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principle regulating the decisions of that body in regard to the publication of papers in the Society's journal.

We must begin by observing that whatever may have been the practice of the council in former days, when it required some vigilance to ensure that the papers should treat strictly of questions of fact-such being the object for which the Society was originally founded-does not now concern us; and our author's smart observations on the subject are altogether irrelevant, although it is perfectly possible that Mr. Warburton and others may have been at times unreasonably autocratic.

It will be as well if we now quote from Mr. Jukes, for the information of our readers, what takes place after a paper has been read before the Society:

"The paper is, at the next meeting of the council, referred to some Fellow of the Society, who is supposed to have special knowledge of the subjects treated of, and he is requested to answer a printed list of questions which are sent with it. These questions, as well as I can recollect them, inquire whether there is anything personally offensive in the paper; whether there is anything superfluous, or absurd, or manifestly contrary to the principles of the science in it; whether it should be published in extenso or only in abstract; whether it should be accompanied with the illustrations, or whether any or all of the latter can be dispensed with; and generally, in fact, what is to be done with the paper.

"If the referee have the requisite knowledge, and acts with judgment and impartiality, and takes sufficient trouble to master the paper, of course the system would act in practice as well as it was meant to do theoretically."

Mr. Jukes further illustrates his position as follows:

"I have two or three times acted as referee, and the plan I adopted was to treat it very much as a matter of form, just to look over the paper to see if there was anything in it personally offensive or disrespectful to any one; any obvious lapsus calami which the author would wish to have his attention called to; or anything manifestly childish, such as attempts to reconcile geology with the Mosaic cosmogony; and, if not, to recommend that it be printed as a matter of course."

According to these extracts the Society undertakes to print in their journal every paper accepted for reading, if it does not contain, in the opinion of the referee and the council, anything personally offensive, or superfluous, or absurd, or manifestly contrary to the principles of the science. If this be true Mr. Jukes has a right to complain, for it would seem, from the intrinsic evidence presented by his paper, that its rejection must rest on other grounds than these.

There is, however, a common saying that one tale is always good until another is told, and Mr. Jukes's tale would cer

tainly have been good to all but a select few, had not a prominent member of the council of the Society (who avowed himself to be one of the referees) read to the assembled Fellows at a recent meeting the first question on the printed list to which Mr. Jukes has referred, as follows:

"Is it desirable that the paper, as it stands, should be published in the Quarterly Journal of the Society,' as containing new facts, or new views of the bearing of admitted facts, or apparently well-founded corrections of important errors as to matters of fact?"

It must be admitted that this gives the matter a different complexion, and by the light of this information it seems fairly a question whether the council were not justified in refusing to print more than an abstract of the paper. Unfortunately for Mr. Jukes, he cannot plead ignorance of the stipulations to be complied with, as he owns to having two or three times acted as referee, and must therefore have had the questions addressed to him over and over again. That he did not discharge his duty more conscientiously is to be regretted in every way; had he done so, he would probably not have taken umbrage at the fate of his own paper. The proper course for him to have followed as referee, if he did not approve of the rules of the Society in respect to the publishing of papers, is manifestly, as was observed by his commentator, to have declined to act. Then, remembering his experience as referee he would probably not have selected the Society's journal as a medium for the publication of his papers on North Devon, although he would thus have deprived hinself of the innocent excitement respecting his first paper, to which he acknowledges in the following paragraph:

"As regards the paper just mentioned, I must confess that it was with some feeling of curiosity as to what would be done with it, that I sent it to the Geological Society of London, and after it was read I marked its progress through the council with some of the interest and amusement one feels in watching an uncertain experiment."

It may be asked, why did Mr. Jukes feel any uncertainty as to the publication of his first paper? Fortunately, since that matter was decided, the Royal Geological Society of Ireland have published a number of their journal, or Echo would still have been compelled to answer, Why? The opportune appearance of that publication a few months ago has, however, solved the mystery, and to this effect-On May 10th, 1865, Mr. Jukes read a paper before that Society, entitled "Notes for a Comparison between the Rocks of the South-west of Ireland and those of North Devon and of Rhenish Prussia (in the neighbourhood of Coblentz)," and on December 8th, 1865, he read another, entitled "Further Notes on the Classification of the Rocks of North Devon;" and it appears to us that they

contain the essence of his papers read before the Geological Society of London. The council of the latter body were probably ignorant of the contents of these Irish papers, or the probability is that they would have saved the cost of fifty pages of their journal. In other words, Mr. Jukes's first paper would have shared the fate of his

second.

The council of the Geological Society are in the habit, according to Mr. Jukes, of referring papers to some Fellow, who is supposed to have special knowledge of the subject; and he gives an instance in respect of his first paper, in which the council took the opinion of two gentlemen before coming to a decision. If the council act with such care and deliberation it seems that the theoretical excellence of the referee system (admitted by Mr. Jukes) must be attained in practice. We have ourselves been unable to discover any important new facts in Mr. Jukes's second paper, or any "apparently well-founded corrections of errors as to matters of fact." There is certainly propounded a new view of an admitted fact; but as it is not supported by evidence it could have been given quite as well in an abstract. Moreover, it is so purely hypothetical, that had it been enunciated by a young geologist, it would have been considered too "manifestly childish" for argument. This view may be stated as follows:-Near Wiveliscombe an east and west fault was indicated long ago by Sir Henry De la Beche, stretching for a distance of not more than four miles, and probably less than three. Mr. Jukes's new view, unsupported by evidence, is that this fault is continued for nearly thirty miles in a westerly direction.

Contributors to the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society' are very rarely given so ample a space as fifty pages for the enunciation and illustration of their views, and therefore Mr. Jukes seems a little unreasonable in complaining that considerable further space was not granted for the publication of so feeble an addition to his evidence as that before us. Fellows of the Society who were present at the reading of this paper will remember how prevalent was the opinion that its author, so far from strengthening his case on that evening, had considerably damaged it, by resorting to so far-fetched an expedient as that we have just noticed.

It is also incumbent upon the council of the Society to use the narrow limits of a yearly octavo volume to the best advantage, and there can be no doubt that the time, thought, and trouble expended on the subject by the council as a body, and individually by the respective referees, have contributed in a large measure to obtaining for the Society's journal the well-merited reputation which it enjoys both in England and on the Continent.

Finally, after a careful examination of the evidence, we are unable to come to any other conclusions than the following:-(1)

That Mr. Jukes, forgetting the Geological Society's rules, has felt aggrieved at the refusal to publish in full a paper whose fate he would doubtless have predicted, had he remembered the Society's regulations; and (2), that he has precipitately written and printed an attack on the council of the Society without first ascertaining that his recollection of the Society's rules was sufficiently exact-a course which can only be compared to rushing into a law-suit without legal advice, on the strength of vague impressions, and with no real knowledge of facts.†

III.

FOOD AS A MOTIVE POWER.

By C. W. HEATON, Professor of Chemistry to Charing-Cross
Hospital Medical School.

No physiologist now doubts that the force exerted in and by an animal is derived from the combination of the oxygen absorbed in the lungs with the solid or liquid substances formed in the body from the food. Hence it follows that if the body remains unchanged in weight after a certain period of time, the force exerted in it during that period is accurately represented by the calorific value of the food, minus the calorific value of the excreta. If the body has increased in weight, a store of potential energy must have accumulated in it; whereas if it has diminished, some portion of the force developed must have been derived from the store provided by previous increase. To avoid unnecessary complexity, it is best to assume the first of these cases, that, namely, in which the food is exactly equal to the requirement of the body.

Whatever intermediate conditions it may assume, there can be no doubt that the force developed in the body is mainly expressed in the final forms of Heat and Mechanical Work. It becomes, therefore, a problem of the greatest importance both to physiology and to dietetics to determine the relation which these two great factors bear to each other and to the different constituents of human food. Much of the work effected by the muscles is afterwards converted, inside the body, into heat, while some of the heat, that, for instance, which is employed in evaporation, is reconverted into work; but these conversions, although they present the gravest difficulties in quantitative investigations, do not affect the main principles which we have to discuss.

The first problem obviously is to find from the day's food, the

*Vol. i., Part 2, 1866.

+ It speaks more for the impartiality of the council of the Geological Society that they refused a place to such an eminent geologist for his second paper, than that they granted it for his first against their convictions.-THE EDITORS.

total amount of force, the actual energy, which it is capable of producing when burnt in the body. The materials for this calculation have been supplied by a series of most valuable experiments which have recently been conducted by Dr. Frankland, who published his results in a lecture delivered at the Royal Institution, June 8, 1866. He selected some of the most important articles of food, and burnt one gramme of each of them in a vessel surrounded with water. He noted carefully the extent to which the water became heated; from this it was easy to calculate the calorific value of the food, and from this its work-equivalent in metre-kilogrammes. In the case of nitrogenous foods, such as meat and bread, a certain portion always leaves the body without undergoing oxidation. The calorific value of this residue was determined by Frankland and deducted from that of the food, and we have therefore, for the first time, a trustworthy statement of the actual force-values of these substances. The following table contains a few of the most important figures. A great deal of the enormous differences perceived is due to the different quantities of water which the various substances contain; but even when they are compared in the dry state, great differences are observed. Fats and oils are superior to all other substances in this respect:

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It is curious to compare with these figures the calorific value of coal. The burning of 1 gramme of coal yields an actual energy of 2,538 metre-kilogrammes, and we will assume its price to be 258. per ton. Equal quantities of force can then be obtained by the burning of

Coal costing 18.
Oatmeal
Butter

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The food which is the cheapest enumerated as a force producer, is,

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