404 
ayear. It will contain ‘a résumé of the col- 
lections made by the Museum, notices of 
publications referring to museum work, and 
brief papers by the officers of the Museum.’ 
The present number contains two such 
papers, both by myself, one on ‘ The Pillars 
of Ben,’ which are some curious monoliths 
in Chiapas, and the other on the Greek 
Murmex (referred to in Scrence, April 16, 
1897). The notes on the accessions to the 
Museum are edited by Mr. Stewart Culin, 
the Director, and are arranged geographic- 
ally. They present descriptions with cuts 
of a curious carved pebble from the Dela- 
ware valley, a horn arrow-straightener from 
the Pueblo Indians, name tablets from 
Corea, an inscribed stone from the thir- 
teenth Egyptian dynasty described by the 
curator, Mrs. Sara Y. Stevenson, and a 
number of other interesting specimens. 
Such a publication will be not only cred- 
itable to the Institution, but will prove a 
valuable reference work for students in ar- 
cheology and ethnography. 
BOTANY OF THE KLAMATHS, 
A RxEcENT publication of the United . 
States Department of Agriculture is a 
paper on the plants used by the Klamath 
Indians of Oregon, by Mr. Frederick V. 
Coville. It well illustrates how closely 
the aborigines studied their plant environ- 
ment and drew their supplies from the 
vegetable world to the full extent that it 
was capable of furnishing. Mr. Coville 
gives the native names for more than a 
hundred species, all of which were utilized 
for food, clothing, dyeing, tool-making, 
‘ medicine,’ smoking, etc. He succeeded in 
identifying all the plants in use, and also 
obtained the native designations from edu- 
cated Klamaths. He gives these with the 
diacritic marks used in the Century Dic- 
tionary ; though it would have been better 
to have had recourse to the orthography 
adopted in the Klamath-English Diction- 
SCIENCE. 
[N. 8. Vou. VI. No. 141. 
ary, published by the United States Geo- 
graphical Survey in 1890. 
D. G. Brinton. 
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. 
NOTES ON INORGANIC CHEMISTRY. 
Tur Revue Universelle des Mines con- 
tains in the last number an article by 
Franz and Biittgenbach on the saline 
deposits of northern Germany in which 
a very full description is given of the 
Stassfurt salt beds. Twenty-five differ- 
ent mineral species are found in these 
deposits, of which the most important are 
the sylvine and kainite, so extensively used 
as fertilizers. The mean thickness of the 
potassium salt beds is at least twenty 
meters, and the quantity is estimated at 
ten billion tons. About three million tons 
are mined annually, so that at the present 
rate the supply would last thirty-three 
centuries. 
Tue British Home Office has issued an 
amendment to their order of February last, 
regarding the keeping of calcium carbid. 
The new order permits the keeping of 
quantities less than five pounds provided 
it is hermetically sealed in closed metal 
vessels containing not more than one pound 
each. Unless so kept no quantity what- 
ever may be held without a license. Such 
restrictions, which are not peculiar to Great 
Britain, illustrate one method of powerful 
corporations to stifle competition. It ap- 
pears that these orders result not so much 
from the intrinsic danger in calcium car- 
bid as from a fear, on the part of those 
interested in gas, oil and electric lighting, 
of rivalry in the use of acetylene. 
G. P. Drosspace discusses in the Journal 
fiir Gasbeleuchtung the fact that, while pure 
thorium oxid has a feeble glow in the 
Bunsen flame, when a per cent. or less of 
cerium oxid is present the light is increased 
ten or twelve fold. He attributes the ac- 
