292 



NATURE 



[Fed. 7, 1878 



establishing a separate branch of the Chemical Society with the 

 Fellows of the Chemical Society. After much discussion the 

 formation of the present institute was decided on. The institute 

 has power to appoint examiners as to the fitness of candidates 

 for its membership. Prof. Frankland, in the course of hiss 

 address, drew attention to the fact that under the Pharmacy Act 

 of 1868 no one, not even the President of the Chemical Society, 

 mav call himself a chemist unless he is duly registered as a 

 pharmaceutical chemist. There are already 225 members and 

 142 associates, and a fund of over 1,000/. for the new institute. 



Thf Naturwissenschaftliche Gesellschaft of Jena celebrated 

 the twenty-fifth anniversary of its foundation on January 17 last. 

 Upon that occasion Mr. Charles Darwin, Prof. M. I. Schleiden, 

 of W'esbaden, and Prof. Oscar Schmidt, of Strasburg, were 

 named honorary members of the society. 



Further information shows that the earthquake of Monday, 

 January 28, was felt at several places in London, at Ryde, 

 Osborne, Southampton, and Lyme Regis. Shocks were felt in 

 Neumarkt at 10 a.m. on the 27th and 5 a.m. on the 28th. 

 At Judenburg (Upper Styria) two different shocks were felt on 

 the 27 h, at I0.6 a.m., and on the following day at 4.32 A.M. 

 At Waldshut, on the Rhine, in the Grand Duchy of Baden, an 

 earthquake was felt on the evening of January 16 shortly before 

 midnight. The shock lasted about a second and seemed to 

 proceed in the direction from south-west to north-east. Subter- 

 ranean noise was plainly audible. The same phenomenon was 

 simultaneously observed at Alb, Karsau, Beuggen, Schopf heim, 

 and other places in Baden, as well as in all the north-westerly 

 cantons of Switzerland. 



The recent investigations of Sergius Kern, resulting in the 

 discovery of davyum to which we have had occasion frequently 

 to refer, are being submitted to a careful examination in the 

 Heidelberg laboratory under the direction of Prof. Bunsen. The 

 results so far coincide with those of the Russian chemist, and it 

 is to be hoped that the entire research may stand the crucial test 

 of the leading authority on the platinum metals. 



M. PiCTET delivered, during the past week, two very interest- 

 ing addresses in the laboratory of the Ecole de Medecine, before 

 the chemists of Paris, in which he gave a very {complete and 

 detailed description of his late experiments on the liquefaction 

 of gases. He is a young man of scarcely thirty, an easy and 

 fluent speaker, and made a pleasant impression on his Parisian 

 auditory. A b7'ochure of 100 pages, which he has just issued, 

 with drawings, gives a very elaborate description of the 'whole 

 series of experiments on the compression of gases. 



The Hon. RoUo Russell sends us some notes on experiments 

 he has made which go to prove that there is no neei to insulate 

 the wires connecting a pair of 'telephones, at least when used 

 for short distances. No. 18 uncovered copper wire was laid 

 along grass and trees 418 yards, the two lines being kept well 

 apart. Articulation and a small musical box were very well 

 heard. The same wire buried for three yards in wet clay, the 

 lines being about 5 ft. apart and the telephones 20 yards apart, 

 gave good results, and it appears that the bare wires may be 

 taken under roads, &c., without diminution of the audible effect. 

 With the same wire taken across a pond, the lines'being sub- 

 merged in water about 40 yards, and lying on the grass the rest 

 of the distance about 28 yards — the wires were about a yard 

 apart in the water — conversation in low tones was distinctly 

 heard when not overpowered by the noise of a strong wind 

 blowing at the time. Probably No. 18 copper vdre, uninsulated, 

 might be laid across rivers and straits and used for telephonic 

 purposes without appreciable loss of sound, as Mr. Russell, not 

 in any of the above cases, noticed a feebler effect than with 

 jisulated wires. 



Interesting antiquities have recently been excavated at 

 Neumagen on the Moselle. The Roman poet Ausonius mentions 

 in his ' ' Mosella " that the Emperor Constantine possessed there 

 a "beautiful castle," which was doubtless destroyed about the 

 middle of the fifth century when Treves was several times ravaged 

 by the Franks. About a century afterwards the famous castle of 

 Nicetia was built by the Archbishop Nicetius, who probably 

 utilised the foundations of the old Roman structure. Nicetia 

 was rased to the ground in the year 881 by the Normans. Many 

 of the old foundations are now being again excavated and are 

 tolerably well preserved ; the materials of which they are con- 

 structed are sandstone, marble, and limestone. 



M. Mari£ Davy has published, through Gauthier Villars, 

 the Montsouris Observatory's Meteorological Annuaire. The 

 volume contains a number of important improvements. 



The first ordinary meeting of the newly-established Physical 

 and Chemical Section of the Bristol Naturalists' Society was held 

 on January 22 in the Library of the Bristol Museum. A paper 

 was read by Mr. W. W. Stoddart, F.C.S., F.G.S., " On a 

 Remarkable Occurrence of Indican in the Human Body." A 

 paper was then read by Mr. S. P. Thompson, B. Sc, B. A., of 

 University College, Bristol, " On Vortex Motion in Liquids." 

 The paper was illustrated by experiments showing the produc- 

 tion of smoke rings in air and of rings of coloured liquid in 

 water. The author had lately tried the action of electro- 

 magnetism upon the rings projected through water and had 

 observed their retardation and partial destruction in passing 

 through a powerful magnetic field. His experiments are at 

 present incomplete. 



The third volume of C. L. Michelet's " System der Philo- 

 sophic als exacter Wissenschaft " (Berlin/. Nicolai) will shortly 

 be published. It will contain the philosophy of the mind. The 

 fourth volume will treat of the philosophy of history and will 

 close the interesting and elaborate work. 



Experiments with a new telegraph apparatus have lately 

 been made at Vienna, by means of which some 100 or 120 

 messages may be sent by a single wire in the remarkably short 

 space of one hour. Under certain conditions this number may 

 even be raised to 200 or even 250 messages. The inventor of 

 the new apparatus is Herr August Eduard Granfeld, an Austrian 

 telegraph official. At the end of December he presented to the 

 Austrian " Telegraphenanstalt " eight working and two principal 

 apparatus of his invention for practical trials. The experiments 

 were crowned with complete success. 



A NEW watchman-controlling clock has been constructed by 

 Messrs. Fein at their telegraph works at Stuttgart, which on a 

 single dial records the times at which a watchman visits any 

 given number of stations however far apart, as well as the 

 succession in which they are visited, and thus also the intervals 

 which elapse while the man is proceeding from place to place. 

 I'he same firm has constructed an automatic alarum for unin- 

 habited or locked localities. 



It is stated that such enormous quantities of snow are now 

 lying in the Austrian " Salzkammergut " as have not been seen 

 there for the last .fifty or sixty years, and a sudden thaw is 

 dreaded extremely, as it would unavoidably cause enormous 

 inundations. News from Pesth reports that on January 27 the 

 Danube broke through the dykes at Domsod, and caused a vast 

 inundation in Rumania, for a distance of some fifty miles, as far 

 as Baja. Nine villages are under water. Other inundations are 

 reported from the valley of the Vesdre River in the eastern part 

 of Belgium. 



An exceptionally mild winter is reported from the north- 

 western states of North America. In the districts near St. 

 Paul, Minnesota, the fanners ploughed their fields in Christmas 



