APRIL 1, 1897 | 
WA TURE 
513 
THe Prussian Academy of Sciences has elected Prof. Erns 
Ehlers, Professor of Zoology in Gottingen University, and Prof. 
G. Darboux, the distinguished French mathematician, to be 
corresponding members. 
Tue American Academy of Aris and Sciences have elected 
as foreign members: Prof. Ludwig Boltzmann, professor of 
theoretical physics at Vienna; Prof. W. Pfeffer, professor of 
botany at Leipzig; and Dr. W. Dérpfeld, secretary of the 
German Imperial Archeological Institute at Athens. 
Tue Naturalists’ Association of Danzig has offered a prize for 
the best treatise on the origin and spread of fungus epidemics 
among insects which are injurious to the forests in West Prussia, 
and for the best means of applying them to the destruction of 
the insects. The papers are to be sent in by December 31, 1808. 
Av the recent annual meeting of the Sanitary Institute, 
H.R.H. the Duke of Cambridge, K.G., was re-elected President. 
Prof. W. H. Corfield and Mr. Thomas Salt were elected new 
Vice-Presidents, to fill the vacancies caused by the death of Sir 
George M. Humphry and Sir J. Russell Reynolds. 
Mr. A. A. C. Swinton will give a paper on recent investi- 
gations in connection with X-rays, at the Camera Club, on 
April 12, when he will show a number of experiments illustrative 
of the properties of kathode and X-rays, and will exhibit a new 
and improved form of Crookes’ tube he has designed for practical 
work. This tube is capable of easy adjustment, so as to give 
X-rays of any desired penetrative value. 
Dr. NANSEN was enthusiastically received at the Paris Geo- 
graphical Society on Friday last, when he gave an account of 
his polar explorations. M. Rambaud, Minister of Education, 
presided, and, before the lecture, invested Dr. Nansen with the 
insignia of Commander of the Legion of Honour. Dr. Nansen 
also received the gold medal of the Society, and a medal from 
the Municipality of Paris. 
PERSISTENT efforts are being made in France by the Com- 
mission officielle pour la division décimale du temps et de la 
circonférence, to secure the adhesion of scientific societies to 
the division of the hours of the day into 100 parts, each to be 
again subdivided into 100 parts. This method of dividing time 
has evident advantages, but it also has its inconveniences ; for 
instance, the C.G.S. unit of time, officially adopted at the Inter- 
national Congress of Electricians in 1881, would have to be 
discarded. To obtain an opinion upon the proposed decimal 
division of time, the Société Francaise de Physique has sent out 
a circular to its members, and has appointed a committee to 
consider the replies received, and to advise therefrom as to the 
action the Society should take. 
TuE United States Government in 1895 appointed a ‘‘ Deep 
Water-Ways Commission,” for the purpose of making a pre- 
liminary investigation of the possibility of opening a deep water- 
way from the great lakes to the sea. This Commission has 
now reported that it is quite practicable to construct such canals 
as will be adequate to any scale of navigation that may be 
required between the great lakes and the sea ; and recommend 
that the depth of any water-ways so constructed, should not be 
less than 20 feet. They also find that the most eligible route, 
‘starting from the heads of Lake Michigan and Superior, is 
through the several lakes and the proposed Niagara ship canal 
to Lake Ontario; and that the Canadian sea-board may be 
reached from Lake Ontario by way of the St. Lawrence; and 
the American sea-board by way of the St. Lawrence, and Lake 
Champlain, and the Hudson river; or by way of the Oswego- 
Oneida, Mohawk valley, and the Hudson river. They recom- 
mend that the Niagara ship canal should be first commenced, 
‘and that the other works required should be pushed on with 
“as quickly as the projects can be matured; and that further 
f NO. 1431, VOL. 55 | 
surveys be undertaken, estimates of the cost prepared, and a 
systematic measurement of the outflow of the lakes undertaken. 
The cost of these investigations is estimated at about 126,000/., 
and it will require two or three years to complete them. 
The President, in sending the report to Congress, advised that 
Provision be made for carrying on the work of preliminary 
examination. The Canadian Government has also appointed a 
Commission to look into the question, and a joint session of the 
two Commissions was held at Detroit in last year. 
THE advantages of the absolute system of electric units have 
Jed Prof. Leonhard Weber to propose a similar system of units 
for photometric purposes. In the Zlehtrotechnische Zettschrift, 
Prof. Weber points out that in photometry we have to deal 
with six different quantities, viz. intensity of light, flux of light, 
quantity of light, illumination, brightness and time-integral of 
illumination. Taking a candle as the unit of intensity, he shows 
how all these quantities can be expressed in terms of the candle, 
centimetre and second; or the candle, metre and hour. The 
objection to this proposed system, to our mind, is the adoption 
of a candle as one of the fundamental units; in order to obtain 
a perfectly absolute system of units, quantity of light should 
be measured in terms of the energy radiated, and the unit of 
intensity would then be that of a source from which the amount 
of energy radiating per unit solid angle per second was one 
erg. This would reduce all photometric quantities to the 
C.G.S. system of units. 
Pror. A. GRAY writes, with reference to his article in 
Navure of last week, that Lord Kelvin has called his attention 
to the fact that the account of Lord Kelvin’s telephone-line and 
the establishment of telephony in Glasgow, is not quite exact. 
The telephone-line to Lord Kelvin’s instrument-makers’ was 
only one, and no doubt an early one, of a number of separate 
or independent lines which were established in Glasgow, and in 
other places, soon after the introduction of the telephone to this 
country by Prof. Graham Bell. 
Messrs. ALLEN AND CHAPMAN, of New York, have just 
issued (extracted from the Avz//etin of the American Museum of 
Natural History) an article on the ‘‘ Mammals of Yucatan,” 
where Mr. Chapman has lately made a brief stay. This dry 
and sparsely-wooded country has by no means a rich mammal- 
fauna; but during his short visit Mr. Chapman was able to 
secure examples of fifteen species, amongst which two or three 
rodents are described as new. 
Messrs. ALLEN AND CHAPMAN also send us (extracted from 
the same periodical) an article on a collection of mammals 
made by Mr. Chapman, in Trinidad, during his trip to that 
island in 1894. The total number of mammals now recognised 
by the authors as found in Trinidad is about sixty-five species, 
of which forty are represented in the present collection. Of 
these a bat and three small rodents are referred to new species. 
Unfortunately, under the guise of priority, the American 
zoologists introduce so many new names into their recent works, 
that it is, in many cases, very difficult for their old-fashioned. 
brethren of Europe to understand what they mean by them. 
Tue latest contribution to the interesting subject of the primi- 
tive wild cattle of Europe is a short illustrated article, by Dr. A. 
Nehring, on Anton Wied’s ‘‘ Muscovia,” a famous publication o_ 
the sixteenth century, in which a very incorrect figure of the urus 
was depicted. In the German edition of this work, by Herber- 
stain, published in Vienna in 1557, characteristic figures are 
given of the European bison or wisent (Bison europeus) and of 
the urus (Bos prémigentus); but the best illustration of the latter 
known to Prof. Nehring is that of a clever unknown artist of 
the first quarter of the sixteenth century, which was copied in. 
