NOTES. 



43i 



never dreamed of changing. One of the con- 

 ditions was, and is, that her patroness shall 

 provide a husband for her. Often enough, 

 also, the child of such a protegee succeeds to 

 her place when old enough, and thus very 

 pleasing relations are established between 

 families of different status. . . . The practice 

 of adopting girl-children to train as servants 

 becomes more and more common as slaves 

 become scarcer. ... A class of domestic 

 servants is being formed which, in due time, 

 will replace the slaves. But transformations 

 of the sort are very, very slow in the East. 

 Meanwhile the process is very disagreeable, 

 even shocking, to Moslem housewives, and it 

 is not at all surprising that they should pay 

 heavily and run some risk to obtain a negro 

 who is all their own." 



Lake Beaches. In his discussion of the 

 beaches and their correlative moraines of 

 Lake Erie, in the American Journal of Sci- 

 ence, Mr. Frank Leverett shows that the be- 

 lief of geologists now is that the phenomena 

 do not demand a submergence of the land 

 during the closing stages of the Glacial epoch ; 

 that, instead of a depression, there was a 

 greater altitude than in the earlier part of 

 the period ; and that the result of investiga- 

 tion has been to reduce the noteworthy lakes 

 connected with the closing stages of glacia- 

 tion in Ohio to the one bounded by the beach 

 lines that were recognized by the Ohio Geo- 

 logical Survey. The examination of the phe- 

 nomena in detail leads to the conclusion that 

 Lake Erie, in its earlier stages, was but a 

 small body of water, its size being conditioned 

 by the position of the retreating ice-sheet and 

 by the height of the western rim of the basin 

 it occupied. 



NOTES. 



The arrangements for the meeting of 

 the American Association, to be held in 

 Rochester, N. Y., in August, are nearly com- 

 pleted. The meeting will be opened on 

 Tuesday evening, the 17th, with an address 

 by Secretary F. W. Putnam. President Jo- 

 seph Le Conte will deliver an address on 

 Wednesday evening, the 18th ; a reception 

 will be given the Association by the ladies 

 of the city at the Powers Art Gallery on 

 Thursday, the 19th ; and a public lecture 

 will be given on Friday evening. The busi- 

 ness meetings will be held in the university. 



The Saturday excursions will include visits 

 to Niagara Falls, Portage, Mount Morris, 

 Canandaigua Lake, and Watkins Glen, and 

 the long excursion will be to the Adirondack 

 region. 



The second annual session of the School 

 of Applied Ethics will be held at Plymouth, 

 Mass., July Gth to August 17th. The pro- 

 gramme of instruction includes six courses 

 of five lectures each in the History of Relig- 

 ions ; seven courses in Economics ; and a 

 series of fifteen lectures by Prof. William 

 Wallace, of Oxford, on Variations of the 

 Moral Standard, illustrated by the History of 

 Ethical Theories ; with four other courses in 

 Ethics. Applications may be made to the 

 secretary, S. Burns Weston, 118 South 12th 

 Street, Philadelphia, 



In Uruguay, according to Admiral Ken- 

 nedy, of H. M. S. Ruby, barbed wire has 

 played a part in suppressing revolutions, as 

 it is not easy to march troops over a country 

 intersected by it. 



A Postschide is to be established at Leip- 

 sic for the special training of post-office as- 

 sistants, and eventually also of postmasters. 

 The course of instruction will embrace, be- 

 sides the usual branches, the subjects be- 

 longing to the postal service. 



According to Dr. R. W. Shufeldt's ob- 

 servations of the Navajo belt-weavers, curves 

 are never found in the figure-patterns on the 

 belts or blankets, but horizontal stripes, 

 diagonals, and the lozenge are interwoven 

 with a variety that appears to be almost end- 

 less in the matter of design. The leading 

 colors used are red, brilliant orange-yellow, a 

 blue, and by combination a green, and black, 

 white and gray. 



The results of the observations of Mr. H. 

 C. Russell, of Sydney, on the Grouping of 

 Stars in the Southern Part of the Milky Way 

 were described by him at the Australasian 

 Association as tending to diminish the value 

 of the rifts in the discussion of stellar distri- 

 bution. 



The detailed meteorological observations, 

 made under the direction of H. B. de Saus- 

 sure simultaneously on the Col du Geant, at 

 Geneva, and at Chamounix, in July, 1788, 

 have been published in the memoirs of the 

 Physical Society of Geneva. Only the means 

 of a part of the observations were pub- 

 lished by De Saussure in his Voyages dans 

 les Alpes. 



The nest and egg of a bird-of-paradise 

 have been found by two Australian gentle- 

 men on an island off the coast of Queens- 

 land, and have been described by Mr. A. J. 

 Campbell in the Victoria Field Naturalists' 

 Club. The hen was watched till she flew 

 into the crown of a pandanus tree, where her 

 head could be seen as she sat on her nest. 



