288 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Prof. Pptnam announced, at •the last 

 meeting of the American Association, that 

 the Government of Honduras had granted 

 to the museum at Cambridge, Mass., the 

 exclusive right to explore the scientific re- 

 sources of the country for a period of ten 

 years. 



A PAPER by Prof. A. N. Krassnof, read 

 at the meeting of the Geological Society of 

 America, traced the resemblance of the 

 black soils of the Russian steppes and the 

 prairies of America to their similar origin 

 in the layers of successive annual crops of 

 plants. 



As described by Charles B. Thwing, the 

 results obtained with Lippman's process for 

 color photography, though not conclusive 

 at all points, seem to indicate that the mixed 

 colors may be reproduced with some fair de- 

 gree of accuracy. Modifications are intro- 

 duced by a change of thickness of the film 

 between exposure and final drying, and by 

 a shortening of the distance between maxi- 

 ma caused by the rays striking the reflector 

 at an angle other than the normal. A sec- 

 ond result is that an exposure long enough 

 to give a clear image of the red is certain to 

 obliterate the blue by over-exposure ; and a 

 third, that an over-exposure may completely 

 reverse the colors, causing the original col- 

 ors to appear on the reverse and the com- 

 plementary on the film side of the plate. 



Prof. Jastrow describes some curious 

 tests which he made with a young man who 

 had been born without the sense of smell, 

 for the purpose of determining what things 

 are tasted when we cat and what are smelled. 

 It appears that many things which we relish 

 are not tasted, but only smelled. 



A PAPER by Mr. John Watson, of Man- 

 chester, England, asserts that the redevel- 

 opment of lost limbs is not unusual among 

 insects. He has had three specimens in 

 which limbs have been redeveloped, and one 

 case of complete cicatrization. " Redevelop- 

 ment," he says, " can take place either in 

 the larval or the pupal stage of an insect's 

 metamorphosis." 



OBITUARY NOTES. 



Mr. William Terrell, an American me- 

 teorologist of world-wide reputation, died in 

 Kansas City, Mo., September 18th, about 

 seventy-four years old. He was graduated 

 from Bethany College in 1844, became as- 

 sistant in the American Ephemeries and Nau- 

 tical Almanac in 1857, and held the place 

 for ten years ; was then appointed on the 

 staff of the United States Coast Survey, 

 when he invented the machine for predict- 

 ing the maxima and minima of tides ; was 

 made assistant, with the rank of professor, 

 in the Signal-Service Bureau in 1882; and 

 retired from that position in 1886 to make 

 his home in Kansas City. He published 



many works, large and small, of researches 

 on the tides or pertaining to meteorological 

 problems ; a volume on Recent Advances in 

 Meteorology (1888); a Popular Treatise on 

 the Winds in 1889; and contributions to 

 scientific journals and societies on such 

 topics as thermal radiation, cyclones, torna- 

 does, and related subjects of terrestrial 

 physics. His earliest scientific writings were 

 contributed in 1856 to the Nashville Journal 

 of Medicine and Surgery. He was a mem- 

 ber of the National Academy of Sciences, 

 and an honorary member of the meteoro- 

 logical societies of England, Germany, and 

 Austria. 



Prof. Martin Duncan, F. R. S., whose 

 death has been recently announced, was a 

 special student of fossil corals and echino- 

 derms, and published some valuable mem- 

 oirs upon them. He was for a long time 

 Professor of Geology in King's College, and 

 there published an account of the Madrepo- 

 ria collected during the expedition of the 

 Porcupine, a description of deep-sea and lit- 

 toral corals from the Atlantic and Indian 

 Oceans, and a revision of the Echnoidea. 

 ITc also published many popular articles, in- 

 cluding Corals and their Polyps, Studies 

 among Amoeba?, Notes on the Ophiurans, or 

 the Sand and Brittle Stars, and a book on 

 the Sea-shore in the Natural History Ram- 

 bles series of the Society for Promoting 

 Christian Knowledge. 



The death, by apoplexy, is announced of 

 Dr. L. Just, Professor of Botany at the 

 Polytechnicum, Carlsruhe, Director of the 

 Botanic Garden there, and editor of the Bo- 

 tanischer Jahresbericht. 



Dr. Francis Beunnow, an astronomer 

 equally distinguished in America and Eu- 

 rope, has recently died in Heidelberg, Ger- 

 many, in his sixty-seventh year. He was 

 associated with Encke in Berlin, and there 

 had a part in the discovery of Neptune. He 

 investigated the motion of De Vice's comet 

 of short period, which, however, has never 

 been seen since. He also, at Berlin and 

 Ann Arbor, Mich., where he became director 

 of the observatory in 1854, calculated the 

 theory of some of the minor planets. He 

 published at Ann Arbor a periodical. Astro- 

 nomical Notices, which is now very rare. 

 His Lchrbuch der spherischen Astronomic 

 has passed through several editions. He 

 was appointed Professor of Astronomy in 

 the University of Dublin and Director of the 

 Dunsink Observatory in 1865. Retiring 

 from those positions in 1874, he lived the 

 rest of his life in private. 



Dr. Barclay, who recently died in Simla, 

 India, was a specialist in cryptogamic bot- 

 any, and had acquired an extended reputa- 

 tion by his researches in the diseases of In- 

 dian plants He was engaged at the time 

 of his death with the commission for the 

 investigation of leprosy. 



