November 20, 1891.] 



SCIENCE. 



283 



Speclrum Analysis to the Analysis of the Rare Earths, and a New 

 Method for the Preparation of Pure Yttrium, by H. A. Rowland; 

 A Nomenclator of the Family of Fishes, by Theodore Gill ; Measure- 

 ment of Jupiter's Satellites by Interference, by A. A. Michelson; 

 The Follicle Cells of Salpa, by W. K. Brooks. 



— The council of the Appalachian Mountain Club has been in- 

 formed by Mr. Henry Brooks of West Medford that if $2,000 can 

 be provided for the care of the property, Virainia Wood, situated 

 in Middlesex Fells, on the north side of the Ravine Road, will be 

 given into the keeping of the Trustees of Public Reservations. 

 The council recommends this project to the favorable considera- 

 tion of the members of the Appalachian Mountain Club, remind- 

 ing them that this work is in the line of the club's work and that 

 the club called the meeting which resulted in the incorporation of 

 the Trustees of Public Reservations. Offers of large or small 

 subscriptions may be sent to Mr. Henry Brooks, West Medford, 

 or to the recording secretary of the club. The club"s Exhibition 

 of Botanical Specimens will be held the second week in Decem- 

 ber. 



— At what elevation is the air of London purest? According 

 to Mr. W. J. Prim, who gave evidence before the Select Commit- 

 tee on House of Commons Ventilation, says the PaZZ Mall Gazette, 

 at about thirty or forty feet from the ground. Lower than that 

 you get the dust, higher than that you get the smoke from the 

 chimneys. Mr. Prim made certain experiments with frames of 

 wood covered with blanketing material put at different elevations 

 — one on the top of the clock-tower at Westminster, another on 

 the highest point of the roof, and others at various heights down 

 to the court- yard. After five-hours' exposure there were found to 

 be more smuts at high elevations than at the low, but on the level 

 of the courtyard there were considerable quantities of dust. On 

 the whole, Mr. Prim came to the conclusion that the purest level 

 was between thirty and forty feet, and that nothing was gained 

 by going higher, unless you went very high indeed — say, some 

 400 or 500 feet. All this is rather fatal to the common notion 

 that the highest stories of the tallest blocks of fiats are especially 

 desirable for their salubrious air. 



— "If any evidence of the fury of the equinoctial storms that 

 have lately raged in the Atlantic wei-e needed, in addition to the 

 lengthening list of ' Disasters at Sea ' which has appeared daily 

 during the past three weeks," says the London Spectator, 03t. 31, 

 "we might find it in the number of ocean-birds which have been 

 driven from distant seas, and even from other continents, or the 

 New World itself, and have drifted to the rain-soaked fields of 

 England. No doubt all shore-birds are liable to be driven inland 

 during a gale ; but these are rarely, if ever, lost in a storm. Every 

 sea gull and cormorant, puffin, or razor-bill, has its own home, 

 the particular shelf or ledge of cliS on which it sleeps every night, 

 and from which it launches itself over the sea when the first 

 streak of dawn appears upon the waters. But these are only 

 'long-shore ' birds that can lie snug in harbor, like their rivals the 

 fishermen, and suffer, like them, mainly from the interruption of 

 their fishing. When the true ocean birds, like the petrels, are 

 found scattered inland, dead or dying, as has been the case during 

 the past month, we may safely infer that the weather from side 

 to side of the Atlantic has borne hardly, not only on the ships, but 

 on the friendly birds that love to follow the.-u. Numbers of these, 

 of at least two different kinds, one of which, as a rule, makes the 

 Azores the eastern limit of its ocean range, have appeared on our 

 coasts or inland during the gales. Wilson's petrel has been seen 

 in Ireland, in County Down, and a second is said to have been 

 shot on Lough Erne. The fork-tailed petrel, another ocean species, 

 has lately appeared here in far greater numbers. These birds have 

 been seen in Donegal, and in Ar,i;yllshire, in Westmoreland, and 

 in the Cleveland district in Yorkshire. As the last appeared after 

 a strong north-western gale, it seems that it must not only have 

 come in from the Atlantic, but have flown over England before 

 falling exhausted to the ground. They have also been seen in 

 Tipperary, at Limerick, Dumfries, and Northampton. From an 

 account given of these petrels in Argyllshire, it is clear that they 

 retained after their long journey all that misplaced confidence in 

 man which marks their behavior when accompanying ships in 



mid-ocean. After five had been shot by the owner of a yacht 

 in Loch Melfort, they settled on the vessel, and one allowed itself 

 to be caught under the sou'wester hat of a sailor." 



— During the nine years and six months preceding December, 

 1884, there had occurred in Japan, according to statements pub- 

 lished in the Illustrated American five hundred and fifty-three 

 earthquakes, averaging one earthquake for every six days and six 

 hours. Professor Milne was able to make the average even 

 greater than this. He could trace an average of an earthquake 

 per day in Nagasaki, in the extreme south of the Japanese Archi- 

 pelago. Probably the official statistics were compiled from the 

 returns of officials from all over the country, in which case only 

 those shocks which caused loss of life or damage to property 

 would be included. If this hypothesis be correct, we should have 

 an average of more than one earthquake per week, which was so 

 violent that it caused injuries to life or property sufficiently seri- 

 ous to attract the attention of the local authorities, and, in their 

 judgment, to require a report to the central government. Earth- 

 quakes being so common, people scarcely notice them unless they be 

 extraordinarily severe ones. For instance, Miss Bii'd, in her " Un- 

 beaten Tracks," thus summarily dismisses two: " While we were 

 crossing the court there were two shocks of earthquake; all the 

 golden wind-bells which fringe the roofs rang softly, and a num- 

 ber of priests ran into the temple and beat various kinds of drums 

 for the space of half an hour." As every one knows, Japan is the 

 very hearth of earthquakes; in 1854 more than sixty thousand 

 people lost their lives in consequence of one of these great terres- 

 trial catastrophes, and it has been calculated that from ten to 

 twelve earthquakes, each lasting several seconds, occur every 

 year, besides numerous others of too light a nature to be worthy 

 of remark. 



— The subject of the use of the flesh of animals killed by 

 poison has been studied by Schmidt-Mulheim with a view to 

 determine whether, if eaten by men, such flesh would be 

 injurious. As reported in the Revista Intemazionale d'Igiene of 

 Naples, for June, 1891, it may be used without any danger what- 

 ever. Many savage races constantly use the flesh of the animals 

 that have been killed with poisoned weapons and have never been 

 injured by that means. Harms has proved (Univ. Med. Mag.) 

 that the flesh of animals that have been poisoned with nux vom- 

 ica and with tartarized antimony is not at all hurtful; Feser has 

 demonstrated the same fact in regard to strychnine and eserine; 

 Spallanzani, Zappi, and Sonnenschein have done the same for ar- 

 senic. Froehner and Knudson have made some experiments for 

 this purpose with strychnine and with eserine. They fed dogs 

 with large quantities of mutton poisoned with strychnine and 

 eserine, and they found that no injury whatever was done to the 

 animals. Besides, they themselves ate some of the poisoned meat 

 and drank soup made from it, and found that the iJavor was good 

 and had no injurious effects whatever on the system. In regard 

 to the alleged injurious effects caused by the meat of animals 

 poisoned with hellebore, and which had eaten belladonna leaves, 

 the authors have shown that the accounts published in tliis regard 

 have not been proved and require further tests. 



— The experiments in the use of commercial fertilizers on wheat, 

 made at the Ohio Experiment Station, have been criticized on the 

 ground that it is idle to expect any profitable return from fertilizers 

 applied to a soil naturally so rich as that of the farm occupied by 

 the station. This criticism was anticipated when these experi- 

 ments were instituted, and accordingly a test, duplicating the 

 mo.-t important features of the station test, was begun at the same 

 time on a tract of land in Columbiana County, placed at the dis- 

 posal of the station by its owner for this purpose. The soil on 

 which this test is located has been derived from the decomposition 

 of underbing slate, and is a light colored clay or clay loam, of 

 moderate productiveness, the crops of wheat grown upon it under 

 ordinary farm management having averaged from fifteen to twenty 

 bushels to the acre. It is naturally underdrained by the cleavage 

 of the underlying rocks, but the contour is not so uniform as that 

 of the section devoted to similar tests at the station, and hence the 

 results are less regular. In Bulletin No. 3 of the Ohio Experiment 

 Station for 1891 the results of theexn?- i-nonts for this year on the 



