874 
THE CITY OF OMITLAN. 
A YEAR or so ago the newspapers men- 
tioned the discovery of a ruined city in 
western Mexico by Mr. William Nivens. 
Since then collections have been brought to 
New York City, and ample means thus 
furnished to judge of its characteristics. In 
the Bulletin of the American Geographical 
Society for July of this year, Mr. Nivens 
has a short article on the subject. The 
ruins are very extensive and indicate a 
skill in stone work above that of many 
tribes, but decidedly inferior to that of the 
best Aztec civilzation. His article speaks 
of a tablet with hieroglyphic characters, but 
examples of such are extremely rare, and 
perhaps of doubtful origin. The stones are, 
as a rule, not dressed with skill and the 
structures were not lofty. From all this 
we may conclude that we have in these ex- 
tensive remains the relics of an inferior, 
subordinate culture-center of Aztec civili- 
zation ; but this, of course, does not in any 
way diminish the interest which attaches 
to Mr. Nivens’ explorations. 
THE CAVE OF LOLTUN. 
Loxton is the name of a remarkable cay- 
ern in Yucatan. The Peabody Museum of 
Archeology has just published a report of 
its exploration by Mr. Edward H. Thomp- 
son, in 1890-91. It is unfortunate for Mr. 
Thompson that the Museum waited six 
years to print his interesting account, as in 
the meanwhile another expedition, led by 
Mr. H. C. Mercer, of the University of Penn- 
sylvania, carefully explored and promptly 
printed a full description of it in 1896. 
Boards of publication should be aware that 
the world gives credit not to him who first 
investigates, but to him whose investiga- 
tions are first placed for use before students. 
The report is well printed with attractive 
illustrations. The excavations were care- 
fully made and confirm the opinion ad- 
vanced by the later expedition that those 
SCIENCE. 
[N.S. Vou. VI. No. 154. 
who entered or dwelt in the cave belonged 
to the same race and people, and possessed 
the same culture, as those who built the 
great stone structures on the surface near 
them. Neither here nor elsewhere in the 
Yucatan caves did Mr. Thompson discover 
any signs of a distinctively ‘cave people, ’ 
or of an earlier, ruder civilzation. 
D. G. Brinton. 
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. 
NOTES ON INORGANIC CHEMISTRY. 
To Berthelot’s researches we owe very 
much of our knowledge of the chemistry 
and technology of the ancients. In the last: 
Comptes Rendus he recounts his examination 
of glass mirrors found near Reims, dating 
from the third and fourth centuries. The 
glass was coated with a metal and also a. 
whitish layer. The metal proved to be 
lead, with no trace of gold, silver, copper, 
tin, antimony or mercury, nor was there 
any organic substance present, showing 
that no extraneous material was used to 
cement the lead to the glass. The mirrors 
appeared to have been cut from hollow 
blown glass globes, and it is probable that, 
before being cut, the molten lead had been 
poured into the interior, adhering to the 
previously warmed glass. The whitish layer 
consisted of lead carbonate and lead oxid 
formed by the oxidation of the lead coat- 
ing, and calcium carbonate, which had been 
deposited from the water of the vicinity. 
A similar method of coating glass with lead 
was known in the thirteenth century. In 
the same find were fragments of glass show- 
ing the lustre of gold and of silver; these 
metals were not present, but the color was 
due partly to the lamellation of the glass 
and partly to a very thin layer of calcium 
carbonate which had been deposited on 
them. 
In the Chemiker Zeitung Léon Franck de- 
scribes experiments with the every-day use 
of spoons, forks and vessels of aluminum. 
