannot refrain from expressing the belief that their work, after being corrected in the manner just alluded to, will hereafter be found to be a much closer approximation to the truth than either the longitude given in the Admiralty charts, or that suggested by Captain Nares.
I am unable to offer any remark on Mr. McNaughton's paper "On Improvements in Ships' Boats," as I was unable to be present when it was read, and was unfortunately too late in applying for perusal of it before its transmission to Wellington.
We received during the session, from our esteemed honorary member, the Rev. Mr. Wohlers, the third of his series of papers "On Maori Mythology." The stories contained in this paper do not deal with the loftier conceptions of the mythology, but to my mind they are more interesting than any which have preceded them. The opportunities which Mr. Wohlers enjoys of collecting these native fairy tales are exceptionally good, and I hope he will have a new budget ready for our next session. The stories now made known will, I think, be new to most, if not all, the students of the Maori race, and will be read with interest by every anthropologist. As it is, strange to say, still in dispute whether the Maoris have any actual references to the Moa in their songs and traditions, I listened to them anxiously to see if any of them shed a new light on this obscure subject. With some of those who were present when they were read, I strongly incline to the belief that one, at least, of the stories is founded on recollections of the way in which the more gigantic of the Dinornidæ were trapped by Maori hunters; but as the paper had been forwarded to Wellington before I applied for a re-perusal of it, I must defer some remarks I desired to make about this and other stories until they appear in print.
The other papers of the past session deal with Biological subjects. These are—Mr. Gillies's "On the Trap-door Spider," Professor Coughtrey's critical notes "On the New Zealand Hydroida," and Captain Hutton's "Contributions to the Ichthyology of New Zealand," and "Description of the Cow-fish of the Sounds on the West Coast of Otago." The proportion which these natural history papers bear to the rest of our Transactions is much less than usual. I believe this is partly owing to the fact that the members of the Field Naturalist Club have preferred to report their work at their own meetings instead of reading papers to the Society. By this method the permanent record, which it is one of the first objects of the New Zealand Institute to secure for the original observations of local naturalists, is lost to them. The Club was formed under the wing of this