NOTES. 



863 



phenomena, and discovered beyond it the 

 reality of chemical processes." Some of the 

 contemporaries of Lavoisier may have been 

 more skilled experimenters in some direc- 

 tions, and no doubt he left much for his fol- 

 lowers to do. " Nevertheless, his Traite 

 Ji'lementaire de Chimie is unquestionably the 

 first rational exposition of the science of 

 chemistry, entirely resting on experimental 

 evidence, largely his own, and admitting to 

 the entities of matter nothing that was not 

 actually produced ; and since that day 

 chemistry is the science of the real ele- 

 ments." 



NOTES. 



IN the present course of thought and 

 life Prof. George E. Howard sees a crisis 

 which is determining the character of the 

 mpdern university. Thus there is a grow- 

 ing tendency to abandon the traditional as- 

 sumption that there is an essential difference 

 in the scholastic value of studies. A new 

 test of scholastic fitness has arisen the test 

 of life. All things are in process of devel- 

 opment; whole departments of knowledge, 

 hitherto unheard of in the schools, have 

 received recognition. Old subjects which 

 were thought dead have turned out to be 

 but sleeping. Thus philosophy and the clas- 

 sics, subjected to the comparative method, 

 are being made more productive than ever 

 before for social good. 



A REPORT on the climatology of the city 

 of Mexico, based upon hourly observations 

 continued through sixteen years (1877 to 

 1892), is published by Senor Barcena, of the 

 meteorological observatory there. The mean 

 annual temperature is 15 '4 C. The mean 

 monthly temperature ranges from 12 C. in 

 December to 18'1 C. in May. The highest 

 temperatures in the shade range from 23 C. 

 in December to 31 '6 C. in April ; while the 

 limit of lowest temperature runs from 2 - 2 

 C. in December to 8'2 C. in August and Sep- 

 tember. The most rainy months are those 

 from June to September. 



A " BIRD DAY " has been established in 

 some of the schools of Oil City, Pa., the ob- 

 ject of which is to promote " preservation of 

 American birds from the women who wear 

 them and from the small boy." The literary 

 exercises are similar to those customary on 

 Arbor day. 



FROGS are credited by Dr. Romanes, in 

 his Animal Intelligence, with having definite 

 ideas of locality. A Japanese correspondent 

 of Nature says that the same fact has been 

 noticed of old by the Japanese and Chinese. 

 Rejoan Terashima, in his illustrated Cyclo- 



paedia of the Three Systems of Japan and 

 China (completed in 1713), says that "when 

 frogs are removed far, they always long after 

 the original locality ; hence the Chinese 

 name Hia nia." For similar reasons the 

 Japanese call them "Kaeru," meaning re- 

 turn. This author is confirmed by the lexi- 

 cographer Shisei Tagawa. 



EXPERIMENTS made upon certain fresh- 

 water crustaceans, says the International 

 Journal of Microscopy, show that they are 

 sensitive to sounds corresponding to more 

 than forty thousand vibrations per second 

 (sounds that we can not hear), and to ultra- 

 violet rays that we can not perceive. Now, 

 all the rays that we can perceive appear to 

 us with definite colors, and it should be the 

 same with these animals ; so that it is prob- 

 able that they see colors that are unknown 

 to us, and that are as different from those 

 that we are familiar with as red is different 

 from yellow or green from violet. It follows 

 from this that natural light, which seems 

 white to us, would appear colored to them, 

 and that the aspect of Nature would be en- 

 tirely different to them from what it is to us. 

 It is possible, therefore, that to certain ani- 

 mals Nature is full of sounds, colors, and 

 sensations that we have no idea of. 



AN English committee of sportsmen and 

 naturalists is taking in hand the protection 

 of South African mammals the giraffe, ze- 

 bra, eland, gnu, koodoo, and other antelopes 

 against their threatened extinction. A 

 suggested method of accomplishing this is to 

 secure an inclosed park of about a hundred 

 thousand acres. 



IN a new process for coloring leather by 

 electrical action, the hide is stretched upon 

 a metallic table and covered, except at the 

 edges, with the coloring liquid. A difference 

 of potential is established between the liquid 

 and the metallic table. The effect of the 

 electric current is to cause the pores of the 

 skin to open, whereby the coloring is enabled 

 to penetrate deeply into its tissue. 



A BUST of Charles Waterton, the natu- 

 ralist and South American traveler, executed 

 by the late W. Hawkins in 1865 the year 

 in which Waterton died has been presented 

 to the Linnaean Society of London by the 

 trustees of the late Mrs. Pitt Byrne. The 

 only accessible portrait of Waterton is from 

 an original oil painting made by C. W. Peale 

 in Philadelphia in 1824. An engraving of 

 it forms the frontispiece of the third volume 

 of the Essays on Natural History. The 

 bust and the portrait correspond well when 

 allowance is made for the forty years' differ- 

 ence in the age of the subject. 



DR. FRANZ STUHLMAN, who accompanied 

 Emin Pasha into the heart of Africa, saw 

 much of the people called Pygmies. He 

 looks upon them as the remnant of a prime- 

 val race which at one time occupied the 



