298 ANNUAL RECORD OF SCIENCE AND INDUSTRY. 



mission. The city is outside of that is, north of the great 

 Chinese wall, and the missionary establishment is on the 

 most extensive scale, with a line church, and a school formed 

 of poor Chinese children. The Christians living there, how- 

 ever, are not Mongolians, but the descendants of Christian 

 Chinese who emigrated from China in order to escape the 

 persecution of the Chinese authorities. 



The contributions of Fritsche to the correct geography 

 and hypsometry of the country traversed are numerous and 

 reliable. One of the most interesting series of observations 

 made by him consists in a large number of determinations 

 of positions and altitudes of peaks belonging to a range of 

 mountains which appears upon one or two old charts under 

 the name of Petseha, but is not generally given upon our 

 maps. The height of the principal peak seems to be about 

 1500 meters, instead of 14,000 feet, as was reported by the 

 Archimandrite Palladius as having been given him by the 

 Chinese authorities. No snow-clad mountains are known in 

 the entire region. At two stations Siw r antsee and Chus- 

 chay he was able to secure missionary observers, and prom- 

 ises from them of continuous meteorological observations. 

 Magnetic observations were made by Fritsche throughout 

 his entire expedition with a new and excellent instrument 

 constructed by Brauer, according to the plan of Wild ; and 

 these afford him the basis for a short chapter on the secular 

 variation of the declination, inclination, and intensity, as 

 shown from the observations that have been made in China 

 and Siberia since the journeys by Humboldt. The results 

 in general confirm those given by him in an earlier work 

 published some five years ago. The annual change in the 

 magnetic intensity appears to have remained nearly constant 

 in Western Siberia, but to have doubled in China and East- 

 ern Siberia. 



major powell's final report. 



In the summer of 1867 Professor J. W. Powell, of Bloom- 

 ington, Illinois, undertook to make an examination of the 

 fossil-bone region of the Bad Lands of the Niobrara and 

 White River, north of the Platte, but, owing to threatened 

 hostilities on the part of the Indians, the military author- 

 ities declined to permit him to run the risk of entering their 



