i6o 



NATURE 



[June 14, 1888 



of natives, and he considered his work worthy of publication 

 only when he could bring out an elaborate grammar. Unhappily 

 all his works were merely lithographed in a limited number of 

 copies. Now the first volume has appeared at Tiflis under the 

 title of " Ethnography of the Caucasus." It contains Uslar's 

 work on the Abkhazian language, and several smaller articles 

 on the principles of transcription of the Caucasian languages ; 

 on the languages of the Tcherkesses and Ubykhes ; and on the 

 grammar of the Svanetian language. 



The sporadic geographical distribution of the Aldrovandia 

 vesiculosa — an aquatic plant of the family of Droseraceas — long 

 ago attracted the attention of botanists. Grisebach and 

 De Candolle discussed it, and Caspary made it the subject of 

 two well-known monographs, trying to explain the strange dis- 

 tribution of the Aldrovandia, a few individuals of which had 

 been discovered, after much hunting for them, in localities so 

 far apart as Aries, Bordeaux, and a very few other places in 

 France ; at isolated spots in Italy, Tyrol, and Hungary; in Silesia ; 

 about Pinsk in Lithuania ; and at Calcutta. Since Caspary 

 wrote, it has been discovered also in Brandenburg, South 

 Bavaria, and at two other spots in Prussia. Schweinfurth dis- 

 covered it in Central Africa, and Ferd. Muller in Australia ; and 

 Russian explorers have found it on the Lower Amu-daria, and 

 in the delta of the Volga. Taking up again the whole question 

 as to the causes of its sporadic extension, in the Trudy of the 

 Kazan Society of Naturalists (vol. xvii. fasc. 1), M. Korz- 

 chinsky shows that in the delta of the Volga it grows especially 

 in thickets of rushes. There, in the most inaccessible parts of 

 the thickets, the water is covered with flowers of the Aldrovandia, 

 while in open places it is very scarce, and the few individuals 

 discovered rarely flower. MM. Herbich and Berdan noticed the 

 same circumstance on the Tiniecki Lake about Cracow ; and 

 M. Korzchinsky concludes that the Aldrovandia vesiculosa is a 

 feeble plant which cannot compete with other aquatic plants, and 

 is thus compelled to seek for refuge in the shaded spots amidst 

 the rushes where no other aquatic plants grow. The spots where 

 the Aldrovandia grows now must be regarded as a few remnants 

 of a wide region over which it formerly extended, and M. 

 Korzchinsky compares it in this respect with the Trapa natans, 

 which is also disappearing. 



How far north did the Caspian Sea extend during the post- 

 Pliocene period ? This question has often been considered by 

 geologists and geographers. Marine deposits, undoubtedly 

 Caspian — that is, containing a fauna which is now characteristic 

 of the Caspian Sea — have been recently found as far north as 

 the Samara bending of the Volga ; so there can be no doubt 

 that during the post-Pliocene period a gulf of the great Aral- 

 Caspian basin penetrated north, up the present valley of the 

 Volga, as far as the 54th degree of north latitude. A few 

 years ago Prof. Golovkinsky raised the question whether the 

 post-Pliocene sediments which fill up the great depression on the 

 middle Volga at its junction with the Kama, were not also 

 deposited in a great lake which stood in connection with the 

 Caspian ; and this question is now answered by M. Netchayeff, 

 who has investigated these deposits. He communicates to the 

 Kazan Society of Naturalists {Trudy, vol. xvii. fasc. 5), that 

 the brown-yellow sandy clays on the Kama about Tchistopol 

 (55 20' N. lat.), contain the following fossils : Dreyssena poly- 

 morpha, most characteristic of the Aral-Caspian deposits all over 

 the Trans-Caspian region, Pisidium fontinale, Paludina achatina, 

 P. impura, Limnceus fuscus, Helix pulchella, and the Hydrobia 

 caspia (Eichwald). The latter, according to Grimm, is one of 

 the forms now in the Caspian Sea which are found only in that 

 sea. We must therefore conclude that the Kazan depression of 

 the Volga, now about 150 feet above the sea-level, i.e. 235 feet 

 above the level of the Caspian, was a part of that sea at a period 

 so close to our own as the post-Pliocene. 



The cod and whale fisheries in the north of Norway have 

 entirely failed this spring, and it is suggested that the non- 

 appearance of the former is due to the low temperature of the 

 sea this season. Thus the Russian naval officers stationed on 

 the Murman coast found in May only a surface temperature of 

 from i° to 2° C, and along the Norwegian coast it has been 

 lower still. As to the whale-fishing, only 40 animals had been 

 captured by the end of April against 200 last year. It is main- 

 tained that the present wholesale slaughter carried out by 

 Norwegian and Russian steamers equipped with harpoon guns 

 will eventually extirpate these animals, and some measure for 

 their preservation is contemplated. Advices from the Arctic 

 regions state that there was an enormous mass of drift-ice in those 

 waters during this spring. Two sealers, the Hekla and the famous 

 Vega, were imprisoned for more than a month in the ice to the 

 north-east of Norway. 



In the very useful scientific methods whereby movements re- 

 cord themselves in curves, photography and a point moving on a 

 smoked surface are perhaps those forms which yield the most 

 delicate curves. In the French Societe d'Encouragement, M. 

 Mascart has called attention to a useful modification by M. 

 Fenon, in which a bent tube of tempered steel forms a siphon, 

 dipping at one end in a reservoir of ink, and at the other being 

 shaped like a pen point, which is brought near the moving paper 

 (the sloped section outwards). Capillary fjrce prevents outflow 

 when the apparatus is at rest. A fine trace is produced by this 

 pen, without interruption by the most rapid displacements, and 

 without sticking when at rest. M. Wolf, of the Paris Obser- 

 vatory, has used the system for getting records of air-pressure, 

 temperature, wind, &c, with the best results. The reservoir 

 needs charging only once a week ; and using inks mixed with 

 glycerine a single charge has been found to suffice for a barometer 

 record of more than six months. 



In a recent interesting lecture, opening his course at the Col- 

 lege de France, M. Ribot gave a sketch of contemporary 

 psychology. The science in France might be characterized by 

 one expression — "the era of monographs." There was no com- 

 prehensive work like that of Wundt in Germany ; such were 

 certainly very useful, but, like vast cathedrals, they always 

 needed repair at some point. In psychology proper, the part 

 belonging to logical operations, to reasoning, as principle of the 

 unity of perceptions, had been well studied ; and perhaps the 

 most important results had been reached in the study of the nature 

 and physical conditions of the image. The psychology of move- 

 ments, especially those expressing thought, had yielded a rich har- 

 vest ; while the great amount of experimentation in hypnotism, and 

 the foundation in 1885 of a Society of Physiological Psychology 

 (impossible twenty years ago), showed the vitality of French 

 studies. In England, the principal contributions were in com- 

 parative psychology, represented chiefly by the work of Lubbock 

 and Romanes. Germany was the centre of psycho-physics. 

 Wundt's laboratory at Leipzig, founded in 1879, had acquired 

 great renown, and, last year, had twenty students of different 

 nationalities working in it. M. Ribot justified those studies, 

 which had been rather depreciated in France. The predomin- 

 ating tendency in Italy was criminal psychology (better known 

 as criminal anthropology)— the three chiefs of the school being 

 Lombroso, mainly a biologist ; Ferri, a sociologist and statis- 

 tician ; and Garofals, a jurist. It had gained several adherents 

 in France, and there were symptoms of its invading Spain. In 

 the United States, as in Germany, public instruction had almost 

 alone played the part of initiation in the psychological move- 

 ment ; in England, the work had been chiefly done by books 

 (Mill, Bain, Spencer, &c). Four American Universities now 

 gave special teaching in physiological psychology, and had 



laboratories, psycho- physics being the dominant study. A 



