NOTES, 



143 



they are liable to be interfered with by 

 unfavorable atmospheric conditions, so as 

 to greatly reduce their radii of visibility. 

 With electric lights having the powers that 

 M. Allard proposes to apply, the period 

 during which ,the penetrative power may 

 be deficient will be reduced to sixty days, 

 or one sixth of the year on the ocean, and to 

 twenty-four nights, or one fifth, on the Med- 

 iterranean coast. The cost of the proposed 

 changes is estimated at seven million francs, 

 or eight million francs if sound-signals are 

 also provided. It is believed that the cost 

 of keeping up the light after the change is 

 made will be several times less than that of 

 maintaining the oil-lamps. 



NOTES. 



A THERMOMETRic burcau has been es- 

 tablished, in connection with the Winches- 

 ter Observatory of Yale College, for the 

 more accurate graduation and verification 

 of thermometers. The thermometers in com- 

 mon use are, as a rule, not graduated with 

 any approach to scientific accuracy, and 

 the best of them, however exact they may 

 be when new, increase their readings rapid- 

 ly within a few months, so as to become 

 as much as 2" in error in the course of a 

 year. This is a matter of particular impor- 

 tance with clinical thermometers, of which 

 several thousand are bought every year ; 

 and to instruments of this class special at- 

 tention is paid. 



The late Mr. Frank Buckland has be- 

 queathed his valuable museum of " Econom- 

 ic Fish Culture " to the British nation, with 

 the sum of 5,000 to go to the nation on the 

 death of Mrs. Buckland, to be applied to 

 the foundation of a professorship of eco- 

 nomic pisciculture in connection with the 

 Buckland Museum and the Science and Art 

 Department at South Kensington. 



A SUGGESTION to employ artificial lights 

 for the capture and destruction of noxious 

 insects has found considerable favor. A 

 medal was awarded at the last exhibition of 

 agriculture and insectology in Paris for a 

 lamp especially adapted for catching insects. 

 The electric litrht has been found to be a 

 very effective insect-trap, and its eventual 

 coming into use for this purpose in bug- 

 infected gardens and orchards may be re- 

 garded as among the things that are pos- 

 sible. 



Arteriography is the name which Dr. 

 Comte, a French army-surgeon, has given 

 to a novel application of tattooing as a help 



in the saving of lives. Believing that a 

 large proportion of deaths by bleeding 

 from wounds received in battle might be 

 avoided if the men knew just where to apply 

 compression to the arteries till the surgeon 

 should come. Dr. Comte has marked the 

 most suitable points for the application by 

 tattooed designs on the skins of the men of 

 his regiment. 



Mr. Thomas Meehan, of Philadelphia, has 

 observed that the Yucca gloriosa has the 

 property of collecting moisture on the outer 

 surface of its flowers to such an extent 

 that drops will fall to the ground. In the 

 plant in which this peculiarity was first 

 noticed, the whole outside of the flowers 

 was covered with moisture ; it accumulated 

 in drops at the tip of each leaf of the peri- 

 anth, and the under leaves showed by their 

 appearance that a dropping of water had 

 been going on for some time. Mr. Meehan 

 could not decide whether the liquid was an 

 exudation from the leaves, or had been con- 

 densed from the atmosphere through some 

 special property of the plant, like that 

 which is attributed to the rain-tree [Fithece- 

 lobium saman) of Peru. 



Carl Weyprecht, one of the command- 

 ers of the Austro-Hungarian Polar Expedi- 

 tion in the Tegetthoff, which discovered 

 Franz-Josef Land in 1874, died in Vienna, 

 March 29th. 



MM. F. FouQUE and A. Michel Levy have 

 produced an artificial basalt identical in all 

 respects with the natural basalts, and par- 

 ticularly so with that of the plateaux of Au- 

 vergne. The experiment is regarded as es- 

 tablishing the igneous origin of the basalts. 



M. Lefranc has called attention in the 

 "Journal dePharmacie" to woolen mat- 

 tres:^es as a possibly fertile tndiis for dis- 

 ease. In a large city such mattresses may 

 represent millions of fleeces that have been 

 only partly cleared of grease, and have, 

 moreover, been affected by long use through 

 successive generations. They are rarely effi- 

 ciently purified, and might become an active 

 medium for the propagation of infection. 



Sabino Berthelot, an eminent natural- 

 ist, died at Santa Cruz de Teneriffe in No- 

 vember last, in the eighty-seventh year of 

 his atre. He had made the Canarv Islands 

 his home for sixty years, and had done 

 much to increase the knowledge of their nat- 

 ural history. His principal work was the 

 preparation, in conjunction with Mr. Philip 

 Barker Webb, of a series of six quarto il- 

 lustrated volumes on that subject ("Nai- 

 tural History of the Canary Islands " ), 

 which was published in 1828. He was con- 

 sul of France, and a member of the princi- 

 pal scientific societies of the Canaries and of 

 Europe. 



