August 18, 1911] 



SCIENCE 



211 



suffered in any degree from the quake was the 

 Lick Observatory, conducted by the Univer- 

 sity of California on Mount Hamilton, Santa 

 Clara County, seventy-five miles from San 

 Francisco and twenty-five miles from San 

 Jose. Even there the damage was nominal, 

 except to buildings injured by the earthquake 

 of 1906 and not adequately repaired. 



Arrangements have been made by the trus- 

 tees of Stanford University for the construc- 

 tion of the new Lane Library which is to be 

 erected on the corner of Sacramento and 

 Webster Streets, San Francisco, at a cost of 

 $100,000. Excavation for the foundation has 

 already been started and it is expected that 

 the building will be ready for occupancy at 

 the end of the school year. This building will 

 house the Lane Medical Library which was 

 founded by Dr. Lane, former president of 

 Cooper Medical College, and the library of the 

 Stanford medical department. The Lane 

 Library was endowed by Dr. Lane and con- 

 tains about 37,000 volumes, making it the 

 largest library in the United States in direct 

 association with a medical school. 



The Geographical Journal says that among 

 the Austrian workers in the direction of an 

 improved scheme for the coloring of relief- 

 maps, based on the optic properties of colors, 

 Herr G. Freytag, of the Cartographical Insti- 

 tute of Freytag and Berndt, at Vienna, de- 

 serves credit for the results attained. Like 

 Dr. Peucker he has been working at the ques- 

 tion for some years, and has arrived inde- 

 pendently at a solution, which is briefly de- 

 scribed in a pamphlet issued by his firm this 

 year. It is accompanied by a specimen relief- 

 map colored according to the scheme adopted, 

 the effect of which is perhaps as satisfactory as 

 any of the attempts hitherto made in the same 

 direction. The stereoscopic effect of the colors 

 selected is well brought out by a pair of dia- 

 grams, in the first of which a square is colored 

 with the reds in the center, these passing out- 

 wards through yellow to green and blue ; in the 

 other the order is reversed. The former gives 

 the appearance of being raised, the latter of 



being depressed, in the center. The grada- 

 tions are brought about by the differences in 

 the tints, the strength remaining the same, so 

 that violent contrasts are avoided. 



In accordance with the resolutions passed 

 on June 14 that the collections of the Geo- 

 logical Society should be divided between the 

 British Museum and Jermyn Street, it is an- 

 nounced that the foreign series has already 

 been removed to its new home at the British 

 Museum (Nat. Hist.), is all in order in new 

 cabinets, and can be referred to by respon- 

 sible students. 



The Geological Magazine remarks that the 

 extraordinary richness of the collections of 

 the British Museum has rarely been better il- 

 lustrated than by the table-case of German 

 Cainozoic Mollusca just arranged and ex- 

 hibited in the geological department by Mr. 

 E. B. Newton with the assistance of Mr. G. 

 K. Gude. The accumulation of nearly a 

 hundred years, there is a fine series of the 

 land, freshwater and lacustrine shells which 

 lived in Germany from Oligocene to Post- 

 Pliocene times exhibited for the first time. 

 No such series is to be found in any contin- 

 ental museum. Many of the specimens came 

 from localities now closed or inaccessible, and 

 such well-known places as Cannstadt, Hein- 

 heim, Oeningen, Mosbach, Budenheim, Floers- 

 heim, Mainz, Wangen, Weimar, Taubach, 

 Hochheim, Wiesbaden, and a score of others 

 are represented in the collection. Similar 

 series of Mollusca from the other continental 

 areas are in course of arrangement, the 

 French and Austro-Hungarian being already 

 in hand. 



The electrical engineering department of 

 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 

 received an appropriation of $3,000 from the 

 Edison Electric Illuminating Company of 

 Boston to be used in an investigation of the 

 relative operating reliability and costs of elec- 

 tric trucks, gasoline trucks and horse truck- 

 ing, for the purpose of determining to what 

 degree electric trucks are adapted to compete 

 with gas and horse trucks in the city of Bos- 

 ton. This investigation will cover the cost 



