August 20, 1896] 



NA TURE 



IT^ 



The ileaih is announced of Dr. H. E. Beyrich, Professor of 

 Geology and Paleontology, at Berlin. 



We are sorry to see the announceme nt of the death of Prof. 

 H. A. Newton, of Vale College, whose work in pure mathe- 

 matics and mathematical astronomy is well known to men 

 of science. 



The list of new Fellows elected by the Keale Accademia dei 

 Lincei of Rome, with their special subjects of study, is as 

 follows ; — Ordinary Fellow, Giovanni Briosi (Botany) ; Corre- 

 sponding Fellow, Giacinto Morera (Mechanics) ; Foreign 

 Fellows, Carl Neumann and Hugo Gylden (Mechanics), Ludwig 

 Boltzmann and Alfred Cornu (Physics). 



The Brilish Medical Journal states that the members 

 of the Liverpool Medical Institution have invited Sir Joseph 

 Lister, President- Elect of the British Association, to a banquet 

 to be given in his honour on September 19. The banquet will 

 take place in the Philharmonic Hall, in which the dinner of the 

 British Medical Association was held on the occasion of the 

 meeting in Liverpool in 1882. The Lord Mayor of Liverpool 

 (the Right Hon. the Earl of Derby) will also be the guest of 

 the Institution, and upwards of one hundred of the more dis- 

 tinguished members of the British Association have been invited 

 to be present. The Blue Hungarian Band has been engaged for 

 the evening, and no effort is being spared by the Dinner Com- 

 mittee to make the festival worthy rif the guests, the British 

 Association, and the Medical Institution. 



A.S announced on July 23, the autumn meeting of the Iron 

 and Steel Institute will commence at Bilbao, on Monday, 

 August 31. The detailed programme has now been distributed, 

 from which it appears that the following papers have been 

 offered for reading :— On the Spanish iron industry, by Don 

 Pablo de Alzola ; on the estimation of sulphur in iron ores, by 

 R. VV. Atkinson and A. J. Atkinson ; on the present position 

 of the iron ore industries of Biscay and Santander, by William 

 Gill ; on a new water-cooled hot-blast valve, by William 

 Colquhoun ; on the manganese ore deposits of Northern Spain, 

 liy Jeremiah Head ; on the missing carbon in steel, by T. W. 

 Hogg ; a note on the presence of fixed nitrogen in steel, by 

 K. W. Harbord and T. Twynam ; further notes on the Walrand 

 process, by G. J. Snelus, F. R.S. ; on the roasting of iron ores 

 with a view to their magnetic concentration, by Prof H. 

 Wedding. 



We regret to notice the report that Herr Lilienthal, whose 

 experiments in artificial flight have on several occasions been 

 described in these columns, has been accidentally killed. 

 According to a Central News telegram, he made an experi- 

 mental journey on August 11, starting from Giimberg, in the 

 province of Brandenburg. He had flown along safely for over two 

 hundred yards, when a gust of wind suddenly caught and carried 

 him upwards, causing him to lose control over his wings, with 

 the result that he fell to the ground, broke his spine, and died soon 

 afterwards. Herr Lilienthal was reported some time ago to 

 have met with a fatal accident, but happily the news then 

 proved to be incorrect. There does not, however, seem to be 

 any grounds for doubting that he has now actually met his 

 death while carrying out one of his intrepid experiments which 

 have been of such assistance in developing the knowledge of 

 the conditions of flight. It is worth remark that Mr. S. E. 

 Peal, in a letter which we published on August 6, prophesied 

 the probability of the occurrence of an accident such as that 

 which has just ended fatally. He said: "Herr Lilienthal is 

 probably on the right trail. I see he desires to turn and meet 

 the breeze ; but in this movement, I fancy the upper central 

 aeroplane— so high above the centre of gravity — will turn him 

 NO. 1399, VOL. 54] 



over in a strong wind." Unfortunately the suggested accident 

 has happened, and has deprived science of an enthusiastic 

 experimenter in aerial navigation. 



A CORRESI'O.NDENT at Johannesburg has sent us a report, 

 from the Johannesburg Star, of some amusing speeches recently 

 made in the Volksraad on the subject of rain-making experiments. 

 It would be a pity to let the richness of the utterances of the 

 members of the Raad be the cause of merely local merriment, so 

 we subjoin the report, trusting that sacrilegious meteorologists 

 will give it their consideration. The report is as follows : " The 

 debate on the memorials from Krugersdorp, requesting the 

 Raad to pass an Act to prevent charges of dynamite being fired 

 into the clouds for rain, was continued. Mr. A. D. Wolmarans 

 spoke in favour of his proposal, and denounced the action of 

 certain persons at Johannesburg as invoking the wrath of God. 

 Mr. Birkenstock said there was nothing irreligious or sacrilegious 

 in these experiments ; they were purely scientific experiments. 

 When lightning-conductors were first invented, the same 

 objections were raised against their use. This was not a subject 

 for the Raad to deal with, and he moved as an amendment that 

 the Report of the Memorial Committee to decline to interfere 

 be adopted. The Chairman said it was a monstrous thing to 

 shoot into the clouds ; it was nothing less than defiance of the 

 Almighty ; it should be made a criminal offence. Mr, 

 Labuschagne was of the opinion that the offenders should be 

 imprisoned. After a further discussion it was resolved, by 

 fifteen to ten votes, to instruct the Government to draft a law to 

 prevent such things happening in future, and submit it this 

 ses.sion. " 



The Committee of the British Association on Zoological 

 Bibliography and Publication de.sire to draw attention to the 

 following statement : — It is the general opinion of scientific 

 workers, with which the Committee cordially agrees, (i) that 

 each part of a serial publication should have the date of actual 

 publication, as near as may be, printed on the wrapper, and, when 

 possible, on the last sheet sent to press. (2) That authors' 

 separate copies should be i.ssued with the original pagination 

 and plate-numbers clearly indicated on each page and plate, and 

 with a reference to the original place of publication. (3) That 

 authors' separate copies should not be distributed privately before 

 the paper has been published in the regular manner. The Com- 

 mittee, however, observes that these customs are by no means 

 universal, and asks that they shall be more generally put into 

 force. The Committee further asks for co-operation in the 

 following matter. There are certain rules of conduct upon which 

 the best workers are agreed, but which it is impossible to enforce, 

 and to which it is difficult to convert the mass of writers. These 

 are : (4) That it is desirable to express the subject of one's 

 paper in its title, while keeping the title as concise as possible. 

 (5) That new species should be properly diagnosed and figured 

 when possible. (6) That new names should not be proposed in 

 irrelevant foot-notes, or anonymous paragraphs. (7) That re- 

 ferences to previous publications should be made fully and 

 correctly, if possible in accordance with one of the recognised 

 sets of rules for quotation, such as that recently adopted by the 

 French Zoological Society. The Committee points out that 

 these and similar matters are wholly within the control of editors 

 (ridaclio)i) and publishing committees, and any assistance in 

 putting them into effect will be valued, not merely by the Com- 

 mittee, but. it is believed, by zoologists in general. Any remarks 

 on the above matters may be addressed to Mr. F. A. Bather, 

 Secretary of the Committee, at the Natural History Museum, 

 Cromwell Road, London, S.W. 



.\n account of experiments, conducted by CI. W. and E. G. 

 Peckham, for testing (i) the range of vision and (2) the colour- 

 sense of spiders, published in a late volume of the Transactions 



