April 12, 1888] 



NATURE 



567 



The death is announced at Yokohama, on February 17, 

 of Mr. Henry Pryer, an old resident there, who had de- 

 voted much attention to the study of Japanese entomology 

 and ornithology. The wri.ter of an obituary notice in tht/ajian 

 Weekly Mail states that, except for a short time, when engaged 

 in arranging natural history collections in the Tokio Museum, 

 Mr. Pryer was occupied in business pursuits, his spare time 

 being given to the study of Japanese fauna; "and it is no 

 exaggeration to state that he "had become the authority facile 

 princeps on all questions connected with the birds, butterflie';,, 

 and moths, whilst at the same time he had acquired a most 

 extensive knowledge and store of facts in connection with all 

 the other branches of the zoology of Japan." Mr. Pryer was 

 the author of papers in various English scientific journals, and 

 the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan. In November 

 1886 he published Part I. of a description of the butterflies of 

 Japan, under the title " Rhopalocera Nihonica," and Part II. is 

 said to be in the printers' hands, and almost ready for publica- 

 tion. It is to be hoped that the third and concluding part may 

 be found in such a state of preparation as will insure the com- 

 pletion of the work. Mr. Pryer, who was the brother of Mr. 

 Pryer of the North Borneo Company's service, like himself an 

 enthusiastic student of Nature, was only thirty-nine years of age 

 at the time of his death. 



Russian zoology has sustained a heavy los? by the death 

 of Prof. M. N. Bogdanoff. He died at St. Petersburg on 

 March 16. His first work, published in 1867, was on the life 

 and the geographical distribution of the Tetrao urogallus. Four 

 years later he published a most elaborate and suggestive work, 

 " The Mamma's and Birds of the Black-earth Region of the 

 Volga," in which he treated in detail the present geographical 

 distribution of animals in connection with the climate and soil 

 of Russia during the Post-Pliocene period. In 1873 he took 

 part in the expedition to Khiva, and returned with a rich geo- 

 logical collection, now at the St. Petersburg University. The 

 results of this journey were embodied in a capital work 

 on the Khiva Oasis and the Sands of Kyzyl-kum. His next 

 work was on the fauna of the Aral-Caspian basin, which he 

 described in the Menioires of the Society of Naturalists at the 

 St. Petersburg University. In 1875 he began the exploration 

 of the Caucasus, and published the results of his labours in a 

 work, " The Birds of the Caucasus," which has become the 

 foundation-stone of the ornithology of the region. In 1880 

 he visited a part of the coast of the Arctic Ocean, and the 

 results of his journey were published in the Menioires of the 

 Society at St. Petersburg University, In i88i he published 

 another excellent work, "The Russian Magpies." Finally, in 

 1885, he began the publication of his life-work, "The Ornitho- 

 logy of Russia," of which only the first part has been issued. 

 Prof. M. N. Bogdanofif's popular zoological sketches, published 

 in a Russian review, were widely read. All the above-men- 

 tioned works, as also many smaller monographs, have been 

 published in Russian. 



The Russian Geographical Society has lost one of its most 

 active ethnographers, V. N. Mainoff, whose works on the 

 Erzya-Mordvinians— their anthropological features and customs 

 —are well known. His knowledge of the Finnish language 

 gave a special value to his works on the remnants of paganism 

 among the Mordvinianc, and to his descriptive work on Karelia 

 and the Onega region. He had already published a Finnish 

 grammar in Russian, and was engaged in the compilation of a 

 Finnish and Russian dictionary. The latter task was intrusted 

 to him by the Senate of Finland. He had brought the dictionary 

 up to the letter K. 



Another masterly contribution to the fundamental principles 

 of chemistry, leading us still further into the intensely interesting 



region of the hitherto unknown, will be found in the current 

 number of the Berichte, from Profs. Victor Meyer and Riecke. 

 We have from time to time in these columns noticed the progress 

 of the development of the now famous " position-in-space " 

 theory first formulated by Van t' HofF, and it will perhaps be 

 remembered that a short account was recently given of the re- 

 markable results obtained by Prof. Meyer from the study of 

 certain complex organic compounds. The main result consisted 

 in the discovery of two new properties possessed by carbon 

 atoms : first, that the four valencies may be deviated from their 

 positions at the corners of a regular tetrahedron ; and second, 

 that two carbon adorns united by single bonds may be attached 

 to each other in two ways— one in which they are free to rotate, 

 and another in which rotation is prevented. Recognizing that 

 the chemist must not tread this unbroken ground alone, but that 

 he must go hand in hand with his co-worker the phyi-icist. Profs. 

 Meyer and Riecke have brought together evidence afforded by 

 both physics and chemistry, and have thereupon formulated a 

 theory which appears likely to be the germ of a grand 

 generalization. They suppose the carbon atom to be a sphere 

 surrounded by an ether shell, that the atom itself is the carrier 

 of the specific affinity, while the surface of the ethereal envelope 

 is the seat of the valencies. Each valency is conditioned by the 

 existence of two oppositely electrified poles, situate at the ends 

 of an imaginary straight line, short in comparison with the 

 diameter of the envelope. Such a system of two poles is termed 

 a di-pole. The four valencies of the carbon atom would thus 

 consist of four such di-poles. The middle point of the line 

 joining each pair of poles is further supposed to remain always 

 in the surface of the envelope, but freely movable in that sur- 

 face, and the di-pole itself would be able to rotate freely round 

 this central point. It is then supposed that the carbon atom 

 possesses a greater attraction for the positive than for the nega- 

 tive ends of the di-poles, so that, owing to the possibility of free 

 rotation, the positive ends would turn towards the centre of the 

 atom. At the same time the valencies of the same atom would 

 repel each other, and take up their positions at the four comers 

 of the regular tetrahedron, from which, however, they could be, 

 as experiment shows they occasionally are, deflected. Thus the 

 molecules of marsh gas, CH4, or any carbon compound of the 

 type Cx4, would naturally be symmetrical, but when the four 

 valencies are attached to groups of different weights their 

 positions would probably be altered. A strikingly natural ex- 

 planation is then given of the nature of single, double, and 

 triple linking of carbon atoms, showing how the first can occur 

 in the two ways previously indicated. It is a matter for sincere 

 congratulation to those who have been labouring so long in 

 building up the now immense fabric of organic chemistry, that 

 it is by reason of the large accumulation of data concerning the 

 carbon compounds that these important principles have been 

 arrived at ; and it is to be hoped that before long the data may 

 be sufficient to permit of like investigations of the atoms of other 

 elements. 



So many interesting reports relative to waterspouts, sighted 

 during January and Febniaiy in the western portion of the 

 North Atlantic, have been received by the Hydrographer of the 

 United States Navy, that he has plotted them in a supplement 

 to the Pilot Chart of the North Atlantic Ocean for March, 

 together with the tracks of storms coincident with some of them. 

 The positions of the spouts are given for fourteen days between 

 January 12 and February 29. To specify a few cases :— On 

 January 12 four spouts were seen in lat. 36° 41' N., and long. 

 72° 27' W., and on the 19th several were seen a little farther to 

 the eastward. And again, on January 22, several large spouts 

 were seen in lat. 31° 47' N., long. 74° 33' W. The most inter- 

 esting of all are those seen on January 26-28, for the reason 

 that they were clearly associated with a low baroneter area 



