Febeuaey 21, 1896.] 



SCIENCE. 



283 



B. Piatt before the historical club of the hos- 

 pital, and the address of Prof. W. H. Welch at 

 the opening of the William Pepper laboratory 

 of clinical medicine. The papers are all note- 

 worthy for historical research and literary form. 

 Prof. Osier reviews the life of Thomas Dover, 

 physician and buccaneer, whose career throws 

 curious light on the social conditions and medi- 

 cal practice in England at the beginning of the 

 eighteenth century. In a second paper there is 

 given from private sources an account of the 

 life of an Alabama student, John I. Basset, 

 "whose name was not written on the scroll of 

 fame, but who heard the call and forsook all 

 and followed his ideal." Prof. Osier's third 

 paper is entitled ' John Keats, the Apothecary 

 Poet. ' Mr. Piatt reviews the work of Johannes 

 Miiller as a physiologist and a teacher. Prof. 

 Welch, in his address at Philadelphia, described 

 the evolution of modern scientific laboratories. 

 With the exception of anatomy, laboratories for 

 instruction and research are comparatively re- 

 dent. Purkinje's physiological laboratory at 

 Breslau was established in 1824, one year 

 earlier than Liebig's famous chemical laboratory 

 at Giessen. Lord Kelvin established a physical 

 laboratory in Glasgow about 1845. The first 

 pathological laboratory was founded by Vir- 

 schow, in Berlin, in 1856. 



The Division of Botany of the U. S. Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture has issued a bulletin by 

 Mr. L. H. Dewey reviewing the legislation un- 

 dertaken by twenty-five of the States and Ter- 

 ritories for the suppression of weeds and giving 

 the essential provisions of a general State weed 

 law. 



The Canadian government proposes to send 

 an expedition to Hudson's Bay next summer to 

 establish customs oflBcers and to further investi- 

 gate the navigability of Hudson's Straits. 



The position of scientific adviser to the Lon- 

 don Trinity House, which has been in abeyance 

 since the resignation of Tyndall, has been re- 

 vived and has been accepted by Lord Eayleigh. 



The Royal Academy of Sciences of Belgium 

 proposes, as the subject for a prize in 1897, a 

 discussion from a theoretical point of view of 

 the Variation of Latitude, its cause and mean- 

 ing, together with a criticism of the works of 



geometers on the subject, from Laplace to the 

 present time. A gold medal valued at 800 fr. 

 will be awarded. 



The London Times states that investigations 

 have recently been undertaken by the Marine 

 Biological Association into the contents of cer- 

 tain bays on the south coast of Devon. The 

 bays selected for the investigations were Start 

 and Teignmouth Bays, both of which are closed 

 to trawlers in accordance with a by-law of the 

 Devon Sea Fisheries Committee. The object 

 in view of which the work was begun was to 

 discover the characteristic features of the local- 

 ities in question in respect to the food fish they 

 contained. Mr. F. B. Stead, the naturalist in 

 charge of these investigations, has conducted 

 trawling experiments in these localities during 

 the months of October to December, and the 

 most important facts ascertained by him are as 

 follows : Of the different species of fish cap- 

 tured in the bays, plaice and dabs are by far the 

 most numerous, and as of these two species the 

 plaice is, from the economic point of view, far 

 the most important, and the large number of 

 competing dabs must probably be regarded as a 

 positive hindrance to the well-being of the 

 plaice, any controversy that may be raised as 

 to the advisibility or otherwise of maintaining 

 the by-law now in force should be solely occu- 

 pied with the consideration of the question 

 whether the closure of the bays to trawlers is 

 necessary or desirable for the protection of the 

 plaice. It has been further shown that the 

 bays difief markedly from one another in re- 

 spect to the sizes of the fish they contain. Thus, 

 while half the plaice in Start Bay were found to 

 be over 12J in. in length, in Teignmouth Bay 

 half the plaice captured were under lOJ in. 

 A similar difference held in the case of the dabs. 

 A preliminary account of these investigations 

 will appear in the ensuing number of the journal 

 of the Association. 



UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL NEWS. 



Mes. D. G. Oemsby, of Milwaukee, has 

 given $25,000 to Lawrence University at Apple- 

 ton, Wis., to endow the ' D. G. Ormsby profes- 

 sorship of history and political economy,' in 

 memory of the husband; and by the will of the 



