March 28, 1895] 



NATURE 



51; 



NOTES. 

 The Bakerian Lecture will be delivered before the Royal 

 Society on Thursday, May 9. The research upon which the 

 lecture is to be based has been coodu;ted by Messrs. A. Vernon 

 llarcourt and William Esson, and the title is announced as 

 " The Laws of Connection between the Conditions of a Chemical 

 Change and its Amount." 



An abstract of the paper in which M. Berthelot describes 

 his investigations of chemical combinations with argpn, will be 

 found in our report of the meeting of the Paris Academy of 

 Sciences (p. 527). 



Prof. Adolphe Car.not has been elected into the Paris 

 Academy of Sciences, in the place of the late M. de Lesseps. 



The late Mr. William Bolitho, of Gulval, Cornwall, has be- 

 queathed £,yx> to the Geological Society of Cornwall, the in- 

 come of which sum is to be applied each year in " the production 

 of a gold or richly-gilded silver medal, to be presented to the 

 member of the Society whose attainments, labours, or dis- 

 coveries in geological or mineralogical science are found most 

 deserving." He has also left a like sum for the Penzance 

 Library. 



The death is announced o Mr. E. Turner, Chairman of the 

 I ouncil of the Sanitary Institute. 



We also notice the death of Dr. E. D. F. Meissel, at the age 

 of si.Kty-nine. He made a number of important contributions 

 ■ mathematical astronomy, and his tables of Elliptic Functions, 

 a, well as the table of Bessel's Functions, published in the 

 Ahliandlun»cn of the Berlin .-Vcademy, stand as examples of his 

 work. 



Mr. H. H. Haytek, C.M.G., the well-known statist, died 

 .It Melbourne last week. He was the first president of the 

 economic and social science section of the Australasian Associa- 

 I tion for the Advancement of Science. His numerous and 

 1 valuable statistical publications earned for him the honorary 

 membership of statistical societies in various parts of the 

 world. 



Dr. Canini, of Leghorn, a well-known Italian specialist in 

 diseases of children, who died recently, has, says the British 

 Aledical fournal, bequeathed his entire estate, amounting to 

 2,300,000 lire (^92,000) for the foundation of a hospital in 

 which poor children suffering from diphtheria may have the 

 advantages of the serum treatment gratuitously. 



I We take the following news from the same source : — The late 

 Dr. .\lfred L. Loomis, of New York, has left real estate to the 

 value of 400,000 dollars (jf8o,coo), and personal property 

 .imounting to 600,000 dollars (;^i20,ooo). The income of 



125,000 dollars (.^5000) is given to the Loomis Laboratory, and 

 whatever p,irt of the income is not used is to be paid to the 

 Professor of Pathology of the University of New York. A sum 

 of 10,000 dollars (;{^2000) is beiiueathcd to the New York 



I Academy of Medicine, the bequest to be known as the Loomis 

 Entertainment Fund, and the interest to be used in providing 

 entertainment for the Fellows of the Academy. 



M. Nils Eikholm, who was at the head of the Swedish 

 astronomical and meteorological expedition for observing the 

 {transit of Venus in 1S82, has accepted a place in the Andrce 

 balloon, which is to start from Spitzbergen for the North Pole in 

 July 1896. The ascent is to take place from Norskoarna, 

 the distance from which to the North Pole is about 600 miles. 

 But it is not e.xpected that the balloon will travel in a direct 

 line. M. Andrce will visit France in July next, and he will 



NO. 1326, VOL. .i^l] 



probably be present at the Ipswich meeting of the British> 



.Association. 



Dr. ^L K. Veeder writes: " In the table of 'Days with 

 maximum temperature not over 32' at Greenwich,' on page 17+ 

 of Nature (February 28), the curve rises sharply and decidedly 

 at intervals of exactly twelve years — namely, in 1S54, 1866, 

 187S, and iSgo. These years also fell in the well-known 

 period of sun-spot and auroral minimum, but did not comprise 

 the entire periods of such minimum in each case. There seems 

 to be a clue here that is important, and that is in a line with 

 the study of current phenomena of this sort in which I have 

 been engaged, some of the results of which were presented in a 

 paper entitled ' Periodic and Non-Periodic Fluctuation in the 

 Latitude of Storm Tracks,' read at the Chicago Congress of 

 Meteorology in 1893." 



The following are among the lecture arrangements at; 

 the Royal Institution, after Easter: — Prof. George Forbes, 

 three lectures on " .Alternating and Interrupted Electric 

 Currents" ; Prof. E. Ray Lankester, four lectures on "Thirty 

 Years' Progress in Biological Science"; Prof. Dewar, four 

 lectures on "The Liquefaction of Gases"; Dr. William 

 Huggins, three lectures on " The Instruments and Methods of 

 Spectroscopic .\stronomy " (the Tyndall Lectures) ; Mr. 

 Arnold Dolmetsch, three lectures on " Music and Musical 

 Instruments of the Sixteenth, Seventeenth, and Eighteenth 

 Centuries : I. English ; 2. French ; 3. Italian " (with illustra- 

 tions upon original instruments). The Friday evening meet- 

 ings will be resumed on April 26, when a discourse will be 

 given by Dr. John Hopkinson, on " The Effects of Electric 

 Currents in Iron on its Magnetisation." Succeeding discourses 

 will probably be given by the Earl of Rosse, Veterinary- 

 Captain Frederick Smith, the Hon. G. N. Curjon, M.P., Mr^ 

 J. Viriamu Jones, Prof. Alfred Cornu, and other gentlemen. 



A STRONG earthquake shock was felt at 1. 16 p.m. on Satur- 

 day last at Comacchio, in the province of Ferrara, Italy, 

 Several houses and a church were slightly damaged. At 

 Mirabella Imbaccari, in the province of Catania, in Sicily, 

 the earthquake caused the collapse of a building. 



Dr. B. BRAtJNER, Professor of Chemistry in the Bohemian 

 University, Prague, suggests to us that argon possibly exists in 

 nebulae. He points out that a strong argon line, measured by 

 Mr. Crookes, has practically the same wavelength as the chief 

 nebula line, and thinks that the line at A. 3729'S in the " blue" 

 spectrum of the new substance represents the ^line at \ 3730, 

 found in the spectra of nebulje and white stars. 



Herr W. Siebe has started on a botanical exploration of 

 Asia Minor, with the special object of making collections of 

 the almost unknown ilora of Cilicia Trachea. Setting out from 

 Cyprus, he proposes to visit Mersina in southern .Asia Minor, 

 proceeding then to the Kalykadnos Valley and the adjacent 

 mountains, the steppe-district of Konia, the maritime district 

 of Egerdir, and finally, in the summer, the elevated alpine 

 region of Geigdagh. 



A STORM of unusual severity passed over these islands on 

 Sunday last. At Sh. a.m. on that day it was central over the 

 sout h of Ireland, and by 6h. p. m. of the same day the centre had 

 reached Denmark, having traversed a distance of 600 miles in 

 ten hours, which gives an average rate of progress of sixty miles 

 an hour. Much damage was done to life and property over the 

 whole country ; but its greatest violence was felt over the 

 southern and midland counties. The maximum force at Green- 

 wich was at 2h. 20m p.m., when the anemometer registered a 



