January 25, 1894] 



NATURE 



297 



The twenty-first annual dinner of the old students of t he 

 Royal School of Mines will be held on January 29. Among 

 those who have promised to attend are Sir Lowthian Bell, 

 F.R.S., Prof. Roberts Austen, C.B., F.R.S., Prof. Le Neve 

 Foster, F.R.S., Prof. Thorpe, F.R.S., Prof. RUcker, F.R.S., 

 Mr. P. C. Gilchrist, F.R.S., Mr. W. Topley, F.R.S., and 

 other well-known authorities in the mining and metallurgical 

 world. 



Ir succeeding numbers of the Psychological Review are of the 

 same high character as the first, there is little doubt that the 

 journal will meet with the success it deserves. The presidential 

 address, delivered by Prof. Ladd, in December last, before the 

 American Psychological Association, is included in this new 

 Jiez'irw, and several interesting contributions from the Harvard 

 Psychological Laboratory. Among the latter is a paper in which 

 an account is given of an experimental study of memory. The 

 results show that, when isolated, the visual memory surpasses by 

 far the aural, but when combined the aural excels the visual — -in 

 other words, in the united action of the senses of sight and 

 hearing, their relative strength is just the reverse of what it is 

 when they act independently. Another contribution from the 

 Harvard Laboratory deals with the intensifying effect of 

 attention. It is usually held that when the attention is directed 

 to an object, the impressions received are intensified. The 

 experiments at Harvard lead, however, to the remarkable result 

 that all stimuli appear relatively less when the attention is from 

 the outset directed to them. In addition to these original 

 papers, the Review contains discussions of psychological subjects, 

 and a survey of recent literature upon the subject. 



Writing in the U.S. Monthly Weather Revieiv, Mr. Mark 

 W. Harrington remarks that the influences of the wind and tide, 

 and possibly the low barometric pressure of a storm area, in 

 causing an unusual rise of water, is the occasion of much of the 

 damage and loss of life that attends the storms of the Atlantic 

 and Gulf coasts. Observations tending to fix the extent of this 

 high water, and the special causes that produce it are, therefore, 

 always desirable. Mr. Harrington has brought together the 

 records of water, wind, and pressure for two storms, viz. June 

 4-5, 1891, at Galveston, and October 12-13, 1893, at South 

 Island, Winyah Bay, S.C. The results show that in Winyah 

 Bay, under the influence of winds that were estimated at 90 

 miles, although doubtless the maximum velocity of the open 

 sea exceeded this, the actual height of the- water exceeded that 

 due to the natural tide by 7 or 8 feet. At Galveston, under the 

 influence of easterly winds, whose measured velocity attained 

 44 miles, the maximum gauge reading was less than 4 feet above 

 the slight natural tide. At these two stations, therefore, the 

 rise in the water surface attributable to the winds is in both 

 cases about twenty times greater than the height of a column of 

 water that can be sustained by such winds in statical equilibrium, 

 as in the Lind anemometer, and this factor is only slightly 

 diminished by making some allowance for the rise of water due 

 to the diminished barometric pressure. 



Dr. S. C. Hepites has published, in the Analele of the 

 Meteorological Institute of Roumania, a -valuable resume of 

 the climate of Sulina from observations taken during fifteen 

 years, 1876-90. The meteorological station is situated on the 

 left bank of the Danube, very near to the sea, and was estab- 

 lished by the European Commission of the Danube. The 

 mean annual temperature is 5i°'6, the mean difference between 

 the hottest month, July, and the coldest month, January, being 

 ! 43°'2. The absolute maximum observed was 98° '4, and the 

 ' minimum -ii°'2, which gives an extreme range of I09°'6. 

 I The mean relative humidity of the air is 76*5 per cent.; the 

 autumn is damper than the spring. The annual amount of 

 arainfall is only 17*3 inches, on sixty-four days; the wettest 

 NO. 1265, VOL. 49] 



month being June, and the dryest, February. The greatest fall 

 in twenty-four hours was 2-59 inches. The prevalent wind is 

 from north-east, the relative frequency from this direction being 

 20 per cent. Thunderstorms are not of frequent occurrence ; they 

 occur mostly in June and July, and not at all in winter. Fog 

 occurs on about twenty-five days in the year; considering the 

 position of the town, we should have expected a more frequent 

 occurrence of this phenomenon. Falls of dust have several 

 times been noted ; they apparently come from the Russian 

 Steppes. 



Mr. J. Glaisher, F.R.S,, contributes to the Quarterly 

 Statement just issued by the Palestine Exploration Fund, a 

 paper on the fall of rain at Jerusalem in the thirty-two years 

 from 1861 to 1892. The average annual rainfall is 25*23 inches, 

 that s, very nearly the same as the mean for London, though 

 the fall is very differently distributed throughout the year. A 

 somewhat remarkable point brought out in the discussion is an 

 evident increase of the fall of rain in the later years of the series 

 of observations. The mean annual fall in the sixteen years from 

 1861 to 1876 is 22"26 inches, whereas in the sixteen years from 

 1877 to 1892 the mean is 28 "20 ; therefore the mean annual fall 

 in the second half of the series is 5 "94 inches greater than in the 

 first half. 



The honour of being the " oldest fossiliferous rock in Europe " 

 has been claimed for certain strata in Bohemia. Barrande first 

 worked out the Silurian and Cam.brian basin in Bohemia, and 

 described a "primordial fauna" at the base of the Cambrian 

 slates near Skrej. Some time later. Prof. Kusta, of Rakonitz, 

 found fossils in the strata below, which had been ranked as 

 pre-Cambrian or Azoic by Barrande. Great interest naturally 

 attached to this discovery of a so-called "ante-primordial 

 fauna," and Prof. Kusta and others wrote several papers upon 

 the fossils. Dr. Jahn, of the Austrian Survey, went for three 

 weeks last summer to the same district, and found that many of 

 the fossils occurred in strata interbedded with the Cambrian 

 series, and had no right to be called " ante-primordial." In a 

 short preliminary note sent to the Verhandluugen der k. k. geol. 

 Reichsanstalt, September 30, 1893, he writes that the oldest of 

 the " ante-primordial" horizons of Kusta rests above Cambrian 

 shales and interbedded with them, while the so-called 

 " youngest ante-primordial horizon " is in reality the oldest, 

 resting immediately below the Cambrian of Barrande, and con- 

 taining a similar fauna. As Dr. Jahn's statements rest on good 

 stratigraphical evidence, we can only conclude that the "oldest 

 fossiliferous rocks in Europe" have yet to be found. 



The Geological Commission of the Natural Science Society 

 of Switzerland has just published vol. xxi. part i. of the "Con- 

 tributions to the Geological Map of Switzerland" ("Beitrage 

 zur Geol. Karte der Schweiz." Bern, 1893.) This part em- 

 braces the wide district of the Bernese Oberland Alps. The 

 author. Dr. Edmund von Fellenberg, was always an enthusi- 

 astic mountain climber, and between the years 1862-1872 dis- 

 tinguished himself as a pioneer of some of the most difficult 

 ascents in the Bernese group. He was asked, in 1872, by the 

 Geological Commission to make a systematic geological survey 

 of the district, and now gives in this volume of the "Beitrage'' 

 the complete result of his scientific labours. The maps which 

 he used in surveying were on the scale of i : 50,000 ; those have 

 been reduced to the scale of the Dufour map, i : 100,000. The 

 value of the work is greatly enhanced by an elaborate " Atlas," 

 containing eighteen plates and a map showing the routes under- 

 taken by the author. The plates include an important series of 

 coloured geological sections through the Breithorn, the Aletsch- 

 horn, the Jungfrau and the Finsteraarhorn mountains, a great 

 number of sketches from nature illustrating in detail the geo- 

 logical features of the landscape, and several prints from photo 



