666 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. III. No. 70. 



It is stated that Sir Wollaston Franks, who 

 has been an officer of the British Museum since 

 1851, will shortly retire ft'om the head of the de- 

 partment of British and Mediaeval Antiquities. 



A CABLE despatch states that the Governor of 

 Yakutsk reports officially that the inhabitants 

 of Ust-Yansk have not heard anything about 

 Dr. Nansen, the Arctic explorer, who was 

 recently reported to be returning after having 

 discovered the North Pole. 



A VITASCOPE devised by Edison, and similar 

 to thekinetoscopeof MM. Lumiere (see Science 

 N. S., No. 66, p. 513), has been exhibited in a 

 New York theater and received with much ap- 

 plause. A scene showing surf beating against 

 a pier and breaking on the sand is said to have 

 been especially successful. 



The most interesting announcement in the 

 report of Sir A. Geikie on the Geological Sur- 

 vey of the United Kingdom for 1895 concerns 

 the new general map of England and Wales on 

 a scale of four miles to an inch. Of the total 

 thirteen sheets, seven have been issued, five 

 are in the hands of the engraver, and the re- 

 maining one will be shortly prepared. Exjseri- 

 ment has been made on one of these sheets as 

 to the comparative cost of hand coloring and 

 color-printing; the price by the first method 

 beingl0s.6d.; by the second, 2s. 6d. So far as can 

 be judged at present, the sale justifies the ex- 

 pectation that the color-printing system may 

 be continued and extended. Not only is there 

 the advantage of a much lower price, but far 

 greater accuracy of the maps can be insured 

 than when each copy has to be laboriously 

 copied by hand. 



At a meeting of the Royal Meteorological 

 Society of London, on April 15th, Mr. E. D. 

 Fridlauder, gave an account of some obser- 

 vations of the amount of dust in the ' atmos- 

 phere made at various places during a voyage 

 round the world in 1894-5. The experiments, 

 which were made with a form of Aitken's 

 pocket dust counter, showed that there are 

 often considerable variations in the number of 

 dust particles in a very short space of time. 

 Not only did the dust occur in the air of inhab- 

 ited countries, over the water surfaces immedi- 

 ately adjoining them, and up to an altitude of 



6,000 or 7,000 feet amongst the Alps, but it was 

 also found in the open ocean, and that so far 

 away from any land as to preclude the possibil- 

 ity of artificial pollution, and its existence has 

 been directly demonstrated at a height of more 

 than 13,000 feet. 



In a letter received by the American Metric 

 Society, G. Q. Coray, the Secretary of the Utah 

 Metric Society, conveys the information that the 

 metric system has been under constant agita- 

 tion in Utah for nearly two years. As a result, 

 practically every teacher, merchant and politi- 

 cal leader is committed to the policy of adopting 

 the system to the exclusion of all other weights 

 and measures at as early a date as possible. 

 The metric system has been recognized by con- 

 stitutional provision, and unless Congress takes 

 some action that will operate against the system 

 in the near future the metric system will 

 take the place of the old systems in the arith- 

 metics used in the Utah public schools. The 

 State Teachers' Association, the Legisla- 

 ture of Utah and the State University have 

 forwarded memorials to Congress asking for the 

 passage of the bill now before the House of 

 Representatives. It is expected that the. Salt 

 Lake Chamber of Commerce will take similar 

 action. The Utah Society proposes to send a 

 representative to AVashington to bring the merits 

 of the system to the attention of the Congress- 

 men. Mr. Coray states that the business men 

 of Utah are practically a unit in favor of the 

 movement. The Metric Society numbers over 

 1,000 members, and is composed largely of the 

 business classes. The success of the Utah Met- 

 ric Society naturally suggests the formation of 

 similar societies in each of the States. 



There will be an exhibition of horseless car- 

 riages at the Imperial Institute, London, begin- 

 ning on May 9th, and at the Crystal Palace 

 during May an exhibition will be opened for 

 carriages of all sorts in which competitions 

 will be arranged for horseless carriages. 



The British Medical Journal states that M. 

 Duclaux, the Director of the Pasteur Institute,. 

 has made some interesting experiments on the 

 chemical action of the sun's rays. The activity 

 of the rays was estimated by exposing solutions 

 of oxalic acid of known strena;th to their action. 



