62 
NATURE 
| NovEMBER 15, 1yo6 
Ar the inaugural meeting of the new session of the 
Institution of Civil Engineers on November 6, the presi- 
dent, Sir Alexander Kennedy, F.R.S., delivered an address 
on the relation of the engineer and engineering to the 
world at large. in relation to science, he pointed out 
that not a few engineers spend their whole lives in what 
is really scientific work, while nominally only earning 
their daily bread in ordinary mechanical pursuits. The 
paths of the artist and the engineer seem too often to be 
divergent, but as soon as engineering works are treated 
on their own merits, and not as if they are mistaken 
imitations of other things, it will be found that they can 
possess even artistic as well as other merits. Everyone 
now recognises that there is a dignity in a Dreadnought 
which is almost majestic, and that a modern liner forms 
really as fine a subject for a picture as a full-rigged ship. 
In concluding, the president spoke of the future of 
engineering and of the possibility—which he thought a 
very small one—of finding anything in mechanical science 
corresponding to the “‘ survival of the fittest,’’ or any 
traceable lines along which mechanical evolution takes 
piace. Invention forms such a disturbing influence in 
engineering evolution that any prophecy on evolutionary 
lines is impossible. It is still more useless to attempt to 
forestall the future by trying to do to-day what it is 
supposed that other people may try to do twenty years 
hence. The Great Eastern, broken up for scrap almost 
within hail of the Carmania, was a pathetic tragedy, from 
this point of view, in engineering. 
EpucationaL Leaflet No. 22 of the National Association 
of Audubon Societies is devoted to an account of the blue 
jay (Cyanocitta cristata) by Mr. W. Dutcher, the presi- 
dent of the association. Tt is accompanied by a coloured 
plate of the bird. 
TuE greater part of the September issue of the Proceed- 
ings of the Philadelphia Academy is taken up by the 
description of a large collection of Orthoptera from 
Montana, Utah, Colorado, and the Yellowstone Park. 
The authors of the paper are Messrs. J. A. G. Rehn and 
M. Hebard, of whom the second made the collection. 
Many new forms are described. 
Or two zoological articles included in Nos. 6 and 7 of 
the fifth volume of the Boletin de la Sociedad Aragonesa 
de Ciencias Naturales, the first, by the Rev. R. P. 
Longinos Naviis, is devoted to abnormal hens’ eggs, of 
which several are figured in a coloured plate. Some of 
these appear to be of the type not uncommonly met with 
in the case of old birds about to cease from laying. One, 
however, is remarkable for its rose-red colour, due, it 
is supposed, to the parent hen having fed on a particular 
kind of bulb. In the second, three new Spanish Neuro- 
ptera are described, one forming the type of a new genus. 
IN an address delivered to the Hull Scientific and Field 
Naturalists’ Club at a conversazione held on October 17, 
Mr. T. Sheppard, the president, took for his subject the 
relationship between provincial museums and local scien- 
tific societies. The address has been published in the 
Transactions of the club, and reprinted in pamphlet form 
as No. 36 of the Hull Museum Publications. Hull, it 
appears, is very fortunate in respect to the good relations 
existing between the municipal museum and the local 
scientific society, this good fellowship, it is stated, being 
of special value to the museum, and likewise, in a minor 
degree, conducive to the interests of the ratepayers. In 
many other towns the relationship is, however, according 
to Mr. Sheppard, of a less satisfactory nature, the museum 
NO. 1933, VOL. 75 | 
| culture, 
officials ignoring the work and disdaining the assistance 
of the amateurs. Neither is it considered advantageous 
for the museum to be “‘ run ’”’ by the local society, such 
an arrangement tending, it is urged, to check donations 
owing to want of security as to the permanency of the 
former. 
AccorpinG to La Nature of November 3, Brussels is 
about to inaugurate a new era in the matter of fresh- 
water aquariums by the opening of a building in the 
Avenue Louise. The new institution is not intended 
to be a merely popular exhibit, with a few tanks in 
which a certain number of more or less unhealthy-looking 
fishes are shown. On the contrary, it is purposed to 
display, as time goes on, the complete fresh-water fauna 
of Belgium in suitably constructed basins and tanks, in- 
cluding, of course, those distinctive of rivers, lakes, and 
ponds. Nor will the flora be neglected, the scheme being 
to show as much of this as is found practicable. The 
central salon will resemble a winter garden, with a large 
central basin and tanks let into the walls. In some of 
these tanks will be shown examples of all the indigenous 
fresh-water fishes, while others will be devoted to the 
exhibition of crustaceans, molluscs, batrachians, reptiles, 
worms, insects, and plankton. It is hoped that the insti- 
tution will prove, not only an attraction to the general 
public, but that it will have a definite scientific value, 
and will also aid in the re-stocking of the depleted Belgian 
rivers with fish. Acclimatisation is to be a feature of the 
aquarium, in which a tank will be reserved for the 
American cat-fish, preparatory to introducing that species 
into the rivers of the country. 
Tue history and origin of zoological gardens and natural 
history museums forms the subject of a long article by 
Mr. J. von Pleyel in Naturwissenschaftliche Wochenschrift 
for October 28. Menageries, in the author’s opinion, owe 
their origin partly to the cult of sacred animals and 
partly to the ambition of rulers to possess specimens of 
rare and valuable creatures from foreign lands or savage 
ones from their own. In their simplest form zoological 
gardens were, indeed, one of the earliest developments of 
and were familiar to the Chinese, Indians, 
Greeks, Romans, and pre-Spanish Mexicans in very ancient 
times. The oldest recorded menagerie is, as might be 
expected, Chinese, dating from 1150 B.c. The den of lions 
kept by Darius, as described in the Book of Daniel, is 
an example of one of these primitive menageries, while 
the cult of sacred white horses by the ancient Greeks 
and Romans, and that of so-called white elephants in 
Burma and Siam, are instances of a second type. After a 
survey of the records of establishments of this nature 
during the Middle Ages and immediately succeeding 
periods, the author refers to the typical menageries of 
| modern times, incidentally mentioning that a live giraffe 
was received at Schénbrunn so early as 1828. The Paris 
establishment is regarded as the earliest entitled to the 
designation ‘* zoological gardens,’’ in the modern sense of 
that term, which owes its origin, however, to the found- 
ation of the menagerie in the Regent’s Park. Of German 
establishments of this nature, the one at Berlin is the 
earliest. 
THE causes producing a cessation of vitality in old trees 
are imperfectly, if at all, understood. There are various 
interesting problems concerned with this question, notably 
the continued propagation of trees by vegetative methods. 
In this connection Mr. R. S. Hole is contributing an 
article on pollard-shoots, stool-shoots, and root-suckers to 
the Indian Forester (July and August). It seems probable 
