NINTH ORDINARY MEETING. ROYAL INSTITUTION, 24th FEBRUARY, 1868. The REV. H. H. HIGGINS, M.A., VICE-PRESIDENT, in the Chair. Messrs. Lewis Hughes, Charles W. Jones, John Marsh, and John Elliott, were unanimously elected Ordinary Members. An unusual number of members and friends, including ladies, were present at this meeting, as it had been announced that Dr. Collingwood, late Honorary Secretary of this Society, would give an account of his recent scientific voyage to the China Seas. The address, which was delivered extempore, described more particularly "The Physical and Ethnological Features of the Island of Formosa," and was illustrated by a variety of maps and sections, and an extensive series of landscape drawings by the author, illustrative as well of the geological features as of the picturesque beauties in the scenery of Formosa. Dr. Collingwood has since published a full account of his voyage, under the title of "Rambles of a Naturalist on the Shores and Waters of the China Sea." The work was exhibited to the Society by Mr. F. Archer, at the Eleventh Ordinary Meeting. L TENTH ORDINARY MEETING. ROYAL INSTITUTION, 9th MARCH, 1868. J. A. PICTON, Esq., F.S.A., VICE-PRESIDENT, Ladies were again invited to attend this meeting. Captain Sir James Anderson, Associate of the Society, was unanimously elected an Honorary Member, and Mr. James Holme, Jun., an Ordinary Member. A paper was read "On the Rationality of the Lower Animals," by Mr. W. Bromham. ELEVENTH ORDINARY MEETING. ROYAL INSTITUTION, 23rd MARCH, 1868. J. A. PICTON, Esq., F.S.A., VICE-PRESIDENT, Mr. Wm. Dixon was unanimously elected an Ordinary Member, and Captain David Scott, an Associate of the Society. Mr. T. J. MOORE brought before the Society the following objects:-A vertebra and samples of Baleen of the Staperayder, or Rorqual, forming part of a donation to the Free Museum lately made by Mr. H. Bird, and introduced to the meeting that gentleman and Captain Bottemanne, of Leyden, both of whom communicated various observations made on this species on the coast of Iceland, where these whales are abundant, and where one was measured 105 feet in length. Also a collection of butterflies from the Cameroons, presented to the Free Museum by the Rev. Quintin W. Thomson, who collected them during several years' residence as a missionary in that region of West Africa. Also the head of a large fish, apparently belonging to the Maigres (family Scionido), taken off the Cape of Good Hope by Captain Fletcher, ship Sumatra, by whom it had been presented. Also the under jaw of a fish from the River Plate, presented to the Museum by Captain Batty, per Mr. R. J. Keen. The two sides of this jaw are united at the chin by a hinge joint, of very remarkable and beautiful construction. It belongs to a fish called the Dorál at the River Plate, and on being compared with a jaw of the Sudis gigas of the Amazon river seemed to be identical with that species, which attains to a large size, being one of the largest fresh-water species in existence. Also a very fine lacquered bowl from Japan, beautifully ornamented with figures of fishes in gold relief on a vermilion ground, the figures being drawn with great skill and truthfulness to nature, The bowl had been kindly lent for exhibition by Mr. Cross, of Park-lane. The following Paper was then read: ON CERTAIN THEOSOPHIC IDEAS OF THE EAST. BY THE REV. W. KENNEDY MOORE. Ix every development of humanity, we must take into account the two related elements of the inward and the outward, what man brings in him and what he finds without him. In an individual life, we have a series of activities which are the resultant of these two things, the original germ of character and the circumstances through which it has been developed. When Themistocles was told by a Seriphian that he was only a great man because of the city he belonged to, he retorted, both wittily and truly, that his reproacher would not have been a great man though he had been born at Athens, nor would he himself have been great had it been his misfortune to be born at Seriphos. Two men differing originally would not live the same life because placed in the same circumstances, nor would the life of a certain man be the same had his circumstances been different. Our character is not a simple effluence, like the springing of a fountain, much less a simple moulding, like the casting of a bronze statue. It is a development from within, modified by the pressure of external forces. The series of past deeds, constituting our historic life, marks the steps by which we have come from the original germ to the present phase of our being. Those deeds themselves have a power in determining to some extent those that follow. Our acts form an incrustation, so to speak, which confines an absolute freedom, just as each successive incre ment to the shell of a mollusc fixes more rigidly the direction of its growth. These thoughts apply equally to races as to individuals. Humanity at large is a unit, the development of which forms all past history, written or unrecorded; and the present character of which as a whole has been determined by that past history. That history shows how the nature we have has been drawn out and acted on by the whole system of forces, natural or supernatural, to which it has been subjected. What humanity is capable of in the developments of the future, whether as a race on earth, or in the individual being in some other world, it is utterly impossible for us to say, for we only know ourselves in so far as we have already developed. What powers yet unfolded may lie hid in the depths of our nature, we know no more than a caterpillar, feeding on a rotting leaf, contemplates the future glory of its purple wings, or than a drop of water is conscious of the tremendous electric forces that slumber within it. A particular tribe of men give us a form of humanity more specialised than the race at large, but of course much less specialised than the individual man; and with the needful modifications, all that we have said applies also here. The Anglo-Saxons would not have developed into Englishmen had they settled in Italy; nor would the inhabitants of this island have been what they are, had they derived their origin from a Finnish Stock. A particular application of the general truth set forth above, may be made in reference to intellectual products. In a work of genius, we note the shaping mind and the materials it found whereon to work. No other man but Shakespere had the peculiar power which enabled him to write King Henry IV. But he would never have written it had not English history furnished Bolingbroke, Hotspur and Prince Harry, and had not English social life given him the |