2IO 



NATURE 



{Jan. lo, 1878 



himself satisfied with the results obtained at the Argentine 

 Observatory ; the photographs of the moon at full and in 

 the last quarter he thinks may be favourably compared 

 with any obtained elsewhere which he had seen. He 

 refers to " the very beautiful picture of the moon " made 

 with the 4-feet reflector at Melbourne, which was also 

 exhibited at Philadelphia, and adds, he is not sure, if he 

 had seen this elegant photograph before placing his own 

 on exhibition, he would have ventured to compete. Dr. 

 Gould remarks that much of the credit of the stellar 

 photographs is due to the pure air of Cordoba, which is 

 incredibly transparent on the not very numerous occasions 

 when the sky is really clear. The impressions on glass 

 exhibited were of six different clusters, the plate of the 

 cluster X Carinas containing two images each of 185 

 stars, and that of jj Argus containing 180, and many of the 

 stars as faint as the ninth magnitude. Measurable 

 photographs of not less than eighty-four celestial objects 

 have been secured, of whjch nineteen are double stars 

 and the remainder clusters. The planets Jupiter, Mars, 

 and Saturn, have also been photographed "with sufficient 

 distinctness to show clearly the details of light and colour 

 on the surfaces of the two former, and the existence of the 

 ring in the laiter," but the ima;4es have not been suffi- 

 ciently sharp to allow of successful photographic 

 enlargement. ♦ 



VaRIAPLE Stars. — Herr Palisa in Ast. Nach., No 

 2,174, mentions his having remarked a new variable star, 

 the position of which for i877'o is in R.A. i6h. 4m. 35s., 

 N P D. 109° 48' 9. It do-s not occur on Chacornac's 

 chart No. 49 ; it was lom. on May 26, 1876, and on 

 July 31 and August 3 of last year, whereas on May 17, 

 1877, no trace of it was percep'ible. The period is there- 

 fore no doubt comparatively short. 



The star L. 36606 = B.A.C. 6641 appears to vary from 

 6'5m. to 9m. On October 17, 1852, Argelander estimated 

 it of the former magnitude, Lalande and Piazzi call it an 

 eighth, while about midsummer, 185 1, it was little, if any- 

 thing, over the ninth magnitude. 



L 262 1 1 is probably variable from 6m. to 8m., and 

 L. 27307 from 7m. to 9m., and it is not unhkely that 

 further observations will place b"^ Geminorum on the list 

 of variables ; it has been rated at a fiith magnitude and as 

 low as 8^ 



The Minor Planet Eva. — A planet of the eleventh 

 magnitude, observed by Herr Palisa at Pola on December 

 29, IS mentioned in the Bulletin International of January 3, 

 as possibly No. 180, but according to a communication 

 from Herr Knorre, of Berlin, as probably identical with 

 No. 164, detected by M. Paul Henry at Paris on July 12, 

 1876, which received the name Eva. The observations 

 of 1876 extended over an interval of little more than a 

 fortnight, and the elements which have been calculated 

 by Mr. Winslow Upton and M. Bossert are therefore 

 liable to uncertainty, but if we adopt Mr. Upton's orbic 

 and compute for the time of the Pola observation, the 

 place is found to be about a degree only from that 

 observed, and it is therefore probable that No, iSo has 

 yet to be discovered. 



THOMAS VERNON WOLLASTON 



THE very limited band of scientific English ento- 

 mologists has just suffered a great loss by the 

 sudden death, on the 4th instant, at his residence, 

 1, Bamepark Terrace, Te'gnmouth, of Thomas Vernon 

 WoUaston — a name dear to science, and of which he well 

 upheld the reputation. Accurate, elaborate, and precise 

 ad punctiim, and naturally of a minutely critical habit, he 

 nevertheless persistently acted upon a broad conception of 

 the science to which he was devoted ; and taking advan- 

 tage of the periodical banishments to a warmer climate 

 imposed upon him in early manhood by pulmonary weak- 

 ness, set himself the task of thoroughly investigating the 

 coleopterous fauna of the Madeiras, Salvages, and Cape 



de Verdes, and finally of St, Helena. His philosophical 

 deductions from the vast mass of well-sifted evidence 

 obtained (chiefly by his own bodily toil, though he was 

 always in a more or less debilitated state of health) 

 referring to these isolated groups, may be summed up as 

 corroborating the former existence of that submerged 

 Atlantis whereon geologists differ. From the exhaustive 

 care with which his material was obtained, it seems 

 highly unlikely that his premises were insufficient ; and 

 his discussion of the subject so far resembles Mr. Dar- 

 win's method that it supplies the objections likely to 

 be raised, and itself practically exhausts criticism by 

 minuteness of observation. 



To students of British entomology, Mr. WoUaston is 

 best known by his early papers in the Zoologist and 

 Stainton's Entomologists^ Annual and Weekly hitelli' 

 gencer, and by his revision of Atomaria in Trans. Ent, 

 Sac, 1877 His first scientific contribution was in the 

 Zoologist, vol. i. (1843";, on Coleoptera at L^unceston, 

 when a student at Jesus College, Cambridge (where, with 

 the late J. F. Dawson and Hamlet Clark, he imbi^^ed from 

 Dr. Babington a taste for natural science), and his last, a 

 paper in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History^ 

 on a weevil destructive to the banana in Madeira, was 

 received from him by the writer almost simultaneously 

 with the news of his death. He published many descrip- 

 tive and analytical papers, almost exclusivelv on Coleot)- 

 tera, in the abo^'C-named publication"?, the Journal of 

 Entomology 2ind the Entomologists' Monthly Magazine; 

 but his magnum opus is the well-known " Insecta 

 Madercnsia," published in 1854, the results of his sojourns 

 in Madeira, to which he first went in 1847. This, from 

 its amount of novelty and classical treatment, at on;.e 

 established his reputation. 



His collection, increased by another visit in 1855. having 

 been purchased by the trustees of the British Museum, 

 he prepared a more complete account, which was pub- 

 lished as a museum " Catalogue " in 1857. Subsequent 

 visits in 1858 and 1859 resulted in a description of the 

 coleopterous fauna of the Canaries, also published as a 

 museum " Catalogue" in 1864. The acquisition of fresh 

 material compelled him in the next year to write his 

 '' Coleoptera Atlantidum," an arduous critical work of 

 nearly 700 pages, followed in 1867 by the *' Coleoptera 

 Hesperidum," a valuable descriptive account of the species 

 of the Cape Verde Archipelago, visited in 1866. His last 

 contribution to geographical entomology, " Coleoptera 

 Sanctas-Helenae," 1877, contains a multiplicity of un- 

 expected developments (especially after the supposed 

 exhaustion of the productions of the island in Mr. Melliss's 

 work), and shows that St. Helena is the home of a special 

 family, Cossonidce, to which Mr. WoUaston had always 

 devoted attention, having himself described no less than 

 255 new species in it, as against 67 described by all other 

 naturalists, living or dead. 



Of his other works, it may suffice to mention one on 

 the " Variation of Sjecies," published in 1856, and 

 another, " Testacea Atlantica," that will, alas, be posthu- 

 mous (though complete), being a descriptive account of 

 the land-shells of his favourite hunting-ground. 



The amount of work in these publications and in others 

 not referred to, is astonishing, especially to those who 

 know the extreme precision (both in manipulation and 

 writing) and the weak physical condition of the author. 

 Mr. WoUaston became a Fellow of the Linnean Society 

 in 1847, and was also a Fellow of the Cambridge Philo- 

 sophical Society, but, beyond his university degree, sought 

 no other honorary distinction. He was, we believe, in his 

 fifty-seventh year at the time of his death. E. C. R. 



NOTES 



We may remind our readers that on this day, a century ago, 

 one of the great reformers of science — perhaps the most cele« 

 brated naturalist of .all times — Linne,, breathed his last. His 



