598 



NATURE 



[October 20, 1892 



done by omitting the potash from the bath. One curious fact of 

 observation is that the mirrors experimented on never seemed to 

 take the first application of the silvering solution, but on being 

 recleaned with nitric acid the second was always successful. 

 Why this should be so does not seem to be easily explained, for 

 Mr. Common only commits himself to the statement that " the 

 nature of the liquid other than distilled water last in contact 

 with the surface of the mirror seems to be the determining 

 thing. " 



Himmel und Erde. — In this magazine for October there 

 is a most interesting set of articles, of which we mention the 

 following: — " Meteorology as the Physics of the Atmosphere," 

 by Herr Wilhelm von Bezold. This comprises a general sum- 

 mary of the proceedings of the German Meteorological Society, 

 which met in Braunschweig on June 7 last. — -"Astronomy of 

 the Invisible," by Herr Dr. Scheiner. This is the first of a 

 series of articles, and deals, as far as it goes, with the discovery 

 of Neptune by Adams and Le Verrier ; it contains also a trans- 

 lation of the letter which Le Verrier wrote to Dr. Galle, who 

 was then an assistant at the Berlin Observatory, telling him the 

 results he had obtained, and asking him to make a search for 

 the unknown planet. As a matter of interest we will give the 

 elements of Neptune as obtained by Le Verrier and Adams, 

 together with the true ones afterwards determined, for the re- 

 sults of such a piece of work will always be looked upon with 

 interest. 



Le Verrier. Adams. True elements. 



Half major axis 36'IS ... 37'25 ... 30*05 



Eccentricity ... ... o"io76 ... o'i2o6 ... 0*0090 



Longitude of Perihelion ... 285° ... 299° ... 46° 



Mass (Sun = 1) ooooi ... o'ooois ... 0*00005 



Inclination ... o" ... o" ... i°'8 



In the notes two excellent illustrations of parts of the moon are 

 inserted, one being a reproduction of a photograph taken at the 

 Lick Observatory on August 31, 1890, and the other displaying 

 the region to the north of Hyginus, showing these curious river- 

 like appearances as first remarked by Prof. Weinek of Prague. 

 Other notes deal with the astronomical reasons of the Ice Age, 

 observations of Mars during the period 1883-88, polariscope 

 observation of the surface of Venus, &c. 



GEOGRAPHICAL NOTES. 



Mount Orizaba, or Citlaltepetl, in Mexico, has been 

 measured trigonometrically by Mr. J. T. Scovell, with the 

 result that its height is fixed as 18,314 feet. Popocatepetl is 

 about 700 feet lower, and unless Mount St. Elias is found to 

 considerably exceed Russel's estimate of 18,100 feet, Orizaba 

 must be considered the highest summit in North America. 



The pumping of brine from the North German salt mines and 

 the consequent subsidence of the land, is the cause of a some- 

 what interesting change in the small lakes near Mansfeld. The 

 Salzigen See, as observed by Dr. Ule, of Halle, had a maximum 

 depth of thirty metres on June 18, and of no less than forty-two 

 metres on June 28, the subsidence of the bottom having taken 

 place at the average rate of more than one metre a day. 



Following the death of Dr. Theodor Menke (see p. 302) 

 we have to notice the loss of his fellow-worker. Dr. Karl 

 Spruner von Merz, at the age of eighty-nine. He died on 

 August 24, 1892. After a military career of some distinction, 

 he retired from the army in 1886. His attention was early 

 attracted to historical geography, and his famous "Historical 

 Atlas" (1837-1852) has made his memory imperishable. It 

 was in preparing the third edition of this atlas that he was first 

 associated with Menke. 



The camels which were introduced into German South-West 

 Africa last year, have, according to the Deuischcs Kolonialblatt, 

 proved a great success. They are employed in keeping up com- 

 munication between Walfisch Bay and Windhoek, and for 

 journeys into the interior. Their power of travelling for a week 

 at a time without food or water has frequently beei\ put to the 

 test on the borders of the Kalahari desert. The climate does 

 not seem to affect them unfavourably, and they have proved 

 exempt from the many fatal diseases which attack horses and 

 even oxen in Namaqualand. 



A LECTURE on "Regions and Races" was delivered on 

 Monday evening in the Regent's Square Hall by Dr. H. R. Mill. 



The object of the lecture was to demonstrate the continuity (^ 

 geography with the physical sciences which account for th 

 growth of the surface features of the globe, and with thenatur;; 

 sciences which explain the forms of plant and animal life on i; 

 surface. The interactions between man and his environmeiv 

 were discussed as the true basis of the higher geography. 



M.J. Thoulet has this summer been engaged in an oceai;' 

 graphical study of the Basin of Arcachon, and publishes in th 

 last number of the Comptes Kendus an interestin'/ epitome > 

 his preliminary results. This lagoon forms a valuable oystci 

 preserve, and the researches into the action of the tides 

 on the enclosed water has practical as well as scientific 

 bearings. The investigation will be continued, so as to include 

 the other lagoons along the coast enclosed by sand dunes, and 

 more or less cut off from the sea. 



THE COMPARATIVE PHYSIOLOGY OF 

 RESPIRA TION.^ 

 A MONG the very first of the physiological acts observed were 

 -^^ those of respiration. The regular movement-; of breath- 

 ing, from the first feeble efforts of the new-born babe until the 

 sigh in the last breath of the dying — after which is silence, cold, 

 and dissolution — have commanded the attention and claimed the 

 interest of every one, the thoughtful and the thoughtless alike. 

 And one comes to feel that in some mysterious way "the 

 breath is the life." But in what way does breathing subserve 

 life or render it possible ? Aristotle and the naturalists of the 

 olden time supposed that it was to cool the blood that the air 

 was taken into the lungs, and, as they supposed, also into the 

 arteries. With the limited knowledge of anatomy in those early 

 days, and the fact that after death the arteries are wholly or 

 almost wholly devoid of blood, while the veins are filled with it, 

 what could be more natural than to suppose that the arteries 

 were vessels for the cooling air ? If one supposes that he 

 has entirely outgrown this view of Aristotle, let him think for a 

 moment how he would express the fact that an individual is de- 

 scended from the Puritans, for example. In expressing it even 

 the physiologist could hardly bring himself to say other than 

 "he has the blood of the Puritans in his veins." Would he 

 say " he has the blood of the Puritans in his arteries " ? 



As observation increased the cold-blooded animals were more 

 carefully studied and found to possess also a respiration ; they 

 certainly do not need it to cool the blood. Then there are the 

 insects and the other myriads of living forms that teem in the 

 oceans, lakes, rivers, and even in the wayside pools. Do these, 

 too, have a breath ? And the plants on the land and in the 

 water, is the air vital to them ? Aristotle and the older natural- 

 ists could not answer these questions. To them, on the respira- 

 tory side at least, all life was not in any sense the same. It was 

 not till chemistry and physics were considerably developed, not 

 until the air-pump, the balance, and the burette were perfected 

 that it was possible to give more than a tentative answer. It 

 was not, until the microscope could increase the range of the eye 

 into the fields of the infinitely little, possible to form even 

 an approximately correct conception. The first glimmerings of 

 the real significance of respiration for all living things was in the 

 observation that the air which would not support a flame, al- 

 though it might be breathed, could not support life. That 

 is, there must be something in the transparent air that feeds the 

 flame and becomes the breath of life, the real pahulum vitcz, the 

 merely mechanical action of the air not being sufficient. 



Since the experiments on insects and other animals by Boyle 

 (1670) with the air-pump, by Bernouilli, on subjecting fishes to 

 water out of which all the air had been boiled, and those of 

 Mayow(i674), it became more and more evident that respiration 

 was not confined to the higher forms, but was a universal fact 

 in the organic world. Then came the most fruitful discoveries 

 of all, made by the immortal Priestley ( 1775-6), viz., that the 

 air is not an element, but composed of two constituents — 

 nitrogen, which is inert in respiration, and oxygen, which is the 

 real vital substance of the air, the substance which supports 

 the flame of the burning candle and the life of the animal as 

 well. 



What would seem more simple at this stage of knowledge 



' Address delivered, in August, 1S92. at the meeting of the American 

 Association for the Advancement of Science, by Prof. Simon Henry Gage, 

 of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., Vice-President of the Biological 

 Section 



NO. I 199, VOL. 46] 



