may derivative altered and elaborated through Phoenician influences, such as might have been anticipated to have accompanied the apparent course of the Arian letters themselves. This be a curious question for future investigation and illustration; at present, it is sufficient to say, that the three Arian figures, similar to our English 3, constitute as a total, the sum of six tens, while the isolated ‹, at the end of the row of figures, completes the number of 70, to which we have to add the eight, already noticed under the units-making the complete date of the plate the year 78. In conclusion I may notice, that Mr. Dowson concurs in Colonel Cunningham's reading of the Macedonian months! These are run either thus for 40 or thus for 60 n በ በ በ በ በ በ በ } = 42 100 = 2 Gesenius p. 87 Phoenician Numbers; ordinary 10 is denarium numerum designans est hæc semilunaris See also Juda's "La langue Phénicienne," p. 84. but, alia figura itidem PROCEEDINGS OF THE ASIATIC SOCIETY OF BENGAL, FOR NOVEMBER, 1862. The Monthly General Meeting of the Asiatic Society of Bengal I was held on the 5th instant. A. Grote, Esq., President, in the chair. The proceedings of the last meeting were read and confirmed. 1. From Lieut.-Col. J. P. Beadle through E. C. Bayley, Esq., a set of the photographs of Buildings, Monoliths, &c. in Orissa taken by the Government Photographer in Cuttack. 2. From C. A. Elliott, Esq, a copy of his work entitled-The Chronicles of Oonao, a district in Oudh. 3. From the Academy of Sciences, Hungary, several publications of the Academy. The Council reported that they had appointed Dr. J. Fayrer to be a member of the Committee of Finance vice Dr. Crozier, who has gone to England. The undermentioned gentleman was named for ballot at the next meeting: S. Lobb, Esq., M. A. of the Presidency College, proposed by Mr. Cowell and seconded by Mr. Atkinson. With reference to a recommendation of the Council that Mr. E. Thomas be appointed Honorary Agent of the Society in place of the late Professor H. H. Wilson, the President stated as follows: "The Council have asked me to obtain the assent of the Meeting to their proposition to appoint Mr. E. Thomas to be their Honorary Agent in London. I need not explain that Mr. Thomas is an old and distinguished member of our Society, for it was only last year that the Society signified their appreciation of his reputation as a scholar and numismatist by electing him one of their Honorary members. In a recent letter I had asked him if he had any objections to my proposing to the Council his appointment as the successor of the late H. H. Wilson, and he has in reply readily assented. The post is one in which he will be in a position to be frequently of great service to us in England, and which I think it is for the interest of the Society to keep always filled. Its first incumbent, if I mistake not, was Colebrooke, who retired from it, and indeed from all literary life, under pressure of ill health in 1830. The next was H. H. Wilson, to whose active cooperation we are perhaps mainly indebted for the annual grant which was made to us more than twenty years ago by the home authorities. In now appointing Mr. Thomas, the Society will secure for itself the services of an Agent not less distinguished in his own special line of study than were Colebrooke and Wilson in theirs." The Meeting unanimously adopted the Council's recommendation. Communications were received 1. From the Under-Secretary to the Government of India a memorandum received from the Bombay Government regarding Captain Speke's expedition to Eastern Africa. The Secretary read the following extracts from the memorandum. Writing from Kazeh on the 24th January, 1861, Captain Speke anticipated that he would be prepared to set out in a few days to explore the Northern countries, and investigate the Victoria Nyanza with the view of determining whether or not the lake was the source of the Nile, and of following down any affluents until he arrived in Egypt. Should unforeseen obstacles arise he intended to endeavour to cross the Northern extremities of the Nyanza and reach Zanzibar. The expedition would attempt to reach the navigable Nile, the passage to Egypt appearing, from all the information which could be collected, the more easy and economical one, and the more advantageous for the future opening of the country, and this plan would only be relinquished in the event of Mr. Petherick or any other traveller arriving at Uganda by the passage of the Nile before him. Captain Speke, and his companion, Captain Grant, had been most hospitably received at Kazeh by Sheikh Moosa M'zari [a native of Surat] a trusted friend of the former expedition. The Sheikh actively assisted in procuring porters, and he generously gave the expedition the services of all his servants, and with this aid Captain Speke was enabled to advance. The Sheikh would travel in company with the expedition as far as Uganda. 2. From Babu Gopi Nath Sen, Abstract of Meteorological Observations taken at the Surveyor General's Office in August last. 3. From E. Blyth, Esq., a memoir on the Rats and Mice of India. 4. From Sir Robert H. Schomburgk, a paper containing an account of a visit to Xiengmai the principal city of the Laos or Shan States. The Secretary read the paper. It will be printed in the Journal. Major Walker read some selections from the last report to Government, on the operations of the Trigonometrical Survey, which was submitted at the last meeting and which will be published in a forthcoming number of the Journal. He then said that he was glad to avail himself of the recent publication of the fourth, and last, of Archdeacon Pratt's papers on the effect of Local Attraction on the operations of the Trigonometrical Survey to acknowledge the obligations of the survey to Mr. Pratt, for his theoretical investigations of this very abstruse and difficult subject. There was a time when the subject seemed likely to become one of the numerous vexatæ quæstiones of science. Before Mr. Pratt commenced his investigations, attempts had been made to prove that the influence of Himalayan attraction had been overlooked by Colonel Everest, and that it exists to an extent which would seriously impair the value of the Indian arc, in determining the figure of the earth. But Colonel Everest had paid considerable attention to the influence of mountain attraction in deflecting the plumb line. one of Colonel Lambton's astronomical stations Presidency, because of its proximity to mountains. the Cape of Good Hope he wrote a very able paper, much attention in the scientific world, on the effects of the attraction of certain mountains, in the vicinity of the extremities of LaCaillies's arc, near Cape Town. The difference between the ellipticity of this arc, and of those measured in Europe and Russia, was sufficient to give rise to the conjecture that the figures of the Northern and Southern hemispheres were considerably different. But Colonel Everest shewed clearly that the discrepancy was probably caused by the proximity of mountains to the ends of the arc. He suggested its. He had rejected in the Madras During a visit to which attracted extension to points where there would probably be no attraction, and he predicted that it would then give a figure coinciding with those obtained in Europe. These suggestions have been entirely verified by the subsequent remeasurement and prolongation of LaCaillies's arc by Sir Thomas MacClear, the Government Astronomer at the Cape. Major Walker mentioned these circumstances to shew that the officers entrusted with the survey of India had not been blindly ignoring the influence of mountain attraction. It was believed to have been avoided, in great measure, by placing the northern extremity of the arc at Kaliana, a distance of upwards of sixty miles from the Himalayas. Colonel Everest considered that the residual errors were about 5'' in the northern section of the arc and 3" in the southern section, by which amounts he conceived the astronomical amplitude to be less than the geodesic in the upper section, and greater in the lower. Major Walker observed that Archdeacon Pratt's early investigations shew that the Himalayas may have a far greater effect in disturbing the plumb-line than had formerly been supposed, thus raising a doubt of the scientific accuracy of the survey operations and questioning the correctness of the relative situations of places, as given in the maps. But the Archdeacon's last paper has dispelled this doubt, by proving the following elegant theorem that the length of an actual arc, measured on the surface of the earth, however altered its form may be by geological changes, is nevertheless sensibly equal to what would have been obtained had the original curvature been undisturbed; or, in other words that no possible change of curvature can disturb the normal length of the arc. Hence the relative mapping of a country is free from all error arising from local attraction. If the positions on the map are too far north or south, they will all be so to an equal degree, and consequently are relatively accurate. The Archdeacon's investigations are further useful in establishing the fact that while the positive attraction of the Himalayas draws the plummet northwards, the negative attraction of the Indian Ocean has a similar effect. Thus, in moving from Cape Comorin to the Himalayas, the influence of the ocean diminishes, while that of the Hills increases, and hence there is a tendency to equalize the resultant attraction, at every point between the ocean, and the Himalayas. Major |