864 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



NOTES. 



At Bedford College (for women) in Eng- 

 land a very commendable addition to the 

 curriculum has recently been made in the 

 establishing of a special course in hygiene. 

 Students are required to devote themselves 

 for one session at least to physiology, bacte- 

 riology, chemistry, and physics, practically as 

 well as theoretically. It is ordinarily taught 

 in a disconnected, half-hearted way, and has 

 had to give way to subjects of much less 

 importance. It is to be hoped that institu- 

 tions in this country will take example from 

 Bedford College. 



In an article in the Chemical News on 

 the places of argon and helium among the 

 elements, R. M. Deeley says : The discovery 

 of these two elements having small atomic 

 weights has undoubtedly had the effect of 

 greatly shaking the confidence of chemists 

 in the periodic classification of the elements. 

 Indeed, a disposition is often shown to place 

 the periodic law altogether in the back- 

 ground and put undue faith in physical evi- 

 dence, which is admitted to be inconclusive. 

 The facts are then reviewed from the stand- 

 point of the periodic law, and the difficulties 

 of placing these new elements clearly shown. 

 He closed his paper with the following para- 

 graph : " Under such circumstances would 

 it not be well to follow the indications of 

 the periodic law and refraction equivalents, 

 rather than a doubtful theory concerning the 

 dynamics of the molecule ? " 



Three years ago M. Joseph F. Loubat, 

 of Paris, offered prizes of one thousand dol- 

 lars and four hundred dollars, to be awarded 

 every fifth year to authors of the best works 

 on the history, geography, archaeology, eth- 

 nology, philology, or numismatics of North 

 America within the period mentioned. A 

 committee composed of Prof. H. T. Peck, of 

 Columbia College ; Dr. D. G. Brinton, of the 

 University of Pennsylvania ; and Prof. Henry 

 C. Adams, the latter of whom was awarded 

 the prize in 1893, will adjudicate essays and 

 works for the next award in 1898. 



The defect in ordinary photographing 

 under which the colors fail to be rendered 

 in their proper proportions of black and 

 white is corrected in Mr. Bothamley's ortho- 

 chromatic photography, by the use of minute 

 quantities of certain dyes, which make the 

 plate more sensitive to orange, yellow, and 

 green rays. By this means colored objects of 

 all kinds, including landscapes, are rendered 

 in monochrome much more correctly. 



Prof. Bailey, of the Harvard Observa- 

 tory station at Arequipa, Peru, has discov- 

 ered from an examination of the photographs 

 obtained by him of certain globular star- 

 clusters that they contain an extraordinary 

 number of variable stars. This does not ap- 



pear, however, to be a general condition of 

 stellar clusters. In the cluster in Canes 

 Venatici, Messier 3, eighty-seven stars have 

 been proved to be variable. Sometimes the 

 variation amounts to two magnitudes or more, 

 and sometimes it does not appear to exceed 

 half a magnitude. Forty-six variables were 

 found in Messier 5. Some of these variables 

 have short periods, not more than a few 

 hours. All the cases included in these 

 counts were confirmed by the independent 

 examinations of the photographs by three 

 persons. Other instances of variation were 

 noticed, but are not included, because they 

 have not been sufficieutly tested. 



Michael S. Bebb, a specialist in the bot- 

 any of the willow, died in San Bernardino, 

 Cal., December 5th. He was a son of Gov- 

 ernor William Bebb, of Ohio, and was born 

 at Hamilton, in that State, in 1833. He be- 

 gan his botanical studies when a boy, led to 

 them probably by the flowers and shrubs in 

 his father's garden, and using Torrey's Re- 

 port upon the Flora of New York as his only 

 guide and text-book. His family afterward 

 removed to Illinois. Some years after the 

 close of the war he began the systematic 

 study of the willows, and made his first com- 

 munication on them to the American Natu- 

 ralist in 1874. He studied all the collections 

 of these plants made in North America ; de- 

 scribed the California species in Brewer 

 and Watson's Botany of California ; the 

 Southwestern species collected by Rothrock, 

 in Wheeler's Report ; the Colorado species 

 in Coulter's Manual of the Botany of the 

 Rocky Mountain Region ; the species of the 

 Eastern States in the last edition of Gray's 

 Manual ; determined the willows of British 

 America for the Geological Survey of Canada ; 

 and has contributed to botanical journals 

 many papers on American species of the 

 genus. 



Prof. George Lawson, of the chair of 

 Chemistry in Dalhousie College, Halifax, 

 N. S., who died in that city November 10th, 

 was author of several papers on Canadian 

 plants, published mostly in the Transactions 

 of the Royal Society of Canada, and was an 

 authority on the botany of the Maritime 

 Provinces. 



Dr. Francis Payne Poucher, a distin- 

 guished physician and botanist, died at 

 Charleston, S. C, where he was Professor 

 of Materia Medica and Therapeutics in the 

 Medical College, November 19, 1895, aged 

 about seventy years. He was editor of the 

 Charleston Medical Journal and Review, and 

 author of books on the Southern Fields and 

 Forests ; a Medico-botanical Catalogue of the 

 Plants and Ferns of St. John's, Berkeley, 

 S. C. ; A Sketch of the Medical Botany of 

 South Carolina; and the Medicinal, Poison- 

 ous, and Dietetic Properties of the Crypto- 

 gamic Plants of the United States. 



