S7 6 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



At a recent meeting held at Madrid, to 

 consider the celebration of the four-hun- 

 dredth anniversary of the discovery of Amer- 

 ica by Columbus, a grand committee was 

 elected which will act in concert with the 

 Spanish Government, and a committee previ- 

 ously appointed, and presided over by the 

 Duke of Veragua, a lineal descendant of 

 Columbus, and the present Minister of Pub- 

 lic Works. It is proposed that the cente- 

 nary shall be celebrated, if possible, at Ma- 

 drid. Genoa is also making preparations to 

 celebrate the same event. 



The annual address of Mr. Charles F. 

 Cox, as President of the New York Micro- 

 scopical Society, is published in the Journal 

 of the Society for April, 1890. The subject 

 is Protoplasm and the Cell Doctrine, and the 

 essay is a historical account of the develop- 

 ment of scientific views in this field. 



A bill has been introduced by Sir Henry 

 Roscoe in the British House of Commons 

 authorizing the Board of Managers of any 

 public elementary school to provide techni- 

 cal instruction for its pupils at any suitable 

 place, attendance at which shall be deemed 

 to be attendance at the public elementary 

 school. 



The influence of ground-water and shal- 

 low wells in relation to public health is dis- 

 cussed in a recent paper by Dr. W. B. 

 Featherstone. A considerable number of 

 diseases are shown to be associated with 

 defects in ground-water and its impurities, 

 as well as of shallow well water; but the 

 exact amount of influence exercised by these 

 properties on the production and spread of 

 disease has yet to be measured. 



Wood-stone is the name of a new com- 

 pound material composed of sawdust and 

 calcined magnesia. The mixture, having 

 been well worked up with water, is put into 

 molds and pressed into whatever shape may 

 be desired. It is incombustible and imper- 

 meable to water, is susceptible of a fine 

 polish, and is adaptable to numerous uses. 



OBITUARY NOTES. 



Dr. Herman Shfltz, Director of the Ob- 

 servatory and Professor of Astronomy at 

 Upsala from 1878 to 1888, died in Stockholm 

 May 8th. Of his numerous astronomical 

 publications, the best known is Micrometri- 

 cal Observations on five hundred nebula?, 

 which was published in England in 1874. 



Prof. W. K. Sullivan, President of 

 Queen's College, Cork, well known as a chem- 

 ist, died May 12th, aged sixty-eight years. 

 He succeeded Sir Robert Kane to the presi- 

 dency of the college in 1872. 



Mr. John Gunn, of Norwich, an English 

 geologist of local reputation, died during the 



last week in May, in his eighty-ninth year. 

 He was regarded as the chief authority on 

 the formation known as the Cromer Forest 

 Bed, and a most indefatigable and success- 

 ful collector of its organic contents, and 

 had an extensive knowledge of all the geo- 

 logical formations of East Anglia. He 

 was also interested in antiquarian research. 

 He made a fine collection of fossils illus- 

 trating especially the Pliocene mammalian 

 life of England, and presented it to the 

 Norfolk and Norwich Museum, where it oc- 

 cupies the " Gunn Room." 



Mr. W. S. Dallas, Assistant Secretary, 

 etc., to the Geological Society of London, 

 and editor of its Quarterly Journal, died 

 May 28th, aged sixty-six years. In early 

 life he became interested in zoology, more 

 particularly in the study of insects, relative 

 to which he published many papers in the 

 Transactions of the Entomological Society. 

 In 1851-52 he published a catalogue of the 

 hemipterous insects in the British Museum, 

 and in 1856 a Natural History of the Ani- 

 mal Kingdom. His later labors were in the 

 direction of scientific literature rather than 

 of original research — of translating, editing, 

 etc. 



The death is announced of Dr. F. Solt- 

 nedel, Director of the Botanical Station at 

 Samarang, in Java. He was conspicuous in 

 the field of applied botany. 



Dr. Karl Jacob Loenig, Professor of 

 Chemistry at the University of Breslau, and 

 author of several eminent works on chemis- 

 try, died March 27th, in his eighty-eighth 

 year. 



Victor, Ritter von Zepharotich, Pro- 

 fessor of Mineralogy at the German Univer- 

 sity of Prague, died February 24th. He was 

 author of the Mineralogical Dictionary of the 

 Austrian Empire, and of many valuable min- 

 eralogical and crystal lographical works. He 

 was fifty-nine years of age. 



Dr. Kap.l Emil von Schafhautl, Pro- 

 fessor of Geology, Mining, and Metallurgy in 

 the University of Munich, died in February 

 last, in the eighty-seventh year of his age. 

 He was an eminent physicist and geologist, 

 and a theoretical musician of some note, and 

 was keeper of the geognostic collection of 

 the Bavarian state, and a member of the 

 Academy of Sciences. 



The death is announced of M. Soret, an 

 eminent chemist and physicist, of Geneva, 

 Switzerland. He was associated with Reg- 

 nault in his researches on vapors and de- 

 terminations of the specific heats of the 

 gases. He afterward published in Switzer- 

 land a work on the density of ozone, and 

 investigated the rotatory polarization of 

 quartz. Another of his publications relates 

 to the cause of the blue coloration of the 

 Lake of Geneva. 



