is the way to Albany?” and when he arrived here, he found that with the aid of Prof.  Hall’s discoveries, he had only to take up the different formations as he had left them on the boundary line, and follow them into Canada.  It was both a convenience and a necessity to adopt the New-York nomenclature, which was thus extended over an area six times as large as New-York.  In Paris he heard De Vernier using the words Trenton and Niagara, as if they were household words.  He was delighted to witness the impatience with which Barron inquired when the remaining volumes of the Paleontology of New-York would be published.  Your Paleontological reputation, said he, has made New-York known, even among men not scientific, all over Europe.  I hope you will not stop here, but will go on and give us in equally thorough, full, and magnificent style, the character of the Durassic and Cretaceous formations.

ProfessorHenry on Dutchmen.

Professor Henry was at a loss to know by what process they had arrived at the conclusion that seven men of science must be substituted to fill the place of one distinguished statesman whom they had expected to hear.  He prided himself on his Albany nativity.  He was proud of the old Dutch character, that was the substratum of the city.  The Dutch are hard to be moved, but when they do start their momentum is not as other men’s in proportion to the velocity, but as the square of the velocity.  So when the Dutchman goes three times as fast, he has nine times the force of another man.  The Dutchman has an immense potentia agency, but it wants a small spark of Yankee enterprise to touch it off.  In this strain the Professor continued, making his audience very merry, and giving them a fine chance to express themselves with repeated explosions of laughter.

          ProfessorDavies on the practical nature of science.

Prof.  Charles Davies was introduced by ex-governor Seymour, and spoke briefly, but humorously and very much to the point, in defense of the practical character of scientific researches.  He said that to one accustomed to speak only on the abstract quantities of number and space, this was an unusual occasion, and this an unusual audience; and inquired how he could discuss the abstract forms of geometry, when he saw before him, in such profusion, the most beautiful real forms that Providence has vouchsafed to the life of man.  He proposed to introduce and develop but a single train of thought—­the unchangeable connection between what in common language is called the theoretical and practical, but in more technical phraseology, the ideal and the actual.  The actual, or true practical, consists in the uses of the forces of nature, according to the laws of nature; and here we must distinguish between it and the empirical, which uses, or attempts to use, those