i897. NEWS OF UNIVERSITIES, ETC. 285 



Mr. and Mrs. Theodore Bent, the archaeological explorers, have returned 

 from a successful expedition to Socotra. 



Mr. J. Whitehead has been investigating the highland fauna of the Philip- 

 pines, where he obtained a huge fruit-pigeon at a height of G.ooo feet. 



According to Reuter, Mr. Poulett Weatherley, who has just circumnavigated 

 Lake Bangweolo in Central Africa, states that it is smaller than usually marked on 

 maps and that, separated from it by a strip of sand about 400 yds. wide, is a long 

 lake named Chifunanti. These lakes, as well as L. Malombwe on the Upper Shire 

 River, he regards as recently submerged tracts of lands. They are quite shallow, 

 and Bangweolo has no molluscan fauna. 



Mr. C. W. Andrews, of the Geological Department of the British Museum, 

 has received leave of absence for nine months in order to investigate the natural 

 history of Christmas Id., one of the few spots on this earth that still remains 

 uninfluenced by man. 



It is 400 years since John Cabot, the Venetian navigator, who lived in Bristol, 

 sailed from that city and landed on some coast on the other side of the North 

 Atlantic. The event is to be celebrated both in Bristol and in Halifax, Nova Scotia, 

 on June 24. 



We are glad to note that the salary of the lecturer on fisheries to the Cornwall 

 County Council has been increased to ;^350 per annum. 



The huge octopus described by Dr. A. E. Verrill in the American Journal of 

 Science, as recounted by us in our March number, turns out not to have been a 

 cephalopod after all. Some portions of the integument have been examined by Dr. 

 Verrill, who, writing to Science, suggests that it was probably related to the whale, 

 though what part of any cetacean it could have been is still an unsolved puzzle. 



A series of lectures on "The Black Death of ths Fourteenth Century," was 

 delivered by Mr. W. North, in February, at Willesden Green Public Library. Mr. 

 North traced the origin and progress of the disease, compared it with the present 

 plague in India, and gave some interesting notes on the sanitation of England at the 

 time, and the value of the plague as a sanitary reformer in this country. 



C. H. Fernald, entomologist to the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture, 

 recommends that $200,000 be appropriated for five years in succession, and a smaller 

 appropriation for ten years more, for the extermination of the Gipsy Moth. 



Mrs. Asa Gray has been mounting the autograph letters from various botanists 

 received by her late husband. Those preserved number over iioo. The Botanical 

 Gazette states that the mounting is now completed, and that, with the letters, 

 whenever possible, an engraving or photograph of the writer has been mounted. 



Coal, in seams with a thickness of 16 and 8 feet, has baen found seven miles 

 from the northern end of Lake Nyassa. 



Borings, instituted in consequence of the discovery of coal at Dover, have 

 succeeded in finding coal at Cape Blanc-Nez on the opposite side of the Channel, 

 further west than coal has hitherto been worked in northern France. 



