864 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



dry provincial towns and cities have been 

 numerously attended by the leaders of sci- 

 ence and the educated public. Financially 

 the Association stands upon a very satisfac- 

 tory basis ; its capital amounts to about 

 sixty-five thousand dollars, and it is rapidly 

 growing. 



It is the opinion of Professor A. R. 

 Grote, expressed at the recent meeting of 

 the Entomological Club at Saratoga, that 

 the damage done by the employment of 

 Paris - green is greater than that done by 

 the potato-bug. This conclusion Professor 

 Grote has reached after a careful study of 

 the effects of Paris -green agriculturally 

 employed. He has found cases of the poi- 

 soning, by this agent, of horses, cattle, 

 sheep, poultry, and even human beings. 



Mr. S. H. Scudder's " Catalogue of Sci- 

 entific Works " is now completed, and has 

 been printed by the directors of the Har- 

 vard University Library. It is a book of 

 three hundred pages, and fifty pages of in- 

 dex. The entries in this catalogue repre- 

 sent over seventy thousand volumes. 



In the sub-Section of Anthropology, at 

 the late meeting of the American Asso- 

 ciation for the Advancement of Science, 

 Mr. Albert S. Bickmore, Director of the 

 Central Park Museum of Natural History, 

 exhibited a large and most interesting map, 

 which showed the distribution of the races 

 of man in the islands of the Indian Ocean 

 and the Pacific. By means of arrows were 

 indicated the routes the different peoples 

 appear to have taken in reaching their pres- 

 ent abodes. 



Is i9 stated in the " Nord Deutsche Zei- 

 tung " that a woman in the neighborhood 

 of Diisseldorf, who had been bitten by a 

 mad dog, was cured by hypodermic injec- 

 tions of twenty centigrammes of curari. 



During an outbreak of scarlatina at 

 Grantham, a town of Lincolnshire, England, 

 nine tent-hospitals were set up in a field 

 just outside the town. These tents were 

 all lined, and had raised wooden floors, 

 which were trenched round. A wooden 

 building was erected to serve for wash- 

 house, kitchen, dispensary, etc. A sepa- 

 rate structure was put up for earth-closets. 

 No provision was made for warming the 

 tents, the season being mild. Patients 

 were admitted on June 30th, and the tents 

 were occupied during the eleven weeks fol- 

 lowing. Sixty-six patients, varying in age 

 from eighteen months to thirty-eight years, 

 were treated ; six of the cases ended fatally. 



The great question of the day for phy- 

 sicians to study, says Dr. S. D. Gross, of 

 Baltimore, is preventive medicine, the hy- 

 giene of our persons, our dwellings, our 

 streets ; in a word, our surroundings, wheth- 



er in city, town, hamlet, or country; and 

 the establishment of efficient town and State 

 boards of health, through whose agency we 

 shall be better able to prevent the origin 

 and fatal effects of what are known as the 

 zymotic diseases. 



Died at Cape Town, July 14th, Sir 

 Thomas Maclear, Director of the Royal Ob- 

 servatory at that place for nearly forty years 

 down to 1870, when he retired. Hi's prin- 

 cipal work was the remeasurement of La- 

 caille's arc of the meridian, the results of 

 which were published in 1866. 



Mr. Keith Johnston, son of the eminent 

 geographer, Alexander Keith Johnston, and 

 himself distinguished as a geographer and 

 explorer, died of dysentery on June 28th, 

 at Berobero, a place about one hundred and 

 fifty miles southwest of Dar-es-Salaam. At 

 the time of his death he was engaged in 

 making an exploration of Africa, under the 

 auspices of the Royal Geographical Society 

 of Great Britain. 



Among 3,050 colored children in the 

 schools of the District of Columbia, of whom 

 1,359 were males, and 1,691 females, Dr.Swan 

 M. Burnett found twenty-four individuals 

 affected with color-blindness, viz., twenty- 

 two boys (P6 per cent.), and two girls (Oil 

 per cent.). This proportion of color blind- 

 ness is very low ; among whites it is three 

 per cent, for males, and - 26 for females. 



A person in England having purchased 

 a ring set with what purported to be a 

 diamond, and having later discovered that 

 the stone was a " Cape diamond," entered 

 suit at law to recover the money paid for 

 the ring. Judgment was given for the 

 plaintiff on the evidence of several diamond- 

 dealers, who testified that " Cape diamonds " 

 are not to be regarded as ordinary diamonds, 

 and that they lack the essential qualities of 

 the Brazilian stones, viz., luster, hardness, 

 and color. A writer in " Nature " calls at- 

 tention to this singular verdict, and ex- 

 presses the hope that, when the case comes 

 up for a retrial, the judge will require some 

 scientific evidence (such as specific gravity 

 or chemical composition) about Cape dia- 

 monds. 



Sixteen thousand panes of glass were 

 recently smashed in the plant-houses of the 

 Roval Gardens at Kew, during a violent 

 hailstorm, that lasted scarcely ten minutes. 

 The hailstones averaged one and a half 

 inch in diameter, and weighed about three- 

 fourths of an ounce apiece. In most cases 

 the panes of glass were completely shattered, 

 but some were found pierced with perfectly 

 circular holes, as if a bullet had been shot 

 through them. The succulent leaves of 

 a few of the plants were penetrated in a 

 similar wav. 



