650 
the Brooklyn Museum of Arts and Sciences, the 
Brooklyn Children’s Museum, and the Brooklyn 
Botanic Garden. 
part in the administration of the Brooklyn Board of 
Education and the Brooklyn Public Library. 
Rev. Dr. Horace Carter Hovey, an American 
geologist who had made a special study of cave 
formations, has died at Newburyport, Mass., at the 
age of eighty-one. He contributed geological articles 
to the ninth, tenth, and eleventh editions of the 
Encyclopedia Britannica, and was the author of 
several volumes on the mammoth cave of Kentucky. 
Tue death is announced of Dr. R. F. Harper, pro- 
fessor of Assyriology in the University of Chicago 
since 1892. In 1906 he was appointed director of the 
American School of Archeology at Jerusalem. He 
will be chiefly known by the publication of the texts 
of the Assyrian letters and reports of the reigns of 
Sargon, Sennacherib, Esarhaddon, and Ashurbanipal, 
preserved in the British Museum. Thirteen volumes 
have been published, and Prof. Harper was finishing 
the fourteenth at the time of his death. This volume 
will be issued in due course, together with the fifteenth 
volume, dealing with Assyrian Palzography, which 
he had planned. 
Tue Iron and Steel Institute has been obliged to 
abandon the holding of its proposed autumn meeting 
in Paris. 
In consequence of the war, the publication of the 
British Pharmacopoeia, 1914, has been indefinitely 
postponed. Advance copies will not, therefore, be 
accessible to the public for inspection as had been 
arranged. Due notice will be given as soon as it is 
decided that the time has arrived when the work shall 
be published. 
A crrRcUuLAR has been issued by the Council of the 
Institution of Electrical Engineers to the members of 
the institution, pointing out two directions in which 
the members may be of great service to the nation at 
the present time, first, by placing their services as 
electrical engineers at the disposal of the War Office 
and the Admiralty, and, secondly, by being ready to 
fill vacancies in public services, electric power stations, 
tramways, railways, etc., caused by the calling up of 
the Reserves and the Territorial Forces. With the view 
of being ready to assist the authorities and the public 
services, the Council has decided to prepare classified 
lists of suitable men, and for this purpose has asked 
members who are in a position to assist in the direc- 
tions indicated, to fill in and return a form giving full 
particulars of the occupations for which they are 
fitted. Not only are members of the institution re- 
quired, but as many other qualified men as possible. 
Further information may be obtained from the Secre- 
tary of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, Victoria 
Embankment, W.C. 
WE learn from Engineering that a scheme has been 
set on foot for the founding of an Australian Institu- 
tion of Engineers. 
M. L. Testut, Professor of Anatomy in the Uni- 
versity of Lyons, contributes to L’Anthropologie (vol. 
NO! 2336, VGxs103)| 
He had also taken a prominent . 
NATURE 
[AUGUST 20, 1614 
xxv., January—April, 1914), under the title of ‘‘ Dis- 
section d’un Imbécile,’’ a careful study of the skull 
and brain of an idiot, aged 69, who died at the 
General Hospital in 1886. The article is well illus- 
trated and contains a large amount of statistical 
information. The writer claims that he has gained 
important results by supplementing his examination 
of the brain by that of other organic systems. 
Tue Carnegie Institution cf Washington has just 
published ‘“‘A Reconstruction of the Nuclear Masses 
in the Lower Portion of the Human Brain-stem,”’ by 
Mr. L. H. Weed, of the Harvard Medical School. 
This valuable publication embodies the results of an 
extremely careful and laborious piece of work in a 
field in which the labourers are comparatively rare. 
The majority of previous studies deal only with plotted 
limits and not with actual morphology. Mr. Weed, 
however, by means of the wax-plate method, has con- 
structed an accurate and enlarged model of the nuclear 
masses in the medulla and pons from a series. of 
more than 2000 serial sections—4o microns in thick- 
ness, and stained by the Weigert-Pal method—com- 
prising one of the “loan collections’ in the anatomical 
department of the Johns Hopkins Medical School. As 
this is practically a purely morphological study, the 
text, for the most part, is descriptive, and contains 
no controversial or hypothetical matter. The six 
coloured plates, comprising fourteen figures, show 
different aspects of the model and cross-sections at 
various levels, and reproduce the more important 
features and relations of the nuclear matter in the 
brain-stem., 
In vol. viii., Nos. 2 and 3, of the Quarterly Journal 
of Experimental Physiology, there are four articles 
dealing with the internal secretion of the ductless 
glands. The most conclusive are those of P. T. 
Herring, who differentiated between the extracts of 
the intermediate and posterior segments of the pituitary 
body of the ox by the effects, which these produced, on 
the uterus of the virgin rat, and on the blood-pressure 
and volume of the kidney in the cat, respectively. T. 
Graham Brown has contributed two further elaborate 
studies on the nervous system, dealing with the 
rhythmic movements in flexor and extensor muscles 
under certain conditions. He holds that similar 
rhythmic phenomena underlie the act of mammalian 
progression, walking, galloping, etc. Rhythmic con- 
traction has been demonstrated by J. A. Gunn and 
S. W. F. Underhill in the circular muscle—completely 
freed from nerve cells—of the small intestine of the 
cat many hours after its removal from the body. The 
journal contains other articles of an interesting but 
highly technical character, 
Tue first part of the second volume of the zoological 
section of the Natural History Report of the British 
Antarctic (Terra Nova) Expedition, 1910, published by 
the trustees of the British Museum, is devoted to a list 
of the collecting stations, drawn up by Dr. S. F. 
Harmer and Mr. D. G,. Lillie, the latter of whom 
served in the expedition. It comprises twelve 4to 
pages and four maps, the total number of stations 
being 357, commencing near the western mouth of 
ml ee eo te OS thse ta S - ‘ 
Mie Nnca 
—s. 
