204 



NATURE 



[July 2, 18 96 



A Keuter telegram from St. Petersburg says : — " Desp.itches 

 from Irkutsk announce that M. Hansen, the Norwegian trader, 

 left that town on June I for the north of Siberia. His journey 

 is primarily for trading purpo.ses, but he will also inquire into 

 the truth of the recent rumours regarding Dr. Nansen, and see 

 if the store of provisions left by Baron Toll in the New .Siberian 

 Islands for Dr. Nansen is still intact. M. Hansen's mission has 

 been confided to him by the Russian Imperial Geographical 

 Society." 



The cruellest deed committed for the gratification of feminine 

 vanity is the destruction of small white herons or egrets, during 

 the .season in which they have their nests and young, in order to 

 supply plumes for ladies' hats. By persistent appeals the Society 

 for the Protection of Birds have induced a small proportion of 

 the gentler sex to give a thought to the conditions under which 

 their borrowed plumes are obtained, and a slight feeling against 

 the fashion of wearing feathers has been aroused. Hut fine 

 feathers are so essential to feminine decoration, that the slightest 

 excuse is sufficient to salve the conscience. Happy were the 

 Jadies, therefore, when they were told by shopkeepers that 

 lovely delicate plumes for the decoration of hats were now artifi- 

 •cially made, and no peculiar cruelty was necessary to obtain them. 

 But their complaisance has been disturbed. Sir William 

 Flower has examined numbers of plumes, the wearers of which 

 were priding themselves on their humanity, trusting to the 

 assurance of the milliner that they were not real egret's feathers, 

 but manufactured, and he has found in every case that they were 

 unquestionably genuine. The only "manufacture" consisted 

 in cutting the plume in two, and fixing the upper and lower half 

 side by side, so that a single feather does duty for two in the 

 ■" brush." Simply to keep up their trade and dispose of their 

 slock, the purveyors of female raiment have invented and widely 

 propagated a monstrous fiction, and are everywhere selling the real 

 leathers warranted as artificial ! " Thus," concludes Sir William 

 flower, "one of the most beautiful of birds is being swept off' 

 the face of the earth, under circumstances of peculiar cruelty, to 

 minister to a passing fashion, bolstered up by a glaring falsehood." 



In order to determine the highest possible speed that may be 

 attained on railways, trial runs were lately made between Berlin 

 and Liibbenau on the Berlin and Gorlitz line, states the Engineer : 

 and for these runs a special express engine of new design with 

 four cylinders and driving wheels of 2 metres (6ft. 6in. ) diameter 

 has been constructed, thus giving the engine a much greater 

 height above the rails than usual. The composition of the 

 trains was very various, amounting sometimes to lOO axles. 

 With a train of 30 axles the highest performance, viz. 106 

 kiloms. (65! miles) per hour was recorded, being 20 kiloms. 

 (12 miles) more than the highest speed hitherto attained by the 

 <iuickest German lightning train (Blitzzlige), viz. the Berlin 

 Hamburg D-Zug, which runs through a distance of 286 kiloms. 

 (1774 miles) in 3^ hours, while the speed of ordinary German 

 ■expresses is only 70 kiloms. (43^ miles) per hour. The portions 

 of lines chosen for the runs were tolerably horizontal over their 

 whole length, and had very few curves. 



Outbreaks of anthrax are by no means easy to trace to 

 their fountain-head ; and the Canton of Ziirich has recently been 

 much exercised over the appearance of anthrax in a district 

 where this disease had previously been unknown. Dr. Silber- 

 schmidt, one of the assistants of the Hygienic Institute attached 

 to the University of Zurich, has been entrusted with the task 

 <)f ferreting out, if possible, the means by which anthrax has 

 been introduced. Suspicion had fallen upon a horse-hair factory 

 in the vicinity of the infected area, where the raw material 

 employed emanated principally from Russia, from which country 

 it is imported direct Tit'i Leipzig, in large bundles weighing 

 over a hundredweight. These bundles are subjected to no 

 NO. 1392, VOL. 54] 



process whatever of sterilisation or cleansing ; and as cases of 

 anthrax, whilst rarely met with amongst horses in Switzerland 

 and other European countries, are comparatively frequent in 

 Russia, the suspicion of this factory being the probable source 

 of the trouble seemed justified. Careful examinations of some 

 of this horse-hair, and also of the dust in the factory, revealed 

 the undoubted presence of anthrax germs ; thus the dissemina- 

 tion of anthrax appeared to be readily accounted for, and its 

 distribution in the spore form as dust, in consequence of the 

 extraordinary vitality of anthrax spores, renders it a particularly 

 dangerous foe to deal with. It has been suggested to the 

 authorities that Russian horse-hair should be sterilised on the 

 frontier, or at any rate in Leipzig, in special apparatus arranged 

 for the purpose, as, after the raw material has been distributed 

 to small factories, the expense of sterilisation renders its being 

 successfully carried a matter of great difficulty. 



The vexed question in the theory of fluid friction, whether 

 finite slipping does or does not take place at the surface of a solid 

 in contact with a liquid, forms the subject of a contribution, by 

 Dr. Antonio Umani, in a recent number of the Ntiovo Cimento. 

 The experiments were conducted in the physical laboratory of 

 the University of Parma, the apparatus used consisting of a 

 cylindrical box filled with mercury, and suspended by a torsion 

 fibre. In one series of experiments the sides of the box were 

 nickel-plated, so that the mercury did ni>t actually wet the metal ; 

 in another series, the mercury was made to bathe the sides of the 

 box by thoroughly amalgamating the latter. In the former case, 

 the presence of a film of air between the mercury and nickel was 

 obviated by filling the box in vacuo. The observed values for 

 the logarithmic decrement of the amplitude of the oicillations 

 were found to differ in the two series of experiments by an 

 amount which. Dr. Umani considers, indicates finite slipping 

 between the mercury and the box when the latter is nickel- 

 plated. The author further proceeds to calculate the internal 

 coefficient of viscosity of mercury from the results of his second 

 series of experiments, and obtains the value tj = o 01577 

 C.G.S. units at temperature 10° C. Warburg, employing 

 Poiseuille's method, had previously obtained at temperature 

 I7°"2 C. the value O'oi6o2. 



In the Biillelin of the Royal Academy of Belgium, M. Leon 

 Gerard contributes the results of some observations on the seat 

 of emission of Riintgen rays, and their mode of propagation in 

 air. The rays emanating from a Crookes' tube were allowed to 

 pass through three diaphragms, and the emergent pencil of light 

 was received on a photographic plate placed in different posi- 

 tions, so as to give both transverse and oblique sections of the 

 pencil. By comparing these various sections, M. Gerard has 

 been led to the conclusion that Rontgen's statement, according 

 to which air is much less absorbent to Riintgen rays than to 

 kathodic rays, is inexact. He considers that both kinds of 

 rays possess the analogy of not travelling exactly in straight 

 lines, and that, in accordance with the views of Lenard, 

 atmospheric air is a turbulent medium for kathodic manifesta- 

 tions, and that their transmission takes place as in a turbulent 

 medium, such as stearin or milk. M. Gerard's second conclu- 

 sion, namely, that Rontgen rays only emanate from the surface 

 of the glass on which kathodic rays fitll, is in accordance with 

 the numerous investigations described in previous numbers of 

 Nature. 



The action of Rontgen and other rays on the higher animals 

 has been studied by Prof. Stefano Capranica {Alii A'. Accad. 

 liei Lincei). The subject selected for observation was Mtis 

 iiiuscii/iis, and the experiments referred chiefly to the quantity 

 of carbon dioxide exhaled in the process of respiration. Prof. 

 Capranica states the following conclusions : (i) The amount of 

 COj is the same in darkness as in diffuse daylight. (2) The 



