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Sept. 21, 1871 | 
NATURE 
419 

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WE must add to our maps the ports of the growing region of 
Bolivia on its narrow strip of coast. Besides Cobija there are 
now as trading ports Mejillones, Tocopilla, and Caleta de la 
Chimba. 
GOLD operations are being undertaken at Penang by English 
enterprise, with great hopes of success. The object is to work 
the quartz reefs. 
GOLD mining is reviving in Colombia or New Granada, a 
country once famous for its riches, 

THE LATE CAPTAIN BASEVI, R.E. 
Fas LETTER in the Zimes of the 19th inst., from Col. J. D. 
Walker, R.E., announces the death of Captain James 
Palladio Basevi, of the Royal (late Bengal) Engineers, Deputy- 
Superintendent of the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, 
an officer of great worth and ability, whose loss will be long felt 
in the department of the public service to which he belonged. 
He was the son of the celebrated architect, George Basevi, and 
was distinguished as a lad for more than ordinary talent, and 
particularly for his mathematical abilities. First at Rugby, then 
at Cheltenham College, and afterwards at Addiscombe, he won 
for himself a high position among his fellow students, and in 
December, 1551, he left Addiscombe as the first cadet of his 
term, obtaining the first prize in mathematics, the sword for 
good conduct, the Pollock medal, and a commission in the 
Honourable East India Company’s Corps of Engineers. 
The first few years of his services in India were spent in the 
Department of Public Works in the Bengal Presidency ; but in 
1856 he was appointed to the Great Trigonometrical Survey of 
India, in which he continued to serve up to the time of his death, 
performing many services of great value. 
His bent of mind and habits of study led him, however, to 
feel a preference for the more purely scientific branches of the 
operations of the Trigonometrical Survey. Thus, in 1864, he 
was selected to undertake certain operations which had been 
proposed by the President and Council of the Royal Society for 
the determination of the force of gravity at the stations of the 
great meridional arc of triangles measured by Lambton and 
Everest, which extends from Cape Comorin to the Himalayan 
Mountains. The investigations were to be effected by measuring 
the number of vibrations which would be made in a given time 
by certain invariable pendulums when swung at the several 
stations, 
Captain Basevi entered on the pendulum observations with his 
characteristic ardour and devotion. He carried his observations 
of pendulum and clock coincidences over at least twelve days at 
each station; for ten hours daily—from 6 A.M. to 4 P.M.—he 
never left his pendulums for more than a few minutes at a time, 
taking rounds of observations at intervals of an hour anda half 
apart ; then at night he would devote a couple of hours to star 
observations for determining time. 
His observations of the pendulums on the Indian are showed 
that the local variations of gravity which are superposed on the 
great law of increase from the equator to the poles, though 

_ apparently irregular when examined singly, are subject to laws which 
are highly interesting and curious, and are well worthy of investi- 
gation. At the northern extremity of the arc the results indicate 
a deficiency of density as the stations approach the Himalayan 
Mountains, while at the southern extremity they indicate an 
increase of density as the stations approach the ocean ; thus both 
groups of results point to a law of diminution of density under 
mountains and continents, and an increase under the bed of the 
ocean, 
Thus far, however, observations had not been taken at any 
very great altitudes, the highest station in the Himalayas being 
under 7,000 feet ; arrangements were therefore made to swing 
the pendulums on some of the elevated table lands in the interior 
of the Himalayas, which rise to altitudes of 14,000 feet to 17,000 
feet. It was expected that this would be sufficient to complete 
the work in India, and then the pendulums would be taken back 
to England to be swung at the base stations of Greenwich and 
Kew, and ex route at Aden and at Ismailha on the Suez Canal, 
places which are in the same latitudes as some of Captain 
Basevi’s stations. Thus gravity at Aden would be directly com- 
pared with gravity at certain points of the coast and continental 
stations of the Indian Peninsula, and similarly the plains of 
Egypt would be compared with the Himalayan Mountains, 

In the spring of the present year Captain Basevi proceeded to 
Kashmir on his way to the high table lands in the interior. 
Early in June he reached Leh, the capital of Ladak. He then 
proceeded to the Khiangchu table land in Rukshu, about eighty 
miles to the south of Leh. There, at a spot called Moré, in lat. 
33° 16’ and long. 77° 54’, and at an altitude of 15,500ft., he com- 
pleted a satisfactory series of observations, which show a very 
gross deficiency of density. After applying the usual reductions 
to sea level, &c., it was found that the force of gravity at Moré 
did not exceed the normal amount for the parallel of latitude 6° 
to the south, as determined by the previous observations with the 
same pendulums. 
Wishing to have one more independent determination at al high 
altitude, Captain Basevi proceeded to the Changchenmo Valley, 
which lies due east of Leh, across the newly-proposed trade route 
between the British province of Lahoul and the States of Eastern 
Turkestan. Near the eastern extremity of that valley, on the 
confines of the Chinese territories, he found a suitable position in 
lat. 34°10 by long. 79°25, at an altitude which is not exactly 
known, but must probably have exceeded 16,000ft. He hoped 
to complete his observations in ten days, and then commence 
the journey back to India. But he did not live to carry out his 
intentions ; already the hand of death was upon him, and, all 
unconsciously to himself, the over-exertion to which he was sub- 
jected in a highly rarefied atmosphere and under great vicissitudes 
of climate was rapidly undermining a constitution which, though 
vigorous, had already been sorely tried. 
With the devotion of a soldier on the battle-field, he has fallen 
a martyr to his love of science and his earnest efforts to complete 
the work he had to do, and in him we have lost a public servant 
of whom it may be truly said that it would not be easy to find 
his equal in habitual forgetfulness of self and devotion to duty. 


SOCIETIES AND ACADEMIES 
ParRIs 
Academie des Sciences, Sept. 11.—M. Faye in the chair, 
—M. Dumas read an abstract of a pamphlet published by MM. 
Lomer and Ellershausen, advocating the establishment at Belle- 
garde, in the department of Ain, of hydraulic machines worked 
by the Rhone, and giving a force of 10,000 horse-power. The 
site is called ‘‘ Le perte du Rhone” at Bellegarde, and this im- 
mense hydraulic pressure is to be obtained by boring a tunnel, 
through which only one-third of the water of the Rhone will go. 
The height of the fall will be sixty feet, and the result is to be 
obtained very easily, as the tunnel is only to havea length of 
550 yards, The engineers hope to create at Bellegarde a city as 
important as Lowell in the United States. It is intended to in- 
duce Alsatian manufacturers to move from Mulhaus, and to settle in 
that locality.-- M. Decaisne sent some observations relating to ani- 
mals fed with bread infested with the odzam aurantiacum, and it 
is considered as demonstrated that, at least under special circum- 
stances, such food must be considered as being really poisonous. 
—M. Berthelot sent a very long paper on the union of alcohol 
with bases, which was inserted 772 extenso in the Comptes Rendus. 
—M. Lecog de Boisbaudron sent also a paper which was published 
by him some time ago, on the constitution of luminous spectra. 
—M. Fayre sent a paper to elucidate certain points of a special 
theory worked out to explain how a certain weight of copper 
rotating between the poles of an electro-magnet is heated by the 
influence at a distance. The fact was discovered by Foucault. 
SAN FRANCISCO 
California Academy of Sciences, August 22,—Mr. Dall 
called the attention of the members to some shells of oysters that 
had been transplanted from the Eastern States, and which during 
the last twelve months had been growing in the waters of the 
bay. The recent growth of these oysters had been modified in 
a manner so that they corresponded very closely to that of our 
native oyster. In the eastern oyster the shell is white and 
smooth, whilst our bay oyster has the shell much corrugated, of 
a brown colour, and frequently with purple stripes between the 
ridges. Now the recent growths of the shell of these trans- 
planted eastern oysters exhibit the same corrugations as our na- 
tive, the colour is decidedly more brown than in the east, and 
purplish stripes are frequently found between the corrugations. 
—Dr. Blake gave a description of some prismatic dolerite found 
in the neighbourhood of Black Rock, Nevada. The prisms 
were six-sided, measuring from o'l in, to 0°3 in. across, and some 
were from 3in. to 4in, long, but they all had evidently been 
