576 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY, 



pervading all the phenomena in question of 

 a second self, to which the name subliminal 

 (under the threshold) has been given, that 

 acts and perceives in manners entirely un- 

 known to our ordinary everyday conscious- 

 ness. 



The French colony of New Caledonia is 

 troubled by the depredations of deer, which 

 midtiply with marvelous rapidity and invade 

 the plantations, where they do great mis- 

 chief, even climbing up into the granaries. 

 A curious feature of the trouble is that the 

 deer are not native, but are the offsprmg of 

 a present made to the colony by the Queen 

 of England. The R(vue Scientifique draws 

 from this fact a lesson that it is well to be 

 cautious concerning the gifts of animals we 

 may bestow upon other countries, and not 

 make them without advice from experts con- 

 cerning the conditions and contingencies. 

 Kabbits in Australia, the mongoose in Ja- 

 maica, and the New Caledonian deer afford 

 instances in which such gifts, made with the 

 best intentions, have resulted disastrously. 

 It is said that the farmers of the State of 

 Maine have also suffered from the incursions 

 of deer since restrictions were placed upon 

 the hunting of them. 



Women are gradually working their way 

 into the German universities, where a few 

 have been admitted, not as of right, but as 

 of favor. Five ladies have up to this time 

 taken the doctor's degree at Heidelberg. 

 One of them, an American, made so brilliant 

 a success that she was at once offered an 

 appointment at the German zoological sta- 

 tion near Naples. 



The curious fact is noted by Mr. C. C. 

 Vermeule, in his forest studies of New 

 Jersey, that less disposition to destroy and 

 waste the forests is shown by the native 

 population than by the immigrants from 

 countries where the control and management 

 of the forests are, on the whole, superior to 

 our modern methods. 



The gypsies those of Hungary, at least 

 are not all wanderers. Of 274,940 repre- 

 sentatives of that race enumerated in 1893, 

 243,432 were described as sedentary, 20,406 

 as semi-sedentary, and only 8,938 as nomads, 

 while 2,164 were soldiers or prisoners. All 

 of them profess one of the various forms of 

 Christianity of the people among whom they 

 dwell, and only 82,405 are still able to talk 

 gypsy dialects. Seventeen thousand of them 

 are musicians. 



Prof. Emil Du Bois-Reymond, of the 

 University of Berlin, one of the most famous 

 and many sided German men of science, died, 

 December 26th, aged seventy-eight, having 

 been professor at Berlin since 1865. He had 

 been suffering for several months from gen- 

 eral debility, but his death, when it came, 

 was sudden, though not unexpected. He 

 was one of the earliest and most vigorous 



champions of the doctrine that biological 

 phenomena are governed by physical and 

 chemical laws, and ranked alongside of Tyn- 

 dall and Huxley as a lecturer and popularizer 

 of the natural sciences. Several of his ablest 

 addresses have been published in the Month- 

 ly, including the Seven World Problems and 

 The Limits of Our Knowledge of Nature 

 perhaps the two most famous of all. A 

 sketch of his life and work to that time was 

 published, with a portrait, in the Popular 

 Science Monthly (vol. xiii) for July, 1878. 



We have learned of the death of the 

 Hon. Horatio Hale, of Clinton, Ontario, one 

 of our most distinguished anthropologists, 

 particularly in the study of aboriginal lan- 

 guages, but have received no details of the 

 event. He was the author of several valu- 

 able articles in the Monthly. 



Dr. Henry Tremen, formerly Director of 

 the Botanic Garden at Peradenyia, Ceylon, 

 who died October 10th, in his fifty- third 

 year, wa.s author of the Flora of the County 

 of Middlesex, England, and, in conjunction 

 with Prof. Bentley, of a standard work on 

 Medical Botany ; and had prepared a com- 

 plete Flora of Ceylon, of which three parts 

 have appeared. 



August Trecul, who recently died in his 

 seventy-sixth year, a distinguished plant 

 anatomist and author of important tech- 

 nical studies in his specialty, spent three 

 years in Texas, collecting material for the 

 Paris Museum, and studying the textile 

 plants used by the Indians. 



Captain John Gregory Boorke, of the 

 United States Cavalry, who died June 8th, be- 

 sides being a gallant soldier, was an ethnolo- 

 gist of much repute. He had done much 

 work in connection with the Bureau of 

 Ethnology, and spent five years from 1886 

 in Washington compiling the ethnographic 

 notes he had collected during his service in 

 the West, and pursuing collateral studies. 

 His most famous work was on the Snake 

 Dance of the Moquis of Arizona, which at- 

 tracted great attention all over the world 

 and brought into prominence a branch of 

 anthropology which had been relatively lit- 

 tle studied. He was also author of works 

 on the Medicine-men of the Apaches, and 

 Scatalogic Rites of All Nations. 



Hugo Gylden, Astronomer of the Royal 

 Swedish Academy of Sciences and Director 

 of the Observatory of Stockholm, who died 

 November 9th, ranked with M. Tisserand 

 as one of the most illustrious mathematical 

 astronomers on the European continent. He 

 was the son of Prof. Gylden, of the Uni- 

 versity of Helsingfors, where he was born in 

 1841. He was best known by the work 

 which he had carried on since the death of 

 Leverrier on the general theory of perturba- 

 tions, and by his great treatise on the abso 

 lute orbits of the eight principal planets. 



