206 



NA TURE 



\yune 20, 1878 



Canterbury mu cum and public library, and various siuilar 

 institutions in the country towns. Lectures are given in the 

 museum ; and it is hoped that in cour. e of time the library 

 will become as large, or at least as useful, as those of Mel- 

 bourne and Boston. Twenty scholarships of 40/. a year, 

 tenable for two years for students of schooh, colleges, or 

 under private tuition, have already been founded by the Board 

 of Education, and it is intended to increase the number. 

 At Dunedin, the capital of Otago, which is chiefly a Scotch 

 settlement, the same eagerness for education prevails. There is 

 a univen;ity and a school of art, a boys' and girls' high school, 

 and district grammar schools ; besides which there are athenscums 

 and public libraries in nearly all the country villages. "Here, 

 as at Canterbury, large landed endowments have been made for 

 the above-named objects. Two hundred thousand acres have 

 been settled upon the university. The buildings have already 

 cost 30,000/. ; they are handsome and well-situated. As yet 

 the number of students does not exceed eighty, to instruct 

 whom there are five professors in addition to one of moral and 

 mental philosophy, endowed with 600/. a year by the synod of 

 Otago. A valuable library is attached, which it is intended 

 shall be utilised as a free public library. Although this has 

 been styled a university, it can only be looked upon as a 

 college affiliated to the Univer.-ity of New Zealand. A Royal 

 Charter has been refused to it, and its degrees are not recog- 

 nised. Nearly one thousand of the elder pupils at the other 

 schools receive, at the school of art, instruction in freehand 

 drawing, painting from copies, from nature, and from the 

 human figure, 'de igning, practical geometry, perspective, 

 mechanical and architectural drawing. In the provinces of 

 Wellington, Nelson, and Auckland there are collegiate bodies 

 affiliated to the University of New Zealand, and there are also 

 provisions for eleaientary instruction. The general dissemina- 

 tion and desire for knowledge, it is said, is "laying a s\u"e 

 foundation of a people able to conduct their own affiiirs, and 

 giving promise of a bright future in w^hat has well been termed 

 the Great Britain of the south." 



We understand that Mr. Thomas Denman, Lecturer on 

 Physiology at the Birkbeck Institution and Physical Science 

 Lecturer at the Working Men's College, has co npiled a Glossary 

 of Biological, Anatomical, and Physiological Terms, which will 

 shortly be published in a small crown 8vo volume by Messrs. 

 Griffith and Farran. 



The Chinese coast was visited by a terrific cyclone on April 

 12. It appeared to take its origin about fifty miles from Macao, 

 and moved directly northwards, devastating eveiything within a 

 path of about 700 feet in width. The European settlement on 

 the Island of Schameen was reduced to a ruin, and the havoc 

 created by the storm in Canton and the neighbourhood is beyond 

 calculation. The loss of life is estimated at 6,ox) to 8,oco. An 

 eye-witness states, in a letter to a Vienna journal, that the 

 cyclone was immediately preceded by a hail-storm, the tempera- 

 ture being at 80° F. 



Mr. Talfourd Ely, the Secretary of University College, 

 London, asks us to state, to prevent misunderstanding, that the 

 admission of women to classes in that College does not apply to 

 the Faculty of Medicine, but only to tae Faculties of Arts and 

 Law, and of Science. 



During the past year the Austrian Educational Department 

 has maintained a party of geologists in Northern Greece for the 

 purpose of preparing a reliable geological chart of this part of 

 the kingdom, a district which, until within late years, has been 

 almost entirely closed to scientific examination. A portion of 

 the results have been submitted to the Vienna Academy recently 

 in the form'of a paper on the "Geological Structure of Attica, 

 Boeotia, Locris, and Parnassus," accompanied by a number of 

 barometric measurements of the heights of Greek mountains. 



In 1866 the Swiss government took active measures to pre- 

 serve the namerous erratic boulders scattered over the country, 

 and its efforts have been so ably seconded by the can- 

 tonal natural history societies that the most important of these 

 silenfc witnesses to ancient glacial action have been carefully 

 sought out and protected from destruction. The geologists of 

 France have, as we intimated some time ago, lately awakened to 

 the necessity of making a similar provision for the numeraus 

 erratic masses in the departments adjoining the Vosges, the 

 Alps, and the Pyrenees, many of the most valuable of which 

 have already been appropriated for building or other purposes. 

 It is but lately that the immensity of the glacial action in eastern 

 France has been comprehended. For the past ten years the 

 two geologist:^, MM. Falsan and Chantre, have been occupied 

 in a thorough study of the great movements which once took 

 place in the valley of the Rhone. Their results are embodied 

 in six large maps, on a scale ' of an inch to the mile, which give 

 a careful reproduction of the strix, marking the progress of 

 glaciers over the rocks in the valley of the Rhone. From their 

 investigations it appears that the ice in the neighbourhood of 

 Grenoble possessed a thickness of over 3,000 feet, and that the 

 glacier formed an enormous fan-shaped mass, bounded on one 

 side by the alps of Savoy and Dauphine, and on the other by 

 the mountain ranges of Beaujolais and Lyonnais, and extended 

 beyond Thodure. For the careful mapping of the movements 

 of the Rhone glacier not only the abundant heaps of pebbles 

 and the striae have rendered the .chief service, the erratic blocks 

 have at every stage played a most important role ; and it is to 

 be hoped that the efforts now set on foot will preserve to coming 

 geologists the means of thoroughly tracing the paths of the 

 great glaciers in other parts of the country. 



In the last Annual Report of the Prussian Commission for 

 the Scientific Examination of the German Sea-coast, we notice 

 an interesting comparison of the relative results obtained from 

 equal areas of (i) fish ponds, {2) grazing districts in Schleswig- 

 Holstein, and (3) fishing grounds off Hela. The latter covered a 

 surface of 7,200 hectares, and supplied, in the course of a year, 

 456, 000" pounds of fish as the result of 3,405 expeditions. As 

 contrasted with each other, per hectare, the land yielded 167 lbs. of 

 meat, the fish-pond yielded 153 lbs. of fish ; and the sea-fisheries 

 yielded 63 lbs. of fish annually. This is the first effort to 

 establish a comparative estimate of the value of fisheries, and 

 affords some idea of the sources of wealth at the disposal of 

 maritime nations, even when contrasted with the adjoining land. 



The Geographical Society of Vienna has conferred the title 

 of honorary member upon Prof. A. Bastian and Dr. Brehm. 



On May 16 a meeting of friends of natural history was held 

 at Dresden, when a resolution was passed to found a society for 

 the establishment and maintenance of an aquarium in that city. 



The Electricite, a scientific paper which was started two years 

 ago by Count Ilalley DaiToz for promoting a special electrical 

 exhibition, will resuue its publication on July I next, to promote 

 a similar project to be executed at the Paris Palais de 1' Industrie 

 in 1879. 



A NEW work on Russia, entitled " Dasmalerische Russland," 

 is about to be published by B. M. Wolff, of St. Petersburg. 

 The editor is Herr P. Semenow, Chief of the Russian Statistical 

 Department. The work will consist of four volumes, and will 

 contain over 500 illustrations. 



M. DE FoNViELLE Writes that he has learned by private letter 

 from Philadelphia, and from a design published by the A^^ York 

 Daily Graphic that Prof. Ritchel succeeded in directing balloons 

 in the interior of the permanent exhibition building on May 22 

 last. About the same time M. de Fonvielle witnessed an experi- 

 ment by Capt. Annibal Ardisson in the Paris hippodrome, which 



