390 



NATURE 



\_August 30, 1877 



W. Eassie, C.E., on "The Influence of Vegetation on Human 

 Health," and by Mr. A. Haviland on " Geography of Disease 

 in Relation to Sanitary Science." There will be an exhibition 

 of .'ianitary apparatus, appliances, and articles of domestic use 

 and economy, in the Drill Hall, Leamington, from October 3 to 

 18, in connection with the Congress. 



Russian papers announce _the return to Kuldja of Col. Prshe- 

 valsky. He has brought with him very interesting zoological 

 collections, the most important of them being the skins of three 

 wild camels. 



Prof. Wagner is engaged now in the organisation of zoolo- 

 gical stations on the White Sea. One of these will be organised 

 on the shore of the Anzerski Strait, the other on Cape Orlovsky, 

 and the third on the Sviatoi Nos. 



Messrs. W. and A. K. Johnston have published a small 

 pamphlet from the pen of Dr. Andrew Wilson, on the Colorado 

 beetle [Dorfphora decevilineata), with an excellent and much 

 magnified coloured representation of the insect, and another of 

 Doryphora jicncia, " the Bogus potato-bug " of the colonists. 

 An account is given of the structure and habits of the species, 

 together with the most successful methods that have been 

 employed for its destruction. Why D. juncta is depicted on 

 the outside of the paper with the heading " The Colorado 

 Potato Beetle " just above it, we are at a loss to comprehend. 

 It is misleading, to say the least. We have also received from 

 Messrs. Routledge a reprint from one of the Reports of Mr. C. 

 V. Rdey, the State Entomologist of Missouri, on the Colorado 

 beetle, and from Mr. Stollwerck, of Cannon Street, a very 

 successful model of the beetle at its various stages in a neat 

 little case. The model has been made by Stollwerck Brothers, 

 of Cologne, by order of the German Government, and has been 

 widely distributed all over the country, in schools, &c. 



We notice an interesting report, by M. Kamensky, on the 

 cotton-tree culture in Turfan, read at the last meeting of the 

 St. Petersburg Society for the Protection of Trade. 



From the Twenty-third Annual Report of the Brighton and 

 Sussex Natural History Society we are pleased to see that the 

 society is in a state of continued prosperity. The report con- 

 tains many papers read at the society's meeting, most of them 

 scientific, and many of them interesting and valuable. An equally 

 satisfactory account of progress is given in the Niiilh Annual 

 Report of the Eastbourne Natural History Society, which also 

 contains a number of interesting papers read at the meetings. 



With reference to Galileo's claim to be the inventor of the 

 telescope, M. Wolf quotes {Antialen der Physik und Cliemie) 

 from a manuscript of Scheiner (1616) in a library in Zurich, a. 

 curious passage, of which the following is part : " It must be 

 allowed first, considering what the telescope does, that Baptista 

 Porta has better right to be thought the inventor, because he 

 describes, after his own way, in obscure words and puzzling 

 exprtssions, an instrument like the telescope. But secondly, if 

 we speak of the telescope, as it is now used after general perfec- 

 tion, we must say that neither Porta nor Galileo is the first 

 discoverer of it, but the telescope in this sense was discovered in 

 Germany, among the Belgians, and that accidentally by one 

 Kramer, who sold spectacles, and either for amusement, or 

 experimentation, combined concave and convex glasses, so that 

 with both glasses he could see a quite small and distant object 

 large and near ; at which success being rejoiced, he united 

 several similar pairs of glasses in a tube, and offered the combi- 

 nation at a high price to wealthy people. Thereafter they (the 

 telescope.-) became gradually more common among the people, 

 and spread to other countries. In this way two of them were 

 brought for the fust time by a Belgian merchant to Italy; of 

 these, one remained long in the college at Rome ; the other 



went first to Venice, later to Naples ; and here the Italians, 

 and especially Galileo, at that time Professor of Mathe- 

 matics in Padua, took the opportunity of improving it, in 

 order to apply it to astronomical purposes, and extend its use 

 further. Thus the telescope, as we have it to-day, was discovered 

 by Germany, and perfected by Italy ; the whole world now 

 rejoices in it." 



Experiments have recently been made at Dortmund, on the 

 Cologne-Minden Railway, with a newly-invented steam-brake, 

 and on the whole they were crowned with success. A railway 

 train travelling at full speed was brought to a standstill in the 

 remarkably short time of twenty seconds, and the inventor is 

 confident to be able to reduce this time to eighteen seconds. 



We have received the programme of the .St. Thomas Charter- 

 house School of Science for session I S77-8, which commences 

 on September 29. It is as well arranged as before, and we 

 notice that another series of Gilchrist Lectures will be given this 

 winter, by Dr. B. W. Richardson, on physiology. One of the 

 subjects to be taught this session is "advanced and elementary 

 physiography." 



The New York Tribune of August 10 and 1 1 devotes about 

 six columns, with illustrations, to a description of the contents 

 of the Peabody Museum, Yale College. Why does not some 

 enterprising English "dally" try, by a similar experiment, 

 whether the English public is ripe for such reading ? 



The property of certain salts of cobalt (such as the chloride) to 

 assume a blue colour in dry air and to change to pink during 

 moist weather, has lately been utilised lor ladies' hats and 

 bonnets. An enterprising marchand de toilettes at Paris has 

 added to his " nouveautes " artificial flowers covered with the 

 salts in question, and christened them " barometers." " Hygro- 

 meters " would perhaps be more correct, but then the barometer 

 is the old I established weather prophet of the enlightened 

 millions. 



The law deduced by Baer from observation on Russian 

 rivers, regarding influence of the earth's rotation on the form of 

 river banks and beds, has received confirmation by various 

 observers since. The attention has been almost exclusively 

 directed, however, to rivers flowing in meridian direction. And 

 a like remark applies to investigations of the pressure arising 

 from the earth's rotation on one of the rails in railways. In a 

 recent paper to the Vienna Academy, M. Finger enlarges the 

 problem beyond this and other limitations, studying the influence 

 of the earth's rotation on movements (especially of rivers and 

 winds) in any paths parallel to the spheroidal (not sperical surface 

 of the earth. One surprising result is, that even when the 

 azimuth of the direction does not vary, the lateral pressure to 

 the right is not (as the adherents of Baer's law suppose) 

 greatest for a motion along the meridian, nor has it the value 

 indicated by the law for all azimuths, but it depends on the 

 value of the azimuth, and, with conditions otherwise equal, it is 

 greatest for a motion towards the east, and least for a motion 

 towards the west. With regard to vertical pressure of a body 

 moving along the earth's surface, M. Finger finds that in con- 

 sequence of the earth's rotation alone, even if the temperature 

 and vapour conditions did not vary, there would bean influence 

 of wind-direction on the state of the barometer, small, indeed, 

 but in the case of strong winds by no means to be negleted, so 

 that a higher barometer would correspond to the east winds, a 

 lower to_ the west. 



A registering "physiological balance" has recently been 

 devised by M. Redier, at the instance of M. Grandeau, for an 

 agronomic station, its object being to represent in curves the 

 gains or losses of weight of any matter (soil, plant, animal, &c. ) 

 placed in one of its scales, With three of these instruments 



