NOTES. 



575 



begins in February and is completed in 

 March. In Mexico, Persia, and Syria, it 

 takes place in April ; in Asia Minor, Alge- 

 ria, Morocco, and parts of China and Japan, 

 in May, and after this in California, Spain, 

 Portugal, Italy, Greece, Sicily, and some of 

 the southern departments of France. In 

 July it begins in France, Austria, Hungary, 

 Poland, Russia, and the Middle United 

 States. The turn of Germany, Belgium, 

 Denmark, and Holland comes in August, 

 and of Scotland, Northern America, Swe- 

 den, and Northern Russia in September. 



Obituary. Mr. Thomas Potts James, 

 who died in February last, was one of our 

 oldest botanists, and was one of four Sul- 

 livant, Austin, James, and Lesquereux who 

 have distinguished themselves as specialists 

 in the mosses. He was born at Radnor, Penn- 

 sylvania, in 1803. Having been prevented 

 by circumstances from acquiring a collegiate 

 education, as he had intended, he settled 

 down in Philadelphia as a druggist, pursu- 

 ing science as a by-occupation. He was an 

 active member of the leading scientific so- 

 cieties of the city, and an officer of many of 

 them. He made himself familiar with the 

 phenogaraous vegetation of the neighbor- 

 hood of Philadelphia, and then devoted him- 

 self to the special study of the mosses, on 

 which he contributed several papers, in- 

 cluding the bryological department of the 

 report of Clarence King's exploration of the 

 fortieth parallel. He was associated with 

 Mr. Lesquereux in the preparation of the 

 " Manual of North American Mosses " which 

 Sullivant was about to prepare in connection 

 with Lesquereux when he died. Mr. James's 

 death leaves Mr. Lesquereux the only sur- 

 vivor of the four American bryologists, and 

 imposes upon him the task of completing 

 the " Manual." 



Mr. John Scott Russell, the construct- 

 or of the steamship Great Eastern, died at 

 Ventnor, Isle of Wight, June 8th, in the 

 seventy-fifth year of his age. He was the 

 son of a Scotch clergyman, and was destined 

 for the Church, but his taste for mechanics 

 and science led him in another direction. 

 He was graduated from Glasgow University 

 when sixteen years old ; was appointed tem- 

 porary Professor of Natural Philosophy in 



the University of Edinburgh in 1832 ; com- 

 municated to the British Association his 

 first paper on the nature of waves and the 

 best form of vessels in 1835 ; and received 

 the gold medal of the Royal Society of 

 Edinburgh for another paper bearing on 

 that subject two years later. As manager 

 of a ship-building establishment at Gree- 

 nock, he built several vessels after the ideas 

 he had worked out, and constructed the 

 Great Eastern in 184.6. He became a 

 Secretary of the Society of Arts in 1845. 

 In 1850 he was appointed a joint Secretary 

 of the Commission for the promotion of the 

 Great Exhibition of 1851, and was one of 

 the three chiefs in the furtherance of that 

 enterprise. His greatest engineering work 

 was the construction of the dome of the 

 Exhibition Building at Vienna in 1873, the 

 largest dome in the world. His last work 

 was the design for a high level bridge with 

 a span of one thousand feet, to cross the 

 Thames below London Bridge. He also 

 built the steamer that carries railway-trains 

 across the Lake of Constance ; and he con- 

 tributed many valuable papers to the litera- 

 ture of his profession. 



NOTES. 



Dr. Byron D. Halstead, of the " Amer- 

 ican Agriculturist," has published, in the 

 report of the Secretary of the Connecti- 

 cut Board of Agriculture, an important 

 memoir on " Fungi injurious to Vegetation, 

 with Remedies." In it he describes ergot, 

 the potato-rot, the rust of wheat, corn-smut, 

 the onion-smut, the apple-leaf fungus, the 

 peach-curl fungus, the American grape-mil- 

 dew, the lettuce-mildew, and the raspberry 

 fungus. 



M. Barral, Secretary of the National 

 Agricultural Society of France, has shown 

 recently that the beet-sugar industry is ad- 

 vancing steadily in Germany, but is sta- 

 tionary in France. A great change has 

 taken place in the character of the ap- 

 paratus used for extracting the sugar in 

 Germany, where hydraulic and continuous 

 presses have given way to a process of 

 extraction by diffusion, the apparatus for 

 which is much more simple. A similar 

 change is going on in France, but it has 

 made less advance there than in Germany 

 and Austria. The relative depression of 

 the industry in France is owing to two 

 causes : the quality of the beet-roots, which 



