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SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XIV. No. 350 



of wild elephants, but became totally blind about three years ago. 

 He continued, however, to work at the plough until within a short 

 time of his death. After death. the tusks were removed, and 

 measured five feet in length. Sella himself was eight, feet high. 



— Of the various orders of the fungi, the Uredinece, or what are 

 commonly known as the rust parasites, are of present interest to 

 the scientist, in that, in their as yet comparatively unknown life- 

 history, development, and relations to other life, many facts lie still 

 unearthed, and to the agriculturist and horticulturist because the 

 destructive capabilities of these pests are becoming more and more 

 a matter of financial importance. Upon passing through fields of 

 ripening wheat or other of the small grains, one may often be not 

 a little surprised to find that his clothes have become quite thickly 

 besprinkled by a yellowish-brown dust which has fallen from the' 

 plants. This is an aggregation of the spores of one of the special 

 forms of what the farmer designates as rust. Whether he regards 

 it as a distinct thing in itself, or as simply a diseased condition of 

 the plant-tissues arising from the evil effects of bad drainage, want 

 of proper light, or what not, none feels to a greater extent than he its 

 destructive effects upon the yield of the crop. The rusts of the agri- 

 culturists, however, are but representatives of a great order, em- 

 bracing more than twelve hundred species, of which it is the prov- 

 ince of a paper on " The Hetercecismal Puccinice," by Henry L. 

 Bolley of Lafayette, Ind. (published in the American Microscopi- 

 cal Journal, vol. X.), to give an outline of the structural develop- 

 ment and life-history of a few species. 



— Charles R. Williams, in a letter to The Evening Post, writes, 

 " Apropos of the frequent discovery in the Far West of fossils of 

 horses with toes, has it ever been recalled that Julius Csesar had 

 such a horse ? Suetonius, in his " Life of Csesar,'' sixty-first section, 

 says, ' Csesar made use of a remarkable horse, with feet almost 

 human, and hoofs divided in the manner of toes ' {Utebaiur eqiio 

 insigni, pedibiis prope hu?Hanis ei in jnodicm digit or tim itngulis 

 fissis). The whole passage is interesting. The horse, it appears, 

 was foaled in Caesar's stud. The soothsayers at once proclaimed 

 that it betokened for its master the dominion of the world, where- 

 upon Csesar had it reared with the utmost care, and was the first 

 to mount it. Indeed, it would never suffer anybody else upon its 

 back. Later he sat up an image of the horse in front of the Tem- 

 ple of Venus Genetrix. Was not this an instance of what evolu- 

 tionists call ' reversion ' ? " 



— The vexed question of obtaining some recognition of physical 

 as well as intellectual powers in competitions for the public service 

 was well put before the British Association by Mr. Francis Galton, 

 in his paper, " On the Advisability of Assigning Marks for Bodily 

 Efficiency in the Examinations of Candidates for the Public Ser- 

 vice." The curious and hardly accountable disregard of bodily 

 efficiency in those examinations through which youths are selected 

 to fill posts in which exceptional bodily gifts happen to be pecul- 

 iarly desirable, must, he said, strike the attention of anthropolo- 

 gists with especial force. The reform now asked for is to give ad- 

 ditional marks to those youths who, being fit for service, are at the 

 same time exceptionally well fit so far as bodily efficiency is con- 

 cerned. There has been a vast amount of lax assertion in reference 

 to this matter, some saying that high intellect is often associated 

 with stunted and weakly frame, and others pointing to instances in 

 which high mental and high physical powers have been connected ; 

 but it is only very recently that we have secured a firm and suffi- 

 ciently large basis of facts. These are the various measures of 

 Cambridge students made during the last two or three years, and 

 discussed by Dr. Venn, F.R.S., in an excellent memoir recently 

 published in the Journal of the A7ithropological Institute. " The 

 number of those who were measured is 1,095, ^fd they were divided 

 into three classes : (i) high-honor men ; (2) low-honor men ; and (3) 

 poll men, that is to say, those who did not compete for honors, but 

 took an ordinary pass degree. The result was that the physical effi- 

 ciency of the three classes proved to be almost exactly the same, 

 except that there appeared to be a slight deficiency in eyesight 

 among the high-honor men. Otherwise they were alike through- 

 out, — alike in their average bodily efficiency, and alike in the fre- 

 quency with which different degrees of bodily efficiency were dis- 

 tributed among them. Therefore the fact that a man had suc- 



ceeded in a literary examination does not give the slightest clew t& 

 the character of his physical powers ; and an opinion that the 

 present literary examinations are indirect tests of bodily efficiency 

 must be considered erroneous. The intellectual differences are 

 usually small between the candidates who are placed, through the 

 present literary examinations, near to the dividing line between 

 success and failure. But their physical differences are, as we have 

 just seen, as great as among an equal number of the other candi- 

 dates taken at random. It seems, then, to be most reasonable,^ 

 whenever two candidates are almost on a par intellectually, though 

 one is far superior physically, that the latter should be preferred. 

 This is practically all I propose." 



— The Emperor of Brazil has announced by telegram to the 

 Paris Academy of Sciences an observation of globular lightning on 

 Sept. 16. 



— In the laboratory of the State Mining Bureau in San Fran- 

 cisco, according to the Engineering and Mining Journal, a dis- 

 covery was made recently which is highly prized. In working a 

 specimen of sulphide or blende ore sent from a mine in Shasta 

 County, Cal., a small piece of native metallic zinc was secured. 

 This is the first piece of the character named ever known to have 

 been secured in this country. Late works on metallurgy note the 

 existence in the mines of Victoria, Australia, of the only native 

 metallic zinc known. The Mining Bureau will endeavor to secure 

 other specimens from Shasta County. 



— In the well-known method employed by Regnault for deter- 

 mining the density or specific gravity of air, oxygen, nitrogen,, 

 hydrogen, and carbonic acid, we deal primarily with tares, of which 

 the weights to be determined are the differences. The glass 

 balloon which holds the gas is tared by a similar balloon of exactly 

 the same volume, and of nearly equal weight, suspended from the 

 opposite pan of the balance. The small difference of weight re- 

 quired to establish perfect equilibrium is alone measured with 

 standard brass or platinum weights. Whatever may be the form 

 of the subsequent calculation, the primary object is to obtain the 

 tare of the empty balloon when absolutely vacuous. This known,, 

 the differences between such tare and the tare of the balloon filled 

 with various aeriform substances, gives the weights of equal vol- 

 umes of these substances under the temperatures and pressures at 

 which the balloon was filled. The volume of the counterpoise is 

 exactly adjusted to that of the balloon by the aid of a small sub- 

 sidiary glass bulb ; and by sealing up more or less mercury in this 

 bulb it is easy to make the difference of weight such that the stand- 

 ard weights required to complete the equilibrium will measure 

 the differences of tare to be"" determined, and no more. In the 

 method of Regnault the tare of the empty balloon, or what was 

 equivalent to it, was found by exhausting the balloon with an air- 

 pump and weighing it after measuring the tension of the residual 

 gas while the glass was surrounded by ice. But it has been shown 

 by Agamennone and Lord Rayleigh that the results thus obtained 

 are vitiated to a small extent by the circumstance that when the 

 balloon is exhausted the pressure of the atmosphere determines a. 

 slight shrinkage of the external volume, which naturally disturbs 

 the exactness of the compensation between the buoyancy of the 

 air on the balloon and on its counterpoise. Although this shrink- 

 age can be readily measured, as was done by Dr. T. W. Richards 

 under Professor J. P. Cooke's direction, and still more recently by Pro- 

 fessor Crafts, who experimented on the balloon used by Regnault, 

 which fortunately has been preserved, it seemed desirable to de- 

 velop a method by which this correction could be avoided : for, 

 even if the new method should lead to no more accurate results 

 than before obtained., it might serve to confirm the validity of the 

 correction in question, and at least would give additional data to- 

 wards establishing the value of important physical constants. The 

 new method Professor Cooke has devised for the purpose consists 

 in first taring the balloon when filled with carbonic-acid gas, and 

 then drawing the gas through absorption tubes and determining its 

 weight, as in the well-known method of organic analysis. This 

 weight known, the tare of the empty balloon is obviously the dif- 

 ference between the first tare and the weight in question. The 

 practical problem here presented is, however, far more difficult 

 than that of organic analysis. In the last we expect to determine 



