1899] NEWS Sind 
including a donkey brought back from the Soudan in 1885 by the New South 
Wales Infantry. Prof. W. B. Spencer presented several specimens of Central 
Australian Muridae. Mr. Waite is making a card catalogue of the mammals, 
and finds the plan exceedingly convenient. A new spirit house has been built, 
and thousands of specimens in spirit have been safely transferred to it. _ The 
detrimental practice of keeping birds’ skins in spirits has now been stopped. 
The skeleton of a large sunfish, Orthagoriscus mola, is being prepared by the 
method used for cartilaginous skeletons. It is worthy of note that the exhibited 
shells have to be protected by movable covers, since their colours are bleached 
by the strong light. The Tunicata of New South Wales have been studied by 
Prof. Herdman, who has compiled a “ Descriptive Catalogue of the Tunicata in 
the Australian Museum, Sydney, N.S.W.,” printed in Liverpool, and published 
about midsummer last. This gives to the Museum some fifty types. Under 
Palaeontology it is stated that Mr. C. W. de Vis of the Queensland Museum 
has continued the determination of the extinct marsupial remains. The more 
important donations were: Mesozoic, Carboniferous, and Silurian fossils of 
Tasmania, by T. Stephens; Cretaceous reptilian and fish remains from the 
Flinders river, by J. B. Nutting; and Prof. R. Tate’s co-types of Ordovician 
fossils from Central Australia, by W. A. Horn. The collection of meteorites 
has been added to by casts, slices, and a small iron meteorite from West 
Australia. Many Australian minerals have been presented, and among them a 
fine series of native copper from Broken Hill. These excerpts by no means 
exhaust the interest of the Report. The amount of work done under discour- 
aging circumstances is highly creditable to the staff. It is clear they do not go 
to sleep, for sixteen telephones have been distributed throughout the building, 
“and have already proved a source of great convenience and saving of time.” 
Science notes that the last report of the Royal Zoological Society of Amster- 
dam commemorates the sixtieth year of its existence. Besides the well-known 
zoological garden, the Society maintains a fine aquarium, a zoological museum, 
a geological and palaeontological collection, a library, ete., a combination which 
affords fine facilities for scientific work. It will be remembered that Fiirbringer’s 
monumental work on the morphology of birds was among the publications of 
this Society. 
On September 11, Alderman George Collard, Mayor of Canterbury, opened 
in that town a new institute, library, and museum, in great part the gift of the 
late Dr. Beaney of Melbourne. 
We learn from Nature that a commencement has been made with the new 
Geological Museum at Oxford. The Museum will cost about £44,000, the 
fund raised at a memorial to Prof. Sedgwick supplying £27,000. 
Science for September 22 quotes from the report of the Australian Museum 
for 1897 an interesting observation in regard to a specimen of the Galapagos 
tortoise, Testudo nigrita, brought to Sydney in 1853. It then weighed 53 
pounds, while at the time of its death, in 1896, its weight had increased to 
368 pounds, ‘‘a more rapid rate of growth than such animals are usually credited 
with.” It is now mounted in the Museum. 
Science reports the following gifts and bequests :—%300,000 given by Mr. 
Edward Tuck of New York to Dartmouth College; $60,000 bequeathed by 
Mrs. Mary D. Goddard to Tufts College; $10,000 bequeathed by Richard B. 
Westbrook of Philadelphia to the Wagner Institute of Science, to endow a 
lectureship for “the full and fearless discussion by the most learned and dis- 
tinguished men and women in our own and other countries of mooted or disputed 
questions in science, and especially the theories of evolution.” 
We have already alluded to the fact that during last year Mr. E. R. Waite 
of the Australian Museum accompanied H.M. Col. 8.8. Zhetis on a trawling and 
