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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



is possible, and described a new form of 

 cable with which the author proposed to con- 

 nect England and Germany. With such a 

 cable across the Atlantic, he claimed, treble 

 or quadruple the number of words per hour 

 now practicable might be transmitted with 

 the same weight of material. 



Dr. C. Le Neve Foster, her Majesty's In- 

 spector of Mines, while visiting the Snaefell 

 lead mine, Isle of Man, after a recent disas- 

 trous explosion there, was, by a series of ac- 

 cidents, exposed to poisoning by carbonic- 

 oxide gas for about two hours, until he was 

 taken out on the verge of death. There were 

 several of the party who had to be taken up 

 one at a time, and he was the last to go. 

 For an hour and a half he recorded notes of 

 his feelings while sinking under the influence 

 of the poison, the last entry giving the time 

 he reached the top. Happily, he recovered. 

 " The world," says Nature, " could ill spare 

 a man with such sterling qualities, and sci- 

 ence would grieve to lose an investigator who 

 devoted what seemed to be his last moments 

 to extending knowledge for the ' benefit of 

 others.' " Such heroism would have won 

 immortal fame for a military man. 



Prof. Bessey, in the American Natural- 

 ist, criticises some recent botanical publica- 

 tions for employing English units of meas- 

 urements, and urges botanical writers to 

 insist upon the use of metric measures 

 throughout. This would all be very well, but 

 that there are some clear-headed people who 

 insist that our system should not be super- 

 seded by any but the best, and who still be- 

 lieve that the metric system has not yet 

 proved itself to be that. If it is really the 

 best, it will work its way without special 

 urging. 



Mr. E. p. Martin, of the Iron and Steel 

 Institute, observed at its annual spring meet- 

 ing, 1897, that American steel makers excel 

 enormously those of Great Britain in the 

 output they obtain from their appliances. 

 They have thus, in spite of the high wages 

 that prevail in America, by working in this 

 wholesale manner brought the cost of pro- 

 duction to a very low ebb, so that it is now 

 a question not how much steel British pro- 

 ducers should send to America, but how far 

 they can meet American competition within 

 their own boundaries. 



Sir Augustus W. Franks, President of 

 the English Society of Antiquaries, who died 

 in May, in his seventy- second year, early de- 

 veloped a taste for mediaeval archffiology, on 

 which he was a leading authority ; became 

 an assistant in the British Museum in 1851, 

 and afterward Keeper of the Department of 

 British and Mediaeval Antiquities and of Eth- 

 nography, and was subsequently till his death 

 a member of the Standing Committee. His 

 principal discovery in archaeology was to dis- 

 tinguish the period of " late Celtic " antiqui- 



ties. Among his archaeological works are 

 Ornamental Glazing Quarries, Medallic Illus- 

 trations of British History, and an edition 

 of Kemble's Horaj Ferales, which his addi- 

 tions converted, Nature says, into a standard 

 work. 



Mr. a. D. Bartlett, Superintendent of 

 the London Zoological Gardens, whose death 

 has recently been announced, was originally 

 a hairdresser, and incidentally a bird fan- 

 cier, specially knowing in canary birds. He 

 obtained a position in connection with the 

 animals at the Crystal Palace, and afterward 

 at Regent's Park. He acquired a remark- 

 able acquaintance with animal life, its habits 

 and diet, and was a skillful appraiser of the 

 value of specimens. With all these accom- 

 plishments in zoology he was not a writer. 



Mr. Edward James Stone, for the past 

 twenty years Director of the Radcliffe Ob- 

 servatory, died in Oxford, England, May 9tb, 

 aged sixty-six years. Previous to assuming 

 charge of RadcUffe Observatory he had been 

 her Majesty's Astronomer at the Cape of 

 Good Hope. His special field was the " as- 

 tronomy of position,'' and his reputation was 

 mainly won by devotion to meridian observa- 

 tions. He studied the constants of nutation 

 and refraction, the proper motions of the 

 stars, the systematic differences between 

 stellar catalogues, the motion of the solar 

 system in space, and the sun's parallax ; and 

 contributed much to the organization of the 

 various astronomical expeditions to the south- 

 ern hemisphere. He had been President of 

 the Royal Astronomical Society, and held 

 other relations to several learned bodies. 



The death is announced at Gothenburg, 

 Sweden, of Baron Oscar Dickson, the wealthy 

 merchant who helped equip Nordenskiold's 

 first (1868) and bore the entire expense of his 

 second arctic expedition (18'72-"73). Baron 

 Dickson was also a large contributor to the 

 expeditions of 1875, 1876, and 1877. 



Matthew Ca^rey Lea, who died in Phila- 

 delphia on March 15th, devoted himself es- 

 pecially to the study of the chemistry of pho- 

 tography, and particularly to the action of 

 light, etc., on the salts of silver, and pub- 

 lished in 1887 a paper on the Identity of the 

 Photo-salts of Silver with the Material of the 

 Latent Photographic Image. He discovered 

 and described three allotropic states of silver. 

 He was a frequent contributor on this and 

 related subjects to the American Journal of 

 Science, had published fifty-four " more im- 

 portant " papers when elected to the National 

 Academy of Sciences in 1892, and issued in 

 1868 a Manual of Photography, which reached 

 a second edition in 1871. 



The deaths are announced abroad of 

 Julius von Sachs, the distinguished botan- 

 ical author, and of the veteran chemist, Frese- 

 nius. 



