NovEMBER 5, 1896] 
NATURE Vie) 
Royal Botanic Gardens, Trinidad, it is now known that the 
sugar-cane will grow from seed, and that remarkable variations 
are produced. A short account of the share taken by the 
Trinidad Gardens in raising these seedlings is given in the 
Trinidad Bulletin of Miscellaneous Information, by Mr. J. H. 
Hart, the Superintendent. As a result of the experiments, 
sugar-canes have been produced that have given 25 per cent. 
above the yield of varieties;commonly grown. _ If these varieties 
can be successfully got into plantations on a large scale, no 
further proof will be required of the value of the work done by 
Botanic Gardens. It is proposed to distribute cane plants of 
the new varieties early next year, and we trust that the results 
of their cultivation will be satisfactory in every sense of the 
word. Mr. Hart points out that the effort of the raisers of the 
sugar beet have long been directed to secure a strain of plants 
that would, while giving a large yield per acre, afford at the 
same time the maximum amount of sugar, and their efforts have 
been attended with great success, for it is well known that the 
yield from roots cultivated of recent years show a tremendous 
advance over the percentage yielded by the beet twenty years | lished in Lausanne, Switzerland, has recently celebrated the 
ago. Had the yield of the cane increased in the same propor- 
tion as that of beet, the sugar industry would not have suffered 
as it has done of late. 
Pror. RAtpH S. Tarr contributes to Sczence a descrip- 
tion of the recent expedition to Greenland, conducted by Lieut. 
Peary. The principal geological results are briefly stated as 
follows :—‘‘ At Turnavik, on the Labrador coast, evidence of 
recent glaciation is abundant. The hills are all rounded ; there 
has been little post-glacial decay, and the transported boulders, 
as well as the bed rock, are very fresh. Upon exposed rock 
faces, unprotected from the weather, glacial striz are still very 
distinct. Granting equality of weathering, this region has been 
much more recently glaciated than regions of similar geological 
structure in New England. The amount of glacial carving has 
not been sufficient to lower the surface of the gneiss to the level 
of the pre-glacial decay in the trap-dike valleys.” On Big 
Island and the neighbouring coast of Baffin Land, evidence of 
very recent elevation was found up to a height of 270 feet above 
sea-level. The results of the study of the Nugsuak peninsula are 
interesting. The peninsula extends twenty-four miles from the 
front of the Cornell glacier to the end at Wilcox Head, while the 
Duck Islands are at a distance of eight or ten miles from the 
mainland. The Cornell glacier was found to have undergone 
recently a rapid withdrawal, and its retreat is believed by Prof. 
Tarr to bea part of a general withdrawal of a vast ice sheet, 
which extended outward beyond the Duck Islands. The entire 
Nugsuak peninsula has been so recently glaciated, that striated 
rocks are still present even at the outer end. 
ACCORDING to the usually accepted theory of Crookes’ tube, 
antikathodic rays are produced wherever kathodic rays impinge 
on a fixed obstacle. In the Bulletin de 0 Académie Royale de 
Belgique, M. P. De Heen advances the theory that these rays 
result from encounters between molecules projected from the 
anode and kathode respectively. In verification of this view, 
experiments were made with a tube in which the usual anode 
was replaced by two parallel laminze of aluminium at a small 
<listance apart. When either of these laminze was used as 
anode, the kathode being at the other end of the pear-shaped 
tube, antikathodic rays were observed; but these disappeared 
entirely when the two parallel laminze were used as anode and 
kathode respectively. This result was easily explained by the 
fact that the space between the two surfaces was too small to 
allow of frequent collisions taking place between the anodic and 
kathodiec projections. On the ordinary theory, however, the 
kathodic projections would traverse the space between the 
lamine with great facility, thereby giving rise to a copious 
emission of antikathodic rays, contrary to observation. 
NO. 1410, VOL. 55] 
THE Proceedings of the fifty-fourth meeting of the American 
Association for the Advancement of Science, held at Springfield, 
Mass., in August and September 1895, have lately been pub- 
lished. 
In the AVeteorologesche Zeitschrift for October, General 
Rykatcheff publishes a note on the meteorological observations 
at the St. Petersburg and Pavlovsk observatories during the 
solar eclipse of August 9. 
THE Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club for September 
reprints Dr. N. L. Britton’s brief account of the Botanical 
Gardens of the world, given as the vice-presidential address 
before Section G of the last meeting of the American Association 
for the Advancement of Science. The total number is given as 
over 200, but some of them are little more than pleasure parks. 
Of the total number, Germany possesses 36, Italy 23, France 
22, Russia 16, Austro-Hungary 13, Great Britain and Ireland 
12, and the United States ro. 
THE Libliothique universelle, a monthly review now pub- 
hundredth anniversary of its foundation. It was originally 
established in Geneva, under the title Bzb/zothéque britannique, 
by Frédéric Guillaume Maurice and the brothers Mare Auguste 
Pictet (pupil and friend of the famous naturalist Saussure) and 
Charles Pictet de Rochemont, its chief object being the diffusion 
of English ideas and scientific researches in France and Switzer- 
land. It numbered among its earliest contributors Sir Humphry 
Davy, Edward Jenner, Sir Joseph Banks, the physicist Charles 
Earl of Stanhope, and, at a somewhat later period, Sir John 
Herschel. 
ARRANGEMENTS are being made to commemorate the 
sixtieth year of the reign of Her Majesty Queen Victoria by 
an exhibition at the Crystal Palace, to be opened on May 24, 
1897. It is proposed to illustrate by models and practical 
éxamples the famous inventions in arts and industries during 
the past sixty years, and also the progress of other sides of 
national development. As a sort of prologue to this exhibi- 
tion, a series of popular lectures, dealing with the advancements 
in science made during Her Majesty’s reign, will be delivered 
during March and April next. 
THE next session of the Anthropological Institute commences 
on Tuesday, November 10. A number of interesting com- 
munications are promised, among others being papers by Prof. 
E. B. Tylor, on North American Wampum Belts; by Dr. 
Oscar Montelius, on the Tyrrhenians and the pre-classical period 
in Italy ; by Dr. J. H. Gladstone, on the transition from the 
use of copper to the use of bronze; by Lieut. Boyle T. Somer- 
ville, R.N., on the natives of South Georgia (Solomon Islands) ; 
by Miss G. M. Godden, on the Nagas and other hill tribes of 
the North-East Indian frontier; by Dr. Colley March, Miss 
Christian Maclagan, and Mr. R. H. Mathews. At the first 
meeting Mr. H. Balfour, of the Pitt-Rivers Museum, Oxford, 
will exhibit a remarkable bow found in Egypt, and believed 
to be Assyrian, and will read the life-history of an Aghori 
Fakir, exhibiting drinking-bowls made from human skulls. 
Mr. C. H. Read will exhibit a curious wooden carving executed 
by a Haida Indian, apparently from a model of a sphinx ; and 
a wooden dance-mask from the north-west coast of America. 
Mr. P. L. Sclater will exhibit a “‘ draught-board ” from Nyassa- 
land; and Mr. Balfour will show a number of transparent 
sections of composite-bows of various times and countries. 
TWELVE years have elapsed since the publication of Phillips's 
well-known and widely-consulted ‘‘ Treatise on Ore Deposits.’ 
In this period the subject of metalliferous deposits has undergone 
such extensive changes, both material and theoretical, that Prof. 
Henry Louis, in preparing the second edition, which Messrs. 
