i6o 



NATURE 



[December 13, 1900 



NOTES. 

 The retirement of Mr. Charles Whitehead from the position 

 of the Technical Adviser to the Board of Agriculture has led to 

 a reconsideration of the means by which the Board obtain 

 technical advice on questions relating to agricultural botany and 

 economic zoology, and it has now been arranged that the 

 scientific and expert assistance required by the Board in con- 

 nection with these subjects will be furnished respectively by the 

 Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and by the Natural History 

 Departments, South Kensington. 



The Paris correspondent of ' the Times states that at the 

 sitting of the Academy of Sciences on Monday M. Becquerel, 

 whose father and grandfather were also men of science, was 

 warmly congratulated on having received the Rumford medal 

 of the Royal Society. The Academy also elected, by forty-six 

 votes to ten, M. Painleve in the section of geometry to the seat 

 left vacant by M. Darboux, 



Dr. Allan Macfadyen, director of the Jenner Institute, has 

 been elected Fullerian professor of physiology at the Royal 

 Institution. 



By a decision of the. House of Lords, the Institution of Civil 

 Engineers has been exempted from payment of the Corporation 

 Tax (1894). In view of this fact it is submitted that the Royal 

 Colleges of Physicians in London and Edinburgh may reason- 

 ably claim similar treatment ; • and we learn from the political 

 notes in the Times that an attempt is being made by Sir John 

 Tuke to induce the Chancellor of the Exchequer to concur in 

 this view. The especial hardship in this case is that, notwith- 

 standing the important part played by the two colleges in 

 administering and regulating medical education and examina- 

 tion, and in maintaining laboratories for original research, and 

 the obligation upon each Fellow to pay a stamp duty of 25/. on 

 election, there will be five years of arrears to make up if the 

 authorities persist in their intention to levy the tax. 



The following are among the lecture arrangements at the 

 Royal Institution, before Easter : — Sir Robert Ball, six lectures 

 (adapted to young people) on great chapters from the book of 

 nature ; Prof. J. A. Ewing, six lectures on practical mechanics 

 (experimentally treated) ; Dr. Allan Macfadyen, four lectures on 

 the cell as the unit of life ; Dr. Arthur Willey, three lectures on 

 the origin of vertebrate animals ; the Right Hon. Lord Rayleigh, 

 six lectures on sound and vibrations. The Friday Evening 

 Meetings will begin on January 18, when a discourse will be 

 delivered by Prof. Dewar on gases at the beginning and end of 

 the century. Succeeding discourses will probably be given by 

 Prof. G. H. Bryan, Prof. J. J. Thomson, Sir W. Roberts- 

 Austen, Mr. W. A. Shenstone, Dr. Horace Brown, and others. 



Twenty-three papers, several of them of a highly impor- 

 tant character, were read at a meeting of the U.S. National 

 Academy of Sciences, held at Brown University, on November 

 13-14. Among novel subjects of general scientific interest 

 brought before the meeting we notice the following : — An 

 account of the study of growing crystals by instantaneous micro- 

 photography, by Prof. T. W. Richards ; stereographic projec- 

 tion and some of its possibilities from a graphical standpoint, 

 by Prof. S. I^. Penfield ; report of progress made with the 

 Echelon spectroscope, and the spectrum of sodium in a magnetic 

 field, by A. A. Michelson ; the explanation of inertia and 

 gravitation by means of electrical phenomena, by Prof. H. A. 

 Rowland ; male preponderance (Androrhopy) in Lepidopterous 

 insects, by A. S. Packard ; exhibition of certain novel appara- 

 tus ; a wave machine ; an expansion lens ; a recording system 

 of two degrees of freedom ; a tube showing coloured cloudy 

 condensation, by Dr. C. Barus ; recent observations of the 

 planet Eros, by Prof. E. C. Pickering. 



NO. 1624, VOL. 63] 



Some valuable additions have recently been made to the 

 equipment of the observatory of Salo, in Lombardy. They 

 include several recording meteorological instruments, different 

 forms of seismoscopes, a great seismometrograph, and a limno- 

 graph for registering the seiches in Lake Gardo, the observatory 

 being situated on its western shore. 



A double explosion, resulting in the loss of three lives, 

 occurred on November 28 at the Smokeless Powder Works at 

 Trimley, near Ipswich ; the first in the mixing house, where 

 125 pounds of explosive material were being prepared, and the 

 second in the drying house, which contained a large quantity of 

 gun-cotton. The entire factory, consisting of a series of isolated 

 sheds and a boiler house, was almost razed to the ground, the 

 debris being scattered over the adjoining fields. The concussion 

 was felt at Ipswich and Rendlesham House, near Wickham 

 Market, which are about eight and twelve miles respectively 

 from the scene of the disaster, and also, it is said, at other 

 places outside a radius of fifteen miles. 



The seismological observatory of Quarto-Castello, near 

 Florence, is one of the most completely furnished so far as 

 regards apparatus provided with mechanical means of registra- 

 tion (see Nature, vol. Ixii., p. 200). Several instruments have 

 been added during the past year, and the older ones have 

 received some improvements in detail. Mr. D. R. Stiattesi, 

 the director of the observatory, has just printed his second 

 seismographic bulletin, that for the year November i, 1899, to 

 October 31, 1900. This valuable pamphlet contains details of 

 the records by the different instruments of no fewer than 135 

 earthquakes. Its publication within a month of the date of the 

 last entry is a feature worthy of imitation. Dr. G. Pacher has 

 also issued the second part of the seismographic bulletin of the 

 University of Padua for March 19 to June 30, 1899. The 

 records at this observatory are obtained by means of the micro- 

 seismographs designed by Prof. G. Vicentini, more than half 

 (sixteen out of twenty-nine) being those which are characteristic 

 of distant shocks. 



In our Norwegian contemporary, A^a^«r£«, published in Bergen, 

 Dr. Hans Reusch, director of the Geological Survey, notices 

 some geological investigations of great interest which have been 

 made by a young scientific Icelander, Mr. Helgi Pjetursson. 

 According to this observer, Iceland shows that the Glacial period 

 has had several subdivisions separated from each other by ice- 

 free periods, as has been demonstrated to be the case in the Alps 

 and other similar regions. 



Dr. Reusch draws attention in Naturen to the changes of 

 level that have taken place in Iceland in recent geological times, 

 viz., since the Ice age. He points out that on a hydrographic 

 map of the North Atlantic Ocean there is shown a submarine 

 ridge under shallow water, which stretches from the Faroe Isles 

 to Iceland and thence over to Greenland. North and north-east 

 of it lies the deep Norwegian Sea. During the Norwegian 

 Atlantic expedition there were found, strewed over the bottom, 

 shells of Arctic mollusca, which at present live in a considerably 

 colder climate and in much shallower water than that which 

 prevails in the Norwegian Sea. Mr. H. Friele directed attention 

 to that fact, and he suggested that the shells had been carried out 

 to the deep sea by drifting ice. It ought, at the same time, to be 

 remembered that Prof. G. O. Sars had found, off the Romsdal 

 coaS(t, in very deep water, shallow water shells and rolled pebbles, 

 and he inferred that this was evidence that sinking of the sea- 

 bottom had taken place there. In 1896 the Danish Ingolf Ex- 

 pedition investigated the sea-bottom between Ian Mayen and 

 Iceland. In examining the dredged material, Herr A. S. lensen 

 made the observation that almost everywhere over the bottom 

 of the deep ocean lie shells of dead molluscs of well-known 



