432 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the use of the word bark in this sense, and 

 of cortex to designate certain parts of the 

 bark, indicated by a preceding adjective. 



roRMALDEHYDE is Commended by E. A. 

 de Schweinitz as possessing many good points 

 as a disinfectant. Anthrax, tetanus, etc., are 

 destroyed by it. It is a good deodorizer, for 

 which use only very small quantities are re- 

 quired, which may be applied by spraying. 

 It is a good preventive of decomposition. 

 The sharp odor it leaves, the length of time 

 necessary to remove which constitutes the 

 chief objection to its use, can be counter- 

 acted by spraying with ammonia. 



An experimental race was recently made 

 in a French office between a skillful type- 

 writer and an expert penman, the test being 

 the number of times a phrase of eight words 

 could be reproduced in five minutes. The 

 typewriter scored thirty-seven and the pen- 

 man twenty-three. 



From experiments on four coal-tar colors 

 methyl orange, coralline yellow, saffroline, 

 and magenta H. A. Weber has found that 

 no one of these affects both peptic and pan- 

 creatic digestion, but that each affects se- 

 riously one form or the other. In the dis- 

 cussion of this paper in the American Asso- 

 ciation it was held that too much importance 

 was attached to such experiments, for the 

 quantities of the substance in question used 

 in food stuffs are extremely small. 



It has been discovered by Surgeon-Major 

 Bruce that the tsetse fly the terror of equa- 

 torial and South African colonists, on account 

 of the deadly effect of its sting on cattle is 

 itself innocuous, and is fatal to animals only 

 when it introduces a flagellated infusorian or 

 haematozoon into the blood of its victims. 



The Botanical Society of America, at its 

 recent annual meeting at Buffalo, elected 

 Prof. John M. Coulter as its next president, 

 and Charles R. Barnes, of the University of 

 Wisconsin, secretary. President C. E. Bessey 

 was appointed to confer with a committee of 

 the National Educational Association regard- 

 ing the unification of requirements in botany 

 for entrance to colleges. The address of re- 

 tiring President Trelease was on Botanical 

 Opportunity. 



Prof. Benjamin Apthorp Gould, one of 

 the most eminent of American and of the 

 world's astronomers, died at his home in 

 Cambridge, Mass., November 26th, from the 

 effects of a fall downstairs. He was seventy- 

 two years old. An excellent sketch of his 

 life and the work which made him famous 

 and increased the glory of American science 

 was given by Erving Winslow, with a por- 

 trait, in the Popular Science Monthly for 

 March, 1882. An account of his great work 

 at the observatory of Cordoba, Argentine 

 Republic, given by Prof. W. A. Rogers in 

 1886, showed that he had then made two 



catalogues of stars one a general catalogue 

 extending to the south pole, containing 

 34,000 stars, and a catalogue of zone stars, 

 numbering 73,000 ; the two catalogues rep- 

 resenting about 250,000 observations, a large 

 part of the work on which was done by 

 Prof. Gould personally. The whole number 

 of stars in the two Cordoba catalogues was 

 nearly three times as great as in any cata- 

 logue that had been till that time con- 

 structed. The results of these observations 

 and those of the meteorological observations 

 instituted by Prof. Gould at places in all 

 parts of the Argentine Republic are em- 

 bodied in several large quarto volumes pub- 

 lished in sumptuous style by the Government 

 of that country. 



Sir Ferdinand ton Mijller, colonial 

 botanist of Victoria, who died in Melbourne, 

 October 9th, was born in Rostock in 1825, 

 wns educated at Kiel, and emigrated to Aus- 

 tralia in the hope of improving his health. 

 Having established his residence in Mel- 

 bourne, he became an indefatigable botanist 

 and explorer. He was a member of several 

 scientific expeditions in central and western 

 Australia, traversed much hitherto unknown 

 country, and made important collections. 

 He acted as an adviser to the Government in 

 matters of exploration, and took great inter- 

 est in the opening up of New Guinea to sci- 

 ence and commerce and in antarctic research. 

 He became director of the Melbourne Botanic 

 Garden in 1852, and when removed from 

 that post in 1873 to give way to a practical 

 gardener he was appointed colonial botanist. 

 He made elaborate studies of the Australian 

 flora, and when he found that he was not 

 able, on account of his remoteness from the 

 great libraries and collections of Europe, to 

 make the best of his material, he sent it to 

 Mr. Bentham, to be used in the preparation 

 of the Flora AustraUensis. His researches 

 lay in the direction of descriptive and applied 

 rather than morphological botany. He was 

 a fellow of the Royal Society, and received 

 one of its royal medals in 1863. He was a 

 knight of the C. M. G., was made a baron by 

 the King of Wiirtemberg, and received deco- 

 rations of some kind from nearly every civil- 

 ized government of which he was proud. 



In a paper on the sailing flight of birds, 

 read in the British Association, Mr. G. H. 

 Ryan pointed out that the support of a bird 

 indefinitely in the air without flapping its 

 wings is apparently contrary to the law of 

 the conservation of energy, and must be due 

 to either upward air currents, variation of 

 wind velocity with altitude, variation of 

 wind velocity with time, or the presence of 

 vortices in the air. In the discussion of 

 these theories, each of which was considered, 

 the author expressed the opinion that birds 

 in flight are often carried up by a side gust of 

 wind, and that this is one of the causes of the 

 phenomena presented by the sailing bird. 



