864 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



gen from such a mass of chlorate, com- 

 bined with the restraining influence of 

 the kegs (the chlorate was packed in 

 kegs of one hundredweight each), and 

 possibly also helped by the presence of 

 much charred wood and the dense vol- 

 ume of smoke. Whatever is the true 

 theory, however, it is evident that our 

 belief in the nonexplosiveness of potas- 

 sium chlorate must be modified. 



NOTES. 



A PIECE of experimental glass pave- 

 ment was laid in Lyons, in the Rue de 

 la R6publique, last fall, and it is reported 

 to have worn very well thus far. The 

 silicate of which the pavement is com- 

 posed is called by the manufacturers 

 ceramo-crystal or devitrified glass. It 

 may be finished in various colors and 

 with a rough or smooth surface. The 

 blocks are made by heating broken glass 

 to a temperature of 1,250 C. and then 

 compressing it by hydraulic power. The 

 resulting compound is said to have all 

 the qualities of glass except its trans- 

 parency. 



THE New York Agricultural Experi- 

 ment Station reports of its analyses of 

 sugar beets in 1898 that the average per- 

 centage of sugar in the samples analyzed 

 is 14.2, with a coefficient of purity of 85. 

 In general the yield of beets was between 

 nine tons and twenty tons per acre. 



AN altitude of 12,440 feet, or 366 feet 

 greater than any attained before, was 

 reached in the kite-flying experiments 

 at Blue Hill Observatory, Massachusetts, 

 on February 21st. The flight was begun 

 at twenty minutes to four in the after- 

 noon, with a temperature of 40 and a 

 wind velocity of seventeen miles an hour 

 at the surface. At the highest point 

 reached by the kite the temperature was 

 12 and the wind velocity fifty miles an 

 hour. Four improved Hargreave kites 

 with curved surfaces, like soaring birds' 

 wings, were used tandem, and the flying 

 line was a steel wire. 



THE first to be unveiled of a series 

 of tablets to be fixed by the Municipal 

 Council of Bath, England, to mark his- 

 torical houses is on the house where 

 William Herschel lived in 1780, and was 

 officially unveiled by Sir Robert Ball, 

 April 22d. In a little workshop at the 

 end of the back garden of this house 

 Herschel made his Newtonian reflector, 

 and here he discovered Uranus. 



ATTENTION is called by Dr. Martin 

 Ficker to the fact, brought out in his 

 experiments, that cultures of microbes 



are affected by the glass of the tubes 

 in which they are made. By virtue of 

 differences in composition, different sorts 

 of glass give varying degrees of alka- 

 linity to water in contact with them, 

 and the activity of the bacteria they 

 contain is correspondingly affected. 



WE have to add to our obituary list 

 of persons in whom science is interested 

 the names of Professor Socin, late of the 

 University of Leipsic, Orientalist, and 

 author of Baedeker's Palestine and Syria 

 and many special works on the Arabic 

 language and dialects; M. N. Rieggen- 

 bach, correspondent of the Paris Acad- 

 emy of Sciences, Section of Mathematics, 

 at Olten, Switzerland ; Elizabeth Thomp- 

 son, donor of liberal gifts for scientific 

 purposes, at Stamford, Conn.; she con- 

 tributed toward the telescope for Vas- 

 sar College, was a patron of the Ameri- 

 can Association, and endowed the Eliza- 

 beth Thompson Scientific Fund; George 

 Averoff, who died at Alexandria, Egypt, 

 July 27th, leaving, among other be- 

 quests, 20,000 to create an agricul- 

 tural school in Thessaly, and 50,000 

 to the polytechnic schools at Athens; 

 Charles J. Stillg, ex-Provost of the Uni- 

 versity of Pennsylvania, under whose 

 administration the institution took a 

 great stride in its development; Mrs. 

 Arvilla J. Ellis, an assiduous student of 

 the fungi, who assisted her husband, J. 

 B. Ellis, in preparing and mounting the 

 five thousand specimens for the North 

 American Fungi and the Fungi Colum- 

 bian!, and more than two hundred thou- 

 sand other specimens which were dis- 

 tributed to the botanists of the world, 

 at Newfield, N. J., July 18th; M. Bal- 

 biani, Professor of Embryology at the 

 Coll6ge de France; Prof. Pasquale Fre- 

 da, Director of the Station for Agricul- 

 tural Chemistry at Rome; Dr. S. T. 

 Jakoic, Professor of Botany and Direc- 

 tor of the Botanic Gardens, at Belgrade ; 

 Dr. Carl Kuschel, formerly Professor of 

 Physics in the Polytechnic Institute at 

 Dresden ; M. A. de Marbaix, Professor of 

 Zoology and Anatomy in the Agricul- 

 tural Institute at Louvain ; Dr. N. Grote, 

 Professor of Psychology and Philosophy 

 in the University of Moscow and editor 

 of a journal devoted to those subjects; 

 Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, the eminent 

 German chemist, of whom a fuller no- 

 tice will be given; and Sir Edward 

 Frankland, another eminent chemist 

 (English), one of Bunsen's pupils, a 

 member of the Royal Commissions on 

 Water Supply and River Pollution, and 

 author of researches on the luminosity 

 of flame and the effect of the density 

 of a medium on the rate of combustion, 

 died in Norway, aged seventy-four years. 



