October 14, 1S97] 



NATURE 



583 



Library, of the deep personal interest taken by hiin in the pro- 

 gress of the College as a place of higher education and learning." 

 (2) "That the Court accepts with great pleasure the munificent 

 offers of two friends of the College of the sums of 10,000/. for 

 the erection, and of 5000/. towards the maintenance, of suitable 

 buildings for the physical laboratory, and requests the Principal 

 to convey to them its sincere thanks for their wise and opportune 

 generosity, which will enable the College to advance and 

 develop a scientific teaching and research of the highest public 

 importance and utility." (3) "That the Court accepts with 

 great pleasure the generous and useful gift of Mr. Edward Holt 

 to the College, and desires the Treasurer to express their best 

 thanks to him. The Court also hopes that the Council will 

 take steps to associate the name of Mr. Holt in some permanent 

 manner with the new gymnasium." 



Several of the London polytechnics have commenced the pre- 

 sent session with some new developments in their day work. The 

 Battersea Polytechnic is inaugurating day courses in technological 

 chemistry, specially adapted to persons engaged in those in- 

 lustries for which a knowledge of chemistry is useful. The 

 xiuth-west London Polytechnic is not only developing its day 

 1 ngineering courses, but is also providing special facilities for 

 students who wish to enter for the examinations of London 

 University, and is starting a day department for women, in which 

 opportunities will be given to pursue advanced studies in art, 

 science, and languages. The East London Technical College, 

 People's Palace, is further developing the day courses which 

 were commenced last year. Courses in physics and electrical 

 engineering are now given, as well as in chemistry and mechanical 

 engineering, while facilities are offered to students to study for 

 the various subjects of the London B.Sc. examinations. The 

 Borough Polytechnic, besides adding considerably to its pro- 

 vision of scientific and technical instruction for artisans, has 

 opened a technical day school for boys, which is specially 

 designed to fit its pupils for entering on industrial life. 



SCIENTIFIC SERIALS. 

 American Journal of Science, September. — Principal 

 characters of the Protoceratidse, by O. C. Marsh. The genus 

 Protoceras, described by the author in 1891, from the Miocene 

 of South I3akota, is now known to include some of the most 

 interesting extinct mammals yet discovered. It likewise repre- 

 sents a distinct family, and thus deserves careful investigation 

 and description. Before this discovery, no horned artiodactyles 

 were known to have lived during Miocene time, and Protoceras 

 is thus the earliest one described. The type specimen, more- 

 over, had a pair of horn-cores on the parietals, and not on the 

 frontals, as in modern forms of this group. The animal was 

 apparently a true ruminant, nearly as large as a sheep, but of 

 more delicate proportions. Another notable feature is the very 

 laige, open nasal cavity. Thispeculiar feature is of even greater 

 importance than the horn-cores, and indicates clearly in the 

 living animal a long flexible nose, if not a true proboscis. The 

 paper is illustrated by a series of admirable plates. — The theory 

 of singing flames, by H. V. Gill. If a singing flame is produced 

 by inserting a burning gas jet into a tube, the pressure during a 

 condensation forces the burning gas back into the nozzle of the 

 jet. This can be made evident by observing the image of the 

 flame in a rotating mirror, when a small flame is seen below the 

 level of the nozzle, corresponding to the gaps in the main flame. 

 — Oscillatory discharge of a large accumulator, by J. Trow- 

 bridge. The discharge from a large number of Plante cells is 

 characterised by a sibilant flame which, by quickly separating 

 the spark terminals, can be drawn out to a length of several 

 feet. It closely resembles the light produced by passing' an 

 electric spark through lypocodium powder. When a photograph 

 of this flaming discharge is examined, it is seen to have an 

 intensely bright spark as a nucleus. By using an arrangement 

 to blow out the flame, it was found possible to examine the 

 spark by means of a revolving mirror. The photographs then 

 showed five or six distinct oscillations. The author concludes 

 that a cell may be regarded as a leaky condenser, and that its 

 discharge is always essentially oscillatory. — Electric discharges 

 in air, by the same author. The voltaic arc is a kind of flaming 

 discharge as above described. Its resistance may be studied by 

 the damping method. The author fed an arc light by a con- 

 tinuous current and by a condenser discharge, and found the 

 resistance to be 08 ohms, which was independent of the length 



NO. 1459, VOL. 56] 



of the arc. — On Pithecanthropus erectus, by L. Manouvrier. 

 The degree of fossilisation of the Trinil remains is such that the 

 femur attains the weight of I kilogram, whereas prehistoric 

 femurs of the same size do not exceed 350 grams. The im- 

 portant fact established by Dubois is that the craniological 

 inferiority of human races increases with their antiquity. The 

 knowa anthropoid genus to which the intermediate Pithecan- 

 thropus is most closely allied is the Gibbon [Hylobates). If the 

 Pithecanthropus was a simple precursor of man, it was superior 

 enough to the other animals to survive unless the human species 

 hastened to annihilate this dangerous competitor. If it was an 

 ancestor, its species lives yet in its human descendants. 



Wiedemann's Annalen der Physik und Chemie, No. 

 9. — Action at a distance^ by P. Drude. Action at a dis- 

 tance may be defined as a relation between two bodies 

 such that the energy of the system depends not only 

 upon their velocities, but also upon their mutual position. 

 Contact action may take place by impact or through the inter- 

 mediary of an elastic solid or a fluid, compressible or incom- 

 pressible. Gravitation has not yet been reduced to a contact 

 action, owing chiefly to the fact that its velocity of propagation 

 through space has not yet been ascertained. According to 

 Laplace, this velocity must be at least ten million times that of 

 light. — Grey and red incandescence, by O. Lummer. Draper's 

 assertion that all bodies begin to glow at the same temperature 

 has been disproved by H. F. Weber and Emden, who showed 

 that the first indication of a grey misty light occurs at tempera- 

 tures ranging from 403° (German silver) to 423° (gold). The 

 grey glow appears to fluctuate and flit about, but the image be- 

 comes fixed as soon as the red glow sets in. This may be ex- 

 plained by the constitution of the eye. The rods perceive the 

 grey glow. The fovea centralis contains no rods, and hence the 

 light is not seen if looked at direct. The cones, on the other 

 hand, are the instruments of colour perception. They alone 

 line the fovea centralis, and hence the red light is seen in its 

 proper place. At a sufficiently feeble intensity the solar spec- 

 trum appears colourless along its entire length. — Glow on insu- 

 lated conductors in a high-frequency field, by H. Ebert and E. 

 Wiedemann. The authors place a wire or rod in a bulb or 

 cylinder placed between the terminal condenser plates of a 

 Lecher wire system, so that it hangs parallel to the axis of the 

 condenser. A sHght exhaustion suffices to produce a blue glow 

 against both ends of the rod on the glass surface, which spreads 

 out in all directions, and shows forms resembling Lichtenberg's 

 figures. As exhaustion proceeds, the glow extends over the sur- 

 face of the rod, and forms a bridge across the middle. The 

 occurrence of this bridge is retarded by making the rod thicker, 

 or using several wires, or substituting a tube for the rod. — Dis- 

 charge inside a wire gauze box, by the same authors. If a 

 cylindrical box of wire gauze is placed inside an exhausted tube, 

 the glow of the gas is observed to penetrate inside the gauze, 

 especially if the box is short. — Method of making lines on glass 

 visible as light on a dark ground, by F. F. Martens. If a glass 

 plate is illuminated through its end surfaces, no light penetrates 

 through the large surfaces owing to total reflection. But if lines 

 are etched into them or cut with a diamond, they appear bright 

 on a dark ground. — Electric viscosity of insulators, by G. 

 Quincke. The logarithmic decrement of a glass sphere sus- 

 pended from the arm of a balance in ether is increased from 

 00210 to 00608 in a field produced by 2000 volts. The differ- 

 ence may be termed the electric viscosity. 



SOCIETIES AND ACADEMIES. 

 Paris. 

 Academy of Sciences, October 4. — M. A. Chatin in the 

 chair. — On ancient glass mirrors backed with metal, by M, 

 Berthelot. A description of some mirrors, of Gallo- Roman 

 origin, dating from the third or fourth century. The metallic 

 backing consists of lead, which would appear to have been 

 applied in a molten state to the glass, — On the number and 

 symmetry of the fibrovascular bundles of the petiole, in the 

 measurement and classification of plants, by M, A. Chatin. — 

 Observations on the sun, made at the Observatory of Lyons with 

 the Brunner equatorial during the second quarter of 1897, by 

 AL J. Guillaume. The results are summarised in three tables, 

 showing the sunspots, their distribution in latitude, and the 

 distribution of the faculce in latitude.— Orthogonal systems for 

 the derivatives of the fl-functions of two arguments, by M. E. 



