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xi his Report into the form in which it was presented and read to the Royal Society on the 24th May, 1860, and which is substantially that in which it now appears in the following pages.

A brief abstract of the Report was published in the 'Proceedings Roy. Soc. Lon.,' vol. x. p. 486, &c., and the document itself, with its accompanying maps, diagrams, sketches, and photographs, ordered to be referred for publication.

As to the mode of this, some difficulty arose. The Report, although in a great degree dealing with dynamical and other rigid questions, is partly an inductive argument; and hence, being necessarily of the nature of a pièce justicatif, requires the sufficient statement of a number of directly employed facts; besides and related to which were, many observations made en passant, upon the physical features, geology, and other collateral subjects, which, referring to a country so little explored as the interior of the Neapolitan kingdom, it was not desirable to suppress.

Its bulk thus became such that if published by the Royal Society in what might seem its natural place, it would have occupied an entire volume of the 'Philosophical Transactions,' to the exclusion, for the time, of all other papers, however valuable. Some suggestions were made to divide the Report, publishing in the 'Philosophical Transactions' only its rigid mechanical portions in result, leaving the remainder for publication there