Sept. 29, 1881] 



NATURE 



523 



on the zone of contact between the gneiss and the limestones of 

 the Berne Oberland ; another most interesting work, on the 

 distribution of heat in the interior of the St. Gothard Tunnel, is 

 pursued by Dr. Stapff, and a preliminary notice about it, with maps, 

 has just appeared in the Quarterly Reports of the Federal Council, 

 (vol. vii.). It shows that the temperature of rocl^s increases to a 

 great degree to the interior of the tunnel, being only 17" Celsius 

 and I9°'7 at the southern and northern extremities of the tunnel, 

 and as high as 30°"8 in the middle parts of it, the decrease at the 

 outer ends being attributed by Dr. Stapff to the cooling influence 

 of tlie water which circulates in the rocks. As to the geologi- 

 cal information collected by Dr. Stapff during his work in the 

 tunnel, which appears complete (with sixty sheets of maps 

 and profiles) in the Reports of the Federal Council, a short 

 resume' of the whole has already appeared in a separate fa cicule 

 of these Reports, with a geological outlme of the tunnel. We 

 notice also in this branch a valuable 1 aper, by M. Salis, on the 

 erosion of the Nolla River, tributary of the Rhine, which has 

 appeared in the engineering paper. Die Eisenlhilin, published at 

 Zurich. 



The various races which inhabit Austria are studied by Dr. 

 Goehlerl in the last number of the Proceedings of the Geo- 

 graphical Society at Vienna (vol. xxiv.), with respect to the 

 lengih of the body. After having collected more than one and 

 a half million of such measurements, which were done on 

 recruits during the years 1S70 to 1873, I)r. Goehlert has dressed 

 a map in v. liich he has shown the average height of young men, 

 twenty to tw enty-three years old, in Austria. The Dalmatians 

 ate the tallest ; next to them co.ne the Serbo-Croats and 

 Slovenes, and then the Germans and the Czechs ; further down 

 come the Ruthenes ajid Roumanians, and the smaller ones are 

 the Magy ^rs and Poles, especially the Mazours. But there are 

 also two or three distinct average heights among the Germans, 

 the Slaves, and the Magyars, those of middle Hungary, between the 

 Danube and the Theiss rivers, being far taller than those of the 

 flat counti'y on the left bank of the Theiss. It is most probable, 

 as M. Broca has shown with regard to France, that these 

 notable differences of height among the same race show that 

 there were two, or more, different branches which constituted w hat 

 we consider now as a single race. As to the supposed decrease 

 of height observed in France, Dr. Goehlert supposes thit in 

 Bohemia, which has furnidied during this centuiy no less than 

 600,000 men to the Austrian armies, the decrea e of average 

 height can be estimated at little under 39 millimetres during 

 the last hundred years, this decease being due to the continuous 

 taking a\\ay of tall men from the counti'y. He shijws also that, 

 the standard height being the same for all provinces of Austria, 

 the provinces where men are taller suffer proportionately mure 

 from recruiting. 



The seventeenth meeting of the Swiss Alpine Club was 

 opened at Basel on September 10. The Annual Report shows 

 that since its foundation the Club has built thirty-one huts, or 

 refuges for climbers. The Club has also endeavoured to give a 

 certain instruction to guides, and during this year an insurance 

 society has been instituted for them. As to its publications, it has 

 published sixteen volumes of year-books, which contain plenty 

 of valuable infonnation on the Swiss Alps, and publi-hes two 

 papers, the EcJio des Alpes and the Neuc Alpenfost, which have 

 contributed nmch to the development of Alpine littrature. 

 At its last meeting Mr. Ed. Whymper and the meteorologist. 

 Prof. Ilam. n, were elected Honorary Members. 



That part of the Ala-taou Mountains which is situated north- 

 east from Tashkent, at the sources of the Arys, Tala~, and 

 Pskem Rivers, and which remamed until now quite unknown, is 

 described in the Izvestia of the Russian Geographical Society 

 (vol. xvii. fascicule 3) by Col. Ivanoff. It is a very complex 

 system of mountains, from 10,000 to 16,000 feet high, covered 

 with mighty glaciers. The upper clefts have stiU conserved a 

 good deal of forests, and tlie high Alpine pasturages are the 

 grazing ground for the numerous herds of Kirghizes, as well as 

 for the great specie^ of Ovis, common to Thian-Shan. Col. 

 Ivanoff has found numerous proofs that formerly the glaciers had 

 a greater extensi.m than now, and that they formed in the valley 

 of the Maydan-tal River a mighty glacier which descended as 

 low as 7000 feet, but he did not discover traces of a general 

 glaciatioa. 



Herr Ernst Marno cives, in the last fascicule of the Memoirs 

 of the Geographical Society of Vienna (vol. xxiv. Nos. 6, 7, 8, 

 and 9), an interesting description of his exp.dition for the de- 



struction of the setts of the Nde, that is, of the great grass- 

 islands which are formed during the inundations of the steppes 

 watered by the Bahr el-Gebel and the Bahr-el-Abiad. The 

 accumulation of grass which is driven away during the inunda- 

 tions constitutes, as is known, wide grass-islands, nr setts, which 

 bar up the river, and, when not cut through for several years, 

 gradually increase by fresh grass and slime, and soon constitute 

 ti'ue floating islands twelve .and fifteen feet thick, which soon 

 reach even the bottom of the river. It is w ith the greatest dif- 

 ficulty that Marno's steamer cut passages through these islands 

 and destroyed the smaller ones. 



We see with pleasure that the Austrian Tourists' Club, 

 which numbers as many as 300 members, has begun to jiublish 

 fortnightly a Tourists' Newspaper, richly illustrated, which has 

 as contributors many well-know u scientific writers. 



In the Monatsschrift fiir den Orient for September, Herr von 

 Schweiger-Lerchenfeld has a long article full of valuable infor- 

 mation on Tripolitania, a propos of recent doings in North 

 Africa. There is also an interesting letter from Ernst Marno 

 on the Sudan. 



In the Bulletin of the Antwerp Geographical Soc'.ety (tome 

 vi. 3= fasc.) M. L. Delavaud has brought toge.her a number of 

 valualile notes on the climate of Africa, interesting both from a 

 scientific and a practical point of view. 



The la-t number of the IzveUia of the Russian Geographical 

 Society contains papers, by M. Maeff, on the roads leading from 

 Karshi to the Amudaria River, and on the valleys of Vaksh and 

 Kafirnahan ; by M. Ivanoff on the upper jiarts of the Talas 

 Alataou, and a map showing M. Mikluho-Maclay's travels in the 

 Melanesian Tlands. 



The eighth volume of ihe Afemoirs of the Russian Geogra- 

 phical Society, for the section of ethnMgra])hy, contains several 

 valuable papers on the middle parts of the v.iUey of Zerafshan, 

 on the basin of I.ob-nor, on the valley of Ferghana, on the 

 Bel<dons Sh.ahrisabs, on the journey of Jenkinson to Khiva in 

 1559, on the Khiku-nor, and on the customs of the Tartars of 

 Kazan. 



In a pamphlet entitled "Geography" Messrs. Ramsey, 

 Millett, and Hudson have reprinted, from the Kansas City 

 lievitui of Science and Inivstry, an interesting collection of 

 official documents relating to United States Arctic colonisation and 

 exploration in 18S1. There are now no less than six expeditions 

 in progress under Government control, which are divisible into 

 two classes, one comprising those sent out for purposes of ex- 

 ploration and scientific research and the other tho.sc whose 

 object is of a humanitarian nature. To the former class belong 

 the Jeannclte, Lady Franklin Bay, and Point Barrow^ expedi- 

 tions, while the latter includes the RoJfars, Alliance, and 

 Corwin, all chiefly engaged in searching for the Jeannette and 

 missing whale-ships. 



The just publihed Bulletin of the Belgian Geographical Society 

 includes a [laper by Capt. Verstraete on the great lakes of inter- 

 tropical Africa from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century. 

 Th re arc also maps of Borneo, the new northern frontier of 

 Greece, Sc, which exhibit considerable roughness of execution. 



Economics and statistics, vieived 

 from the standpoint of the pre- 

 liminary sciences^ 



n^IlE object of the present paper is to show the relation of 

 •'• the preliminary sciences to statistics and economics, and to 

 attempt to maUe the transition from the former studies to the 

 latter simjile and attractive to the scientific man. This must 

 evidently be done by constructing a classification of social know- 

 ledge avoiding all immediate reference to practice. That such 

 a classification does not at present exist cannot be better evi- 

 denced than by Mr. Badeu-Powell, who has kindly drawn my 

 attention to the conclusion of his jjaper, read on the previous 

 day, "On Protection in Young Communities," in which he states 

 the difirculties he has encountered in many departments of his 

 researches because of the different methods of classification 

 adopted in odierwise excellent statistical records, and insists that 

 " miif ormity in the method of registering statistical facts is of 

 the utmost importance to comparative investigations," so that 



» Abstract of a paper read before fection F of tlie Biitlsli Association , 

 18S1, by P. Geddes, F.R.S.E. 



