AucusT 6, 1914] 
NATURE 
589 
NOTES. 
Tue Endurance, with Sir Ernest Shackleton and 
the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition on board, left 
London on Saturday last. The vessel will leave Ply- 
mouth for the Antarctic on Saturday next with a crew 
of seventeen, and six or eight members of the Weddell 
Sea-shore party. The remaining members of this 
party will sail in the middle of September by mail 
steamer for Buenos Aires. 
WE learn from the Times that the Scottish Spits- 
bergen Expedition, under the leadership of Dr. W. S. 
Bruce, director of the Scottish Oceanographical 
Laboratory (referred to on p. 512 of NATURE, July 16), 
left Tromso on the morning of July 24. Dr. Bruce 
has chartered the sailing ship Pelikane, and is pro- 
ceeding to Wybe Jansz Water, where he will land a 
party under the direction of Mr. R. M. Craig on the 
east. coast of the mainland. From there he will go 
with the ship to Green Harbour, Ebeltoft Harbour, 
and Prince Charles Foreland. Dr. Bruce will return 
with the Pelikane to Wybe Jansz Water to continue 
the hydrographic survey of the loch, while Mr. Craig, 
it is hoped, will be able to carry on the geological 
researches, which he will have begun during Dr. 
Bruce’s absence in the west. 
An expedition under the leadership of Miss M. A. 
Czaplicka, who holds a travelling fellowship of Somer- 
ville College, Oxford, is being sent out by the Uni- 
versities of Oxford and Moscow, for the purpose of 
studying the tribes of the Yenesei region. The other 
members are Mr. H. A. Hull, of Philadelphia Uni- 
versity, in charge of physical anthropological work ; 
Miss Haviland, zoologist and ornithologist; Miss 
Curtis, photographer. The tribes which will be in- 
vestigated are the Tungus and Ostiak of the Yenesei, 
both with Mongoloid affinities, though physically 
distinct. The question of group marriage, peculiari- 
ties of the tribal wizard, and their religion are in- 
cluded in the scope of the inquiry. The expedition 
will be absent for about a year, and is supplied with 
carefully selected equipment and provisions. 
It is stated in Science that Mr. C. Boden Kloss 
and Mr. H. C. Robinson, director of museums, 
Federated Malay States, are engaged in an expedition 
to Mount Indrapura or Korinchi in Central Sumatra 
—a volcano 12,700 ft. high, and the highest summit 
in the island. The objects of the expedition are 
zoological and botanical, but it is hoped to ascend to the 
summit of the mountain and make observations of the 
crater and the present activity of the volcano. 
WE learn that the committee of the Capt. Scott 
Memorial Fund has accepted the offer of the Admiralty 
of a site at Greenwich Hospital for the erection of 
the memorial to the explorers who lost their lives 
in the Antarctic region. It has been stipulated by 
the Admiralty that the memorial shall harmonise with 
the architecture of neighbouring buildings. 
Tue death is announced, at the age of sixty-seven, 
of M. Paul Reclus, who was largely instrumental 
in making general the use of cocaine as an anzs- 
thetic in surgery. He was elected a member of the 
Paris Academy of Medicine in 1895. 
NOb 2336, VOL: 93! 
; and 3. 
Mr. JoHN Hoop, whose recent death, at an ad- 
vanced age, is announced from Dundee, was well 
known to many zoologists and microscopists as a 
collector of the more minute forms of fresh-water life 
and especially of the Rotifera. The study of these 
attractive little animals was the hobby of his life, and 
though he published little under. his own name, he 
gave very important assistance to many other workers. 
It is only necessary to turn the pages of Hudson and 
Gosse’s great Monograph to see how largely they 
were indebted to him for the material on which they 
worked, and his name is quoted on almost every other 
page as authority for some statement regarding the 
bionomics or occurrence of a species. He was especi- 
ally successful in obtaining new and curious forms 
of the sessile Rotifers forming the group Rhizota, 
which in recent years have been somewhat neglected 
in favour of the more easily collected free-swimming 
species. Mr. Hood was a mechanic by trade, and in 
his later years, when laid aside from work, he was in 
straitened circumstances, and sometimes perilously 
near actual privation. Only a year ago, a small pen- 
sion from the Murdoch Trust, obtained at the instance 
of some of his scientific friends, brought ease of mind 
and some comfort to his last days. Probably very 
few of his numerous correspondents knew him person- 
ally, but those who did know that he represented a 
particularly fine type of the ‘‘working-man natural- 
ist,’’ a type which is, perhaps, commoner in the north 
country than in the south, and which was more char- 
acteristic of the nineteenth century than it promises 
to be of the twentieth. 
As already announced (see Nature, December 18, 
1913), an International Congress of Meteorology is to 
be held in Venice in September next. From a circular 
just received, we learn that the Congress will take 
place on September 17, 18, and 19, and will be divided 
into three sections, dealing respectively with. climat- 
ology and agrarian meteorology; aerology; general 
and maritime meteorology. The communications and 
discussions are to be in English, French, German, or 
Italian, and those intending to take part must send 
their applications and subscriptions to the secretary 
of the executive committee (Osservatorio Patriarcale 
della Salute, Venice) before August 31. The sub- 
scription will be to lire (8s.). 
Tue fourteenth French Congress of Medicine is to 
be held at Brussels on September 30, October 1, 2, 
The president will be Prof. Henrijean, of 
Liége, and the general secretary Prof. R. Verhvogen, 
22 rue Joseph II., Brussels. Among the subjects to 
be discussed are cardio-vascular syphilis; vaccino- 
therapy in general, and in particular vaccinotherapy 
of cancer and typhoid fever; the therapeutic value of 
artificial pneumothorax; lipoids in pathology. 
An illustrated lecture on the modification of response 
in plants under the action of drugs is to be delivered 
on October 30 before the Royal Society of Medicine 
by Prof. J.C. Bose, of Calcutta. 
Tue thirteenth competition for the Riberi prize, the 
value of which is 8o0o0l., is now open. It is to be 
| awarded for scientific researches in medical science, 
