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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



The Cockeville Iron and Steel Company 

 at Seraing, Belgium, employing about ten 

 thousand workmen of all kinds, maintains 

 free night-schools, which are attended by 

 about two thousand boys and adults from 

 the works ; an industrial or technical school, 

 which is attended by about eighty fitters and 

 boiler-makers, and by the clever young men 

 in all the departments ; and a mining-school, 

 with two hundred students. In the steel de- 

 partment all the young men under eighteen 

 are required to attend the night-school, and 

 those who willfully absent themselves are 

 liable to expulsion. At the great zinc-works 

 near Liege, also, the apprentices are re- 

 quired to attend evening-schools. 



The Davenport (Iowa) Academy of Sci- 

 ences has recently received from the Rev. J. 

 Gass a number of the peculiar " curved- 

 base " mound-builders' pipes. One of thern 

 is a finely carved stag's head, representing 

 the antlers bent around the bowl, in relief ; 

 another is an eagle, perched and holding 

 some small animal in its claws ; two others 

 are neatly carved birds ; another is a finely 

 sculptured black bear ; a sixth is supposed 

 to represent a fox, with the face turned 

 backward ; a seventh is a nondescript ani- 

 mal. Others are plain. The bear is cut 

 from a black stone ; the other pipes are in 

 ash-colored pipestonc or red catlinite. 



Up to the present date, we understand, 

 there have been received in answer to the 

 official letter of inquiry to the members of 

 the British Association, as to whether they 

 intended to go to Montreal or not, replies in 

 the affirmative from three hundred and for- 

 ty. Among these are a good many who may 

 be said to be really representative of Eng- 

 lish science, but, as might be expected, the 

 younger men are present in a larger pro- 

 portion than the older. Nature. 



Pierre Carbonnier, the distinguished 

 French pisciculturist, has recently died. He 

 was the author of several monographs on the 

 natural history and cultivation of fishes, and 

 contributed many papers to scientific jour- 

 nals. He was also director of the Aquarium 

 of the Trocadero at the French Exhibition 

 of 1878. 



Mr. YV. S. Barnard, of the Department 

 of Agriculture, observes that ants may do 

 valuable service as destroyers of larvae and 

 insects, particularly of the cotton - worm, 

 which appears to be fiercely attacked by all 

 the species. Even the smallest ant all alone 

 will assault and worry the worm, and the 

 insects appear plentiful in all the fields. 

 They dispatch the younger worms very 

 quickly, but the older ones more often es- 

 cape. Ants are, however, detrimental, though 

 indirectly, to vegetation, in that they protect 

 aphides or plant-lice by keeping off the in- 

 sects that would prey upon them. This they 



do for the sake of the honey-dew which 

 the lice excrete while sucking the juices of 

 the plants on which they live. It may be 

 noticed that plants suffer most from aphides 

 where ants are most numerous. 



The agricultural interests of the south 

 of France have been nearly ruined by the 

 substitution of the artificial alizarine for 

 madder in dyeing, the silk-worm disease, and 

 the phylloxera. The cultivation of madder 

 will have to be given up, for it can not 

 again be made profitable. The disasters 

 wrought by the silk-worm disease and the 

 phylloxera, now that remedies have been 

 discovered, may be repaired in time. To 

 expedite the recovery of the depressed agri- 

 culture, an extensive scheme of irrigation 

 has been arranged, by which water will be 

 drawn from the river Rhone in canals, and 

 distributed to all the country within reach. 



Mr. George Sutton, of Aurora, Indiana, 

 traces the causes of the floods in the West- 

 ern rivers to the great aerial currents which 

 bring on extensive storms independently of 

 local influences, now in the Missouri, now 

 in the Mississippi, now in the Ohio Valley, 

 in summer or winter as the storms may oc- 

 cur. Whenever four inches of water fall 

 suddenly over the seventy-seven thousand 

 square miles of the Ohio Valley, a rise of 

 sixty-three feet will be produced in the river 

 at Cincinnati ; and if the ground be deeply 

 frozen and heavily covered with snow, the 

 flood will be much higher. What the peo- 

 ple of the river valleys need to enable them 

 to avoid disaster from floods is to know be- 

 forehand the height to which the water will 

 rise, and this may be determined by ascer- 

 taining how much rain is falling. The Sig- 

 nal-Service Office could provide this informa- 

 tion by systematically collecting and pub- 

 lishing measurements of the rain-fall at 

 points in all parts of the water-sheds of the 

 large rivers. 



An Association of American Naturalists 

 was organized at Springfield, Massachusetts, 

 in April last, of which Professor A. Hyatt 

 was chosen president, Professors H. N. 

 Martin and A. S. Packard, Jr., vice-presi- 

 dents, and Professor S.F. Clarke, of Williams 

 College, secretary. Twenty-seven members 

 were enrolled. The Association adopted the 

 name of the " Society of Naturalists of the 

 Eastern United States." 



A noteworthy feature of the recent 

 third annual meeting of the German Geo- 

 graphical Society, at Frankfort, was the 

 presence, as the hero of the occasion, of the 

 youthful African explorer, Lieutenant Wiss- 

 mann, and by his side Dr. Riippell, now 

 eighty-nine years old, who explored Egypt 

 and' Nubia seventy years ago, and Abyssinia 

 and the other Red Sea countries twenty 

 years later. 



