Page:TASJ-1-3.djvu/106



A General Meeting of the Society was held on Wednesday evening, 23rd December, at the Grand Hotel, C. W. Goodwin, Esq., V.P. in the chair. The minutes of the last meeting were approved, and A. O. Gay, Esq. of Kobe, was announced as having been elected an ordinary member.

The Committee on the Library reported that a new room had been engaged at No. 28, which would be open daily from 4 to 6 Whereupon Professor Ayrton suggested that although the Librarian might only attend from four to six o’clock, so that books could only be obtained during those hours, he would suggest that the room itself should be open all day and furnished with pens, ink and paper so that it might be used by the members as a room for writing letters in, &c. He would add that the small room at the Grand Hotel which formerly was used as a Library by the Society, had been found by himself as well as by other members residing in Tokio, very convenient for such purposes.

Mr. Brunton read the following explanatory remarks, as supplementary to his statement made at the last meeting, in regard to the discharge of water from the rivers Rhine and Shinanogawa respectively:—

At the last meeting of the Society during the discussion which followed the reading of Mr. Lindo’s paper on a trip to Niigata I made a statement giving some particulars concerning the Shinanogawa, which river has its mouth at Niigata. I then compared the discharge of the Shinanogawa with that of the Rhine, and I have received from Mr. Lindo a letter taking exception to that comparison and asking me to make a correction of my statement in such a manner as I deem most suitable. As the matter occurred at the last meeting of this Society, and has appeared as part of its proceedings I think that this is the proper time and place to bring the matter forward. Mr. Lindo informs me in his letter, that his paper, read by Mr. Boyle, contains statements relative to the discharge of the Shinanogawa; and also a comparison between it and that of the Rhime, but that that gentleman, in reading the paper, passed these over. His comparison and mine he says are antagonistic, not as regards the discharge of the Shinanogawa, because on that we agree, I may say, quite remarkably, but as regards the discharge of the Rhine; and he has been good enough to send me very elaborate tables of the discharge of the Rhine which were, of course, not previously known to me, but which place that matter beyond a doubt. From these I find that the ordinary summer discharge of the Rhine near its mouth is over five millions cubic feet per minute, that its maximum discharge in floods is over twenty-three millions cubic feet per minute, and its minimum discharge is 2,700,000 cubic feet per minute. In my statement I gave the ordinary summer discharge as 900,000 cubic feet per minute, and the flood discharge as ten millions cubic feet per minute, that is to say the summer discharge as given by me is between one-fifth and one-sixth of what it actually is,