326 



A' A TURE 



[August i, 1895 



Mr. F. T. Coville, ihe honorar)- curator of the Department 

 of Botany of the United States National Museum, issues an 

 appeal for information on the aboriginal uses of plants by the 

 natives of Xorlh .\merica, accompanied by instructions as to the 

 collecting of specimens, and the arrangement of the information 

 under \'arious heads. 



We learn from the Botanical Gazette that the Dirision of 

 \'egetable Physiology and Pathology in the United States 

 Dejiartment of .\griculture has had under cultivation during the 

 past year over looo varieties of wheat and oats. The grains 

 have been collected from nearly all parts of the world, and have 

 been grown chiefly for the purpose of obtaining information 

 upon their rust-resisting qualities. Numerous crosses have been 

 made, and material and facts obtained which will be used in 

 further work. 



A VALUABLE memoir on the earthquakes of the Philippine 

 Islands has recently been published by P. Miguel Saderra Maso, 

 the director of the seismic section of the Observatory of Manila. 

 The work consists of 122 quarto pages, and is illustrated by 48 

 plates, representing the instruments used in the observatory, the 

 disturl)ed areas and isoseismal lines of sixty-one important earth- 

 quakes, and copies of some of the seismographic records, one of 

 them somewhat resembling a bank manager's signature. With 

 a seismological observatory so well equipped as that of Manila, 

 a network of seismic and meteorological stations already 

 established over the country, an energetic and capable director, 

 and numerous shocks, the Philippine Islands promise to become 

 as important a district for studying earthquakes as the neigh- 

 I)ouring empire of Japan. 



Some beautiful enlargements of phonograph traces arc given 

 by Dr. John G. McKendrick in the Journal of Anatomy and 

 Physiology, illustrating his paper "On the Tone and Curves of 

 Ihe Phonograph." The accuracy of the phonograph records is 

 strikingly exemplified by the traces of four Koenig tuning-forks, 

 giving 64, 128, 256, and 512 vibrations per second respectively. 

 In each case, the length of indentations is half of that of the 

 prenous set, and they arc of the same character. Traces of the 

 sounds of a violin, flute, organ, military land, and human voice, 

 singing and speaking, are reproducetl. But these traces do not 

 show the exact motion of the vibrating disc. To exhibit this, 

 the phonograph traces were converted into curves by a lever 

 arrangement. The lever ended in a fine point of a hard 

 needle, which translated the up-and-down motion of the 

 reproducing style into a to-and-fro wave motion. To get rid of 

 all disturbing vibrations due to the needle itself, the latter was 

 firmly fixed in a lead block to which the reproducing style was 

 attached, and the phonogram cylinder was turned so slowly that 

 its motion was almost imperceptible to the eye. By this con- 

 trivance the uniform curves due to a tuning-fork, the smooth 

 notes of a piccolo, the strong undulations of a liassoon, and the 

 highly over-tonc<l ripples of an old English coach horn were very 

 effectively made visible to the eye. 



A RECENT number of Modem Medicine aiif Bacteriological 

 A'nvVra; contains an article on Prof. Uunge's important ]iaper on 

 the therapeutic value of iron, read at the German Congress of 

 Internal Medicine last spring. .\n interesting tabic is quoted 

 showing the amount of iron founti in various food substances. 

 Spin.ach contains considerably more iron than the yolk of eggs, 

 whilst the latter, again, is suj^rior in this respect to beef, next in 

 order coming apples, lentils, strawlK-rrics, white Ijcans, |icas, 

 potatoes, wheat, &c., and almost at the Uittom of the list we 

 find cow's milk. That this article of food, of such great import- 

 ance in infant life, thould contain so small a quantity of iron, led 

 Prof. Bungc to conduct a scries of experiments on animals, to 

 ascertain in what quantity iron was present in the '.v'.irni .if 

 NO. 1344. VOL. 52] 



animals of different age. The interesting fact was established 

 that younger animals contain a much greater quantity of iron 

 than adult animals, that the body of a rabbit or a guinea-pig, for 

 example, one hour old, w.is found to contain more than four 

 times as much iron as that of similar animals two and a h.ilf 

 months old. Prof. Bungc is of opinion that a long-continued 

 exclusive milk diet for infants is not ad\-antageous, but should be 

 supplemented by the addition of wheat preparations. Strawberries 

 and apples, however, become investe<l with fresh attractions by 

 the light of these investigations. The writer of the article suggests 

 that reform is required in the .tdministration of iron, ami that the 

 immense quantities of iron in the shape of tonics, which custom 

 prescribes for patients, may very possibly, in a large number of 

 cases, only ser\e to increase the discomfort of the inv.»lid by the 

 disturbance caused in the digestive functions of the body. In 

 conclusion the hope is expressed that Prof. Bunge's valuable 

 results will "set physicians to thinking more of materia ali- 

 mentariie, and less of materia medica " ! 



Iwt. American Naturalist for July contains a statement of the 

 advantages offered for scientific study by the Missouri Botanical 

 Garden at St. Louis, and by the Hopkins Seaside Laboratory, 

 situated at Pacific Grove on the coast of California, and main- 

 tained by the Lcland Stanford Junior University. 



Quai.n's "Elements of Anatomy" (Longmans, Green, and 

 Co.) is now in its tenth edition. The second part of the third 

 volume, which has just been published, comprises the descri]itive 

 anatomy of the cerebro-spinal and sympathetic nerves, and their 

 ganglia. It is by Prof. G. D. Thane, who, with Prof. Schiifer, 

 edits the edition. 



We have received the first ])art of a new monthly microscopical 

 journal, the Zeitschrift fur angc-u<andte Mitroskojiie, edited by 

 G. Marpmann, and published by Thost, of Leipzig. It will be 

 esix'cially concerned with technique and methods. The present 

 number contains papers on a new species of Sceiiedesmus, by P. 

 Richter ; on modern imbedding materials, by the editor ; on the 

 fixing of spores and pollen in glycerin, by H. Reichelt ; and a 

 number of reviews and notes. 



The Central Meteorological Institute of Finland has just 

 issued vol. xii. (new series) of its observations for the year 1893. 

 This service is one of the oldest, having been established about 

 1844, and reorganised, under the superintendence of the Society 

 of Sciences of Finland, in 1882. -Vmong its earlier publications 

 there is a series of eye observations taken at twenty minutes 

 interval, from March 1848 to December 1856, before the 

 establishment of self-registering instruments, a labour which is 

 probably without a ixirallcl. The present volume contains 

 hourly observations for Helsingfors, particular attention being 

 paid to the character and motion of clouds, and to atmospherical 

 electricity. 



The eighth volume of the late Prof. Cayley's " Collected 

 Mathematical Papers " has just appeared. The volume contains 

 seventy papers, numbered from 486 to 555, published for the 

 mcst part in the years 1871-73, and runs into 570 |)ages. In a 

 prefatory note. Dr. A. R. Forsyth, the editor of this and the 

 remaining volumes, .says that Prof. Cayley had himself passed 

 the first thirty-eight sheets for press, and prepared one note. 

 The actual manuscript of this note, which was one of the last of 

 Cayley's writings, is reproduced in fac-siuiile in the present 

 volume, u|)on Ihe kind of paper which he regularly used during 

 his malhemalicnl investigations. The remaining papers will 

 appear without notes and references. The long biographical 

 ntvtice of Cayley, contributed by Dr. Forsyth to the Proceedings 

 of the Royal .Society, is reprinted in the volume just published. 



The sixth annual report of the Missouri Itutanical Garden 

 l«ars witness that useful work was.iccomplished during la.sl year. 



