176 
NATURE 
. 
[NovEMBER 2, 1916 " 
mining a Ceratopsian skull, beneath which it lay. 
Being thus accidentally found during work with a 
heavy pick, it was badly shattered, but it is believed 
that all the fragments originally preserved have been 
recovered. 
Mr. E. C. Cuuss, the curator of the Durban 
Museum, is to be congratulated on the admirable 
‘““General Guide’’ which he has prepared for the aid 
of visitors, a copy of which has just reached us. Mr. 
Chubb has evidently made the most of the collections 
under his charge, though it would seem that great 
gaps have to be filled, even in so far as African mam- 
mals are concerned. If we may judge from this guide, 
neither the elephant nor the giraffe is yet represented 
here. When a new edition of this guide is issued we 
would suggest that the statement that the ‘* lamp- 
shells,’ or Brachiopods, are possibly related to the 
starfishes should be corrected, while in regard to the 
information concerning flexible sandstone the fact 
might be added that it is found in India and Brazil. 
At the present time the Durban Museum occupies no 
more than the first floor of the south block of an 
imposing pile of buildings serving also as an art 
lery and public library, and apparently yet other 
unctions. In the course of time it is to be hoped the 
Natural History Department will either oust its rivals 
or find new and more commodious quarters elsewhere ; 
as matters stand, the space allotted to it is inadequate. 
Mr. E. P. Metnecke, in U.S. Dept. Agric. Bulletin, 
No. 275, entitled ‘* Forest Pathology in Forest Regula- 
tion,’ gives the results of an investigation, as regards 
the incidence of wounds and disease, of 160 felled trees 
of Abies concolor, varying in age from 60 to 258 years, 
These trees were representative of the ordinary condi- 
tion of the species under natural forest conditions in 
Oregon. Only one-fourth of the trees were found to 
be free from wounds. The rest had all been injured 
at one time or another by lightning, fire, frost-crack, 
etc., or by a combination of these, and as the wounds 
permitted infection by fungi, decay had set in. After 
the trees had reached eighty or ninety years of age, 
70 per cent. were more or less badly wounded; and at 
106 years, 80 per cent. ; but serious decay of the timber 
rarely set in until about the age of. 130 years. Fire, 
usually caused by lightning, is the greatest enemy. 
The management of the forest should be modified by 
the pathological conditions, as it is evident that much 
may be done to avert decay and destruction of valu- 
able timber by timely removal of wounded and badly 
suppressed trees, and by fixing the felling rotation 
at 130 to 150 years. 
Tue richness of Sweden in water-power, and Den- 
mark’s natural poverty in any sources of power, has 
led to Sweden exporting electric power across the 
Sound. The works are established in the small river 
Liga, in Smialand,-and the current is carried by over- 
head wires to Helsingborg, and thence by three sub- 
marine cables under the waters of the Sound to 
Marienlyet, north of Elsinore, on the island of See- 
land. According to La Géographie (vol. xxxi., No. 2), 
the Swedish power station sends 500 h.p. to Denmark, 
but the company undertakes to increase this to 
5000 h.p. Precautions have been taken so far as 
possible to prevent the cables being fouled by the 
anchors of ships. 
Tue Royal Italian Geographical Society has issued 
as one of. its special memoirs a handbook and index 
to the names which appear on the Austrian’ Staff map 
(1: 75,000) of the Alto Adige, the new province of 
Italy lying north of the Trentino (‘‘Prontuario dei 
nomi locali dell’ alto Adige”), The index itself, apart 
from the introduction, runs to more than one hundred 
pages, 
NO. 2453, VOL. 98] 
and contains all the names on the fourteen | 
sheets of the map, with their Italian equivalents. 
Pending the preparation of a new map, this index 
should be of great value, as many of the places are 
difficult to identify from the German versions of their 
names, which often bear no relation to the Italian. 
The work has been done under the direction of Signor 
E. Tolomei. ; 
WirH the view of increasing the commercial utility 
of cobalt, Dr. H. T. Kalmus, of Queen’s University, 
Kingston, Ontario, has carried out a number of in- 
vestigations of the physical properties of the metal and 
its alloys for the Mines Branch of the Departiment of 
Mines. of Canada. The fifth of these investigations 
deals with the magnetic properties of pure cobalt and 
of the alloy Fe,Co, and has been conducted by Dr. 
Kalmus and Mr. K. B. Blake. The B, H curves of 
both materials have been obtained by the Burrows 
method in use at the American Bureau of Standards. 
For pure cobalt the value of B for H=10co is only 
about 5000, while older observations had given 8000. ~ 
At H=150 B has risen to 6300, and shows no sign of 
the material being magnetically saturated. The Fe,Co 
alloy, when cast, is very liable to fine cracks, but after 
forging is more than twice as strong as pure iron. 
At low fields its magnetic permeability is less than 
that of pure iron, but at fields exceeding 8 it is greater, 
and for fields of the order 50 to 200 is approximately 
25 per cent. greater. The hysteresis loss is consider- 
ably less than that of transformer steel, and its elec- 
trical resistance about the same as that of pure iron. 
A paPER by the late Lieut. F. Trevor Wilkins (North- 
umberland Fusiliers), read at the Institution of 
Mechanical Engineers on October 20, gives an account 
of some trials of a small Diesel engine at the Univer- 
sity of Birmingham. The manner of conducting these 
trials and reducing the results enabled figures to be 
presented additional to those usually given in such 
investigations. The indicator diagrams have been re- 
drawn upon a heat-energy chart, and by this means 
any differences between the theoretical and practical 
cycles are clearly exhibited. The amounts of heat 
passing to the cylinder walls and to the exhaust were 
determined accurately. The heat flow during the com- 
pression and expansion strokes was estimated separ- 
ately, and the period during which this heat flow takes 
place was indicated definitely. At full load the ther- 
mal efficiency, heat to jackets, and heat to exhaust 
are respectively 42:1, 296, and 28:3 per cent., these 
being the results of the test. The corresponding 
figures from the energy diagrams are 42-5, 25:3, and 
32:2 per cent. ; 
OUR ASTRONOMICAL COLUMN. 
Tue FiresaLt or. OcToBeR 20.—Mr. Denning writes 
that forty-six observations of this brilliant object have 
reached him. It was seen from widely distant sta- 
tions, the most northerly being Rothes (Elgin), and 
the most southerly Totteridge (Herts) and Bristol. 
The fireball was a splendid one, and it traversed a 
long flight of about 252 miles, from over a_ place 
60 miles N.W. of Edinburgh to 50 miles E. of Whitby, 
Yorks. Its elevation decreased from 68 to 25 miles, 
and its velocity was about 17 miles per second. The 
radiant point was near ¢ Haass, situated low in 
the N.W. by W. sky at the time of the apparition. 
There is no well-known meteor shower from this 
region in the autumn, but bright meteors have some- 
times been observed from the same astronomical point 
at various times of the year, and this point near 
¢ Herculis forms the chief focus of a well-defined 
meteoric shower visible during the last half of May. 
