September 15, 1905.] 



SCIENCE. 



347 



easily worked, but with the working it gains 

 rapidly in hardness, and must be carefully re- 

 heated or annealed before it can be further 

 worked. As at high temperatures it is readily 

 oxidized, its heating or fusion is best accom- 

 plished in a vacuum and by means of the 

 electric current. Alloys of iron with a very 

 small quantity of tantalum, and of tantalum 

 with a very small quantity of • iron seem to 

 have an especial value. Owing to its great 

 cost at present, the use of tantalum is neces- 

 sarily very restricted, but if it shall ever be 

 obtainable in considerable amounts it will 

 have great value, especially for those parts of 

 machinery which are subject to strong me- 

 chanical action, such as the cones and balls 

 for ball bearings, cams, eccentrics and rollers. 



TIN, TITANIUM AND COBALT STEELS. 



In a recent number of the Compies Rendus, 

 Guillet describes a study of a number of steels, 

 some of which have already been more or less 

 investigated by others. He finds that tin dis- 

 solves readily in iron, and if present to the 

 extent of more than one per cent, renders the 

 steel very hard but brittle. The carbon pres- 

 ent never separates out as graphite. The 

 mechanical properties of the titanium steels, 

 when the proportion of titanium is not above 

 nine per cent., are practically those of steel 

 itself. The presence of cobalt, up to sixty 

 per cent., has no effect upon the micro-struc- 

 ture of the steel and very little effect upon its 

 mechanical properties. Guillet concludes 

 from his investigations that none of these 

 steels has any industrial value. This result 

 is not wholly in accord with the work of other 

 previous investigators, who have found that 

 certain of these alloys, notably some of the 

 titanium steels, give promise of industrial 

 usefulness. 



COPPER AS AN ANTISEPTIC AGAINST TYPHOID 

 ORGANISMS. 



Quite an extensive paper has recently ap- 

 peared in the American Journal of 'Pharmacy 

 by Henry Kraemer, entitled ' The Use of 

 Copper in Destroying Typhoid Organisms, 

 and the Effects of Copper on Man.' After 

 discussing the distribution and removal or 



destruction of typhoid organisms, the effect of 

 copper on lower animals and plants is consid- 

 ered. The effect of water treated with copper 

 on man and the elimination of the copper 

 from water are next taken up, and finally the 

 effect of copper in foods. It is, perhaps, worth 

 while to quote the author's conclusions : 



1. It is pretty well established that the typhoid 

 organism is disseminated not only through water, 

 but also through air and food, and may retain 

 its vitality for a considerable period of time. 



2. Typhoid organisms in water are eliminated 

 by filtration, boiling and certain biochemical 

 methods. Of the latter, the use of copper, as pro- 

 posed by Moore and Kellermann, is probably the 

 most efficient and at the same time most prac- 

 ticable. 



3. While exceedingly minute quantities of cop- 

 per in solution are toxic to certain unicellular 

 organisms, as bacteria, it is safe to assume that 

 the higher plants and animals, including man, are 

 unaffected by solutions containing the same or 

 even larger amounts of copper. 



4. There being a number of factors which tend 

 to eliminate copper from its solutions, it is 

 hardly likely that there would be any copper in 

 solution by the time the water from a reservoir 

 reached the consumer, if the treatment of the 

 reservoir were in competent hands. 



5. Many plants contain relatively large amounts 

 of copper, and when these are used as food some 

 of the copper is taken up by the animal organism, 

 but there are no records of any ill effects from 

 copper so consumed. 



In connection with this last paragraph, 

 which is in its conclusion quite contrary to 

 the usually accepted idea, numerous authori- 

 ties and experiments are quoted, and the con- 

 clusion is probably well justified that very 

 little danger is to be apprehended from either 

 acute or chronic copper poisoning from copper 

 present in water or foods. 



J. L. H. 



RECENT MUSEUM REPORTS. 

 That the annual report of a museum should, 

 as a rule, appear from three months to a year 

 late, doubtless strikes the average reader as 

 extraordinary. But ' the average reader,' or 

 the average man, frequently looks upon a 

 museum as a haven of rest whose collections 

 assemble, arrange and label themselves; as a 



