576 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the 1st of May. He was born in 1817, and 

 had been a professor in the Colleges of Ca- 

 en, Stanislas, and Bourbon, and a member 

 of the Academy since 1873. He was the 

 author of several valuable papers on the 

 laws of radiant heat, the polarization of the 

 calorific rays, the latent heat of aqueous va- 

 por, etc. 



M. Jamin attributes the cold nights usual 

 in April and May to the fact, which he de- 

 duces from the experiments of Mr. Glaisher 

 and others, that the minimum of vapor in 

 the atmosphere prevails then, the maximum 

 being in August. 



M. Edouard Heckel, of Marseilles, has 

 called attention to a new prospective source 

 of gutta-percha in the fiuti/iospermum Par- 

 Hi, or Barsia Parkii, of the interior of Af- 

 rica, from the seeds of which the natives 

 already extract a kind of butter. The plant 

 possesses many advantages. It is very wide- 

 ly diffused ; it will grow apparently in the 

 most desert, gravelly soil ; it matures in 

 four years ; and it is available to a certain 

 extent, to native taste, as a food-plant. 



M. Dieulefait has been inquiring why 

 there is so much sulphur in stone-coal, and 

 why there is so little of free alkaline car- 

 bonates in the ashes. For that purpose he 

 has analyzed the surviving species of the 

 families of the coal-plants, particularly the 

 Equisclacea?., and has found in them a greater 

 than the usual proportion of sulphuric acid. 

 Hence he deduces, as the answers to his 

 questions, that the coal-plants were more 

 highly charged with sulphur than most exist- 

 ing plants; and that, for that reason, their 

 alkaline constituents assumed the forms of 

 sulphates instead of carbonates. 



The chimney of a manufactory in Bres- 

 lau, about fifty feet high, is made of pressed 

 paper, a substance which, it is remarked, 

 has almost perfect powers of resistance to 

 fire. 



M. Admiral Mouchez has taken, at the 

 Paris Observatory, distinguishable photo- 

 graphs of stars of the fourteenth magni- 

 tude. On a plate about ten inches square 

 he has photographed a field of about five 

 degrees square on which are shown 2,790 

 stars of between the fifth and fourteenth 

 magnitudes, equally clear in the edges and 

 the center of the picture. Stars of the fif- 

 teenth magnitude can be discerned in the 

 negatives, but they were not clear enough 

 to be transferred to the paper. It is esti- 

 mated that, if the stars are distributed over 

 the whole sky as thickly as over these five 

 degrees, then the total number of them is 

 20,500,000. 



A commission of inquiry respecting the 

 earthquake in Ischia of July, 1883, appoint- 

 ed by the Italian Government, has reported 



that the number of victims of the catas- 

 trophe, not counting mere contusions, was 

 3,075, of whom 2,313 were killed or died in 

 the hospitals, and 762 were wounded. Of 

 the 672 dwellings in Casamicciola, 537 were 

 wholly destroyed, and only one wholly es- 

 caped injury ; of the 4,300 inhabitants of the 

 town, 1,784 were killed. At Ischia town the 

 shocks were strong, but no serious harm was 

 done. Accommodation was provided after 

 the disaster for 9,500 unhoused inhabitants 

 of the island, in 700 temporary barracks of 

 corrugated iron. 



OBITUARY NOTES. 



Professor Fleeming Jenkin, of the Uni- 

 versity of Edinburgh, died June 12th, in the 

 fifty-third year of his age. He was distin- 

 guished in locomotive and constructive en- 

 gineering art, and in connection with the 

 laying of cables, including the first trans- 

 atlantic one, and general telegraphy. He 

 was made Professor of Engineering in Uni- 

 versity College, London, in 1865, and in the 

 University of Edinburgh three years later. 

 He has written several papers in engineer- 

 ing and electrical science, and was the au- 

 thor of the article on " Bridges " in the 

 "Encyclopaedia Britannica." 



Lieutenant Tilly, the leader of one of 

 the German West African exploring expe- 

 ditions, has recently died in the Cameroons. 



Mr. Alexander Croall, Curator of the 

 Smith Institute, Stirling, Scotland, is dead, 

 in the seventy-seventh year of his age. He 

 was the author and illustrator of "Nature- 

 printed British Sea-weeds." 



Mr. Alexander Murray, formerly of the 

 Canadian Geological Survey, died in the 

 early part of this year. He was born in 

 Scotland in 1811, and, after serving in the 

 British Navy for several years, went to Can- 

 ada about 1837. He was invited by Mr. W. 

 E. Logan to join the geological survey of the 

 province, which was about to be begun, and, 

 having no previous knowledge of the sci- 

 ence, qualified himself for the work by spe- 

 cial studies. On the survey he was able 

 and efficient, and superintended a large part 

 of the work for twenty years. He had 

 charge, from 1863 to 1883, of the geological 

 surveys of Newfoundland, the collated re- 

 ports of which, published in 1881, are our 

 chief sources of information on that sub- 

 ject. 



The Rev. T. W. Webb, of Hereford, 

 England, author of "Celestial Objects for 

 Common Telescopes," and of numerous arti- 

 cles on observational astronomy, died May 

 19th. 



The anatomist, Professor Henle, of Got- 

 tingen, died on the 13th of May last. 



