72 NATURAL SCIENCE. Jan., 1896. 



A NUMBER of Fellows of the Royal Geographical Society interested in Antarctic 

 exploration are discussing the possibility of organising an expedition by private sub- 

 scription. It is estimated that a sum of about ^50,000 would be required for an 

 adequately-equipped fleet. 



Mr. F. O. Pickard-Cambridge, a nephew of the well-known speciaHst on 

 spiders, and himself a competent naturalist and artist, has been appointed by the 

 British Museum (Natural History), with the sanction of Messrs. Siemens, to assist 

 Mr. Austen, who, as we have already announced, has left this country in the 

 " Faraday " for Para. Messrs. Siemens intend to lay their telegraphic cable from 

 Para to the mouth of the Rio Negro at Manaos, a distance of 1,100 miles. 



The Glaciah'sts' Magazine states that Dr. Karl Grossmann, of Liverpool, who 

 visited Iceland last summer with a medical expedition for the investigation of 

 leprosy, was able to make some interesting observations on the glaciation of little- 

 known parts of that island. 



According to Nature, the Austrian Expedition to establish meteorological 

 stations at Jedda, Koseir, and other places on the Red Sea, has made some satis- 

 factory zoological collections, and during the winter will investigate the southern 

 parts of the Red Sea, between Jedda and Massowa. 



Mr. Charles Schuchert informs us that he has spent a successful summer col- 

 lecting Devonian fossils, chiefly from New York, Ontario, and Michigan, or as he 

 expresses it, dry-dredging in the Mississippian Sea. An account of his collections^ 

 which are now in the U.S. National Museum, is given in St7£«« for November 2, 

 1895. It appears that in some parts of North America the lookers-on imagine that 

 the fossil collector takes his specimens home to gild them ; but at Thetford, in West 

 Ontario, a famous locaUty for Middle Devonian fossils, the inhabitants are so 

 accustomed to the visits of the collector that they have begun to think he may 

 not be insane. 



Professor Frederick Starr, of the University of Chicago, has gone to 

 Guadalajara, Mexico, to study a submerged city in Lake Chapala, and to determine 

 whether the dwarfs who inhabit the neighbouring mountains owe their small stature 

 to disease or inherit it from their ancestors. 



ERRATUM. 



Mr. Chalmers Mitchell writes to us : " In a ' Note and Comment ' in the 

 December number of Natural Science (' Chauna,' p. 380, vol. vii.) you transpose 

 the authorship of two memoirs on Screamers to which you allude. It was Garrod 

 who wrote upon Chauna derbiana ; the memoir on Palanudea cornuta was written by 

 Beddard and Chalmers Mitchell." 



NOTICE. 



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The " Challenger " Number. — In reply to enquiries, ive remind our 

 readers that, although the First edition of this ran out of print immediately, 

 there are still some copies of the Second edition to he obtained at the usual price — 

 One Shilling. No more will now he printed, so orders should he sent at once. 



