March 8, 1889.] 



SCIENCE 



i8r 



— Agassiz Association, Chapter 949, New York City (Z), held 

 its third annual exhibition of natural history collections, microscopes, 

 electrical apparatus, etc., on Saturday, March 2, 1 889, at 49 West 

 20th Street, near Sixth Avenue, from 3 to 6 P.M., and from 

 7 to 10 P.M. 



— The ship-canal which is to connect Manchester, England, 

 with Liverpool, is being rapidly constructed, ten thousand men and 

 a great number of steam excavators being engaged upon it. The 

 ■canal will be thirty-five miles long, twenty-six feet deep, and a 

 hundred and twenty feet wide at the bottom. 



— Rev. Arthur C. Waghorne, New Harbor, Newfoundland, has 

 published "A Summary Account of the Wild Berries and other 

 Edible Fruits of Newfoundland and Labrador." 



— The exercises of the centennial celebration of Georgetown 

 University, Washington, D.C., closed, Feb. 22, with a session in 

 Gaston Hall, at which the honorary degrees were conferred by 

 President Cleveland. Three gold medals were struck in honor of 

 the occasion, which were awarded as follows : one to John Gilmary 

 Shea, LL.D., the historian of the Catholic Church in America, for 

 his work, " The Life and Times of Archbishop Carroll ; '' a gold 

 medal, struck by the Alumni Association, presented to his Emi- 

 nence James Cardinal Gibbons, for the archi-episcopal see of Balti- 

 more ; and a gold medal, like the preceding, to the President, Grover 

 Cleveland, for the Government of the United States. 



— A meeting was held, Jan. 31, in the meeting-room of the 

 Royal Society, London, the Right Hon. Lord Rayleigh, Sec.R.S., 

 in the chair, for the purpose of promoting a project, set afoot by 

 some of the leading men in Munich, of erecting in that city a 

 statue of George Simon Ohm, — a man who, although he discov- 

 ered no new phenomena of very striking importance, yet by the 

 accuracy of his thought, and the clearness of his insight into the 

 true bearings of physical facts, was able to lay one of the principal 

 and firmest parts of the foundation of modern physics. The occa- 

 sion for the proposal at this particular time is the near approach 

 of the hundredth anniversary of Ohm's birth, on March 16, 1789. 



— The fourteenth annual commencement of the American Vet- 

 erinary College was held at Chickering Hall, New York, Monday 

 evening, March 4. 



— At the meeting of the Royal Meteorological Society, Feb. 20, 

 a report on the helm-wind inquiry was made b)« Mr. W. Marriott, 

 F.R. Met. Soc. The helm wind is peculiar to the Cross Fell range 

 of mountains in Cumberland, which runs from north-north-west to 

 south-south-east. This range is high and continuous, and is not 

 ■cut through by any valley. Cross Fell is 2,900 feet above sea-level. 

 From the top of the mountains to the plain on the west, there is 

 an abrupt fall of from 1,000 to 1,500 feet in about a mile and a half. 

 At times, when the wind is from some easterly point, the helm 

 forms over this district, the chief features of the phenomenon being 

 the following : a heavy bank of cloud rests along the Cross Fell 

 range, at times reaching some distance down the western slopes, 

 and at others hovering just above the summit, while at a distance 

 of two or three miles from the foot of the fell a slender roll of dark 

 cloud appears in mid-air, and parallel with the helm cloud : this is 

 the helm bar. The space between the helm cloud and the bar is 

 usually quite clear, while to the westward the sky is at times com- 

 pletely covered vv-ith cloud. The bar does not appear to extend 

 farther west than about the river Eden. A cold wind rushes down 

 ■the sides of the fell, and blows violently till it reaches a spot nearly 

 underneath the helm bar, when it suddenly ceases. The observa- 

 tions that have been made in the district during the past three or 

 four years show that the helm wind is not such a rare occurrence 

 as it was popularly supposed to be, the bar having been observed 

 on 41 occasions in 1885, 60 in 1886. and 19 in 1887. The phe- 

 nomenon takes place usually when the sky to the eastward is cov- 

 ered with cloud. 



— Two large hydraulic canal-lifts have been recently erected at 

 Fontinettes, on the Neuffosse Canal, in France, and at La Louviere, 

 ■on the new Central Canal, in Belgium. They both consist of two 

 counterbalancing troughs, resting on central hydraulic rams, 6 feet 

 6| inches in diameter, and moved by an excess of water intro- 

 duced into the upper trough, and by hydraulic machinery supply- 



ing water to the presses under the rams to aid the ascent. The 

 troughs at Fontinettes are each 129 feet 7 inches long, 18 feet 4i 

 inches broad, and contain 6 feet 6| inches depth of water, so as to 

 be available for vessels of 250 tons. The troughs at La Louviere 

 are 141 feet long, 19 feet wide, and hold water to a depth of lof 

 feet, being designed to admit vessels of 400 tons. The total weight 

 they lift is 785 tons at Fontinettes, and 1,037 tons at La Louviere, 

 while the heights of the lifts are 43 feet and 50J feet respectively. 



— Professor Baker of the Illinois University says in a letter to 

 the Clay Work on the sustaining strength of brick-work, " By 

 actual experiments in a testing-machine, the average strength, from 

 fifteen experiments, of piers laid in ordinary brick and common 

 lime mortar, using the same care as that with which ordinary brick 

 masonry is built, stood a few pounds (I am writing from memory) 

 over 1,500 pounds per square inch, which is equal to 216,000 

 pounds per square foot, or the weight of a column of brick 2,000 

 feet high ; with ordinary Portland cement mortar, the strength 

 was, for a mean of eight experiments, 2.500 and some odd pounds 

 per square inch, which is equal to 360,000 pounds per square foot, 

 or the weight of a column of brick masonry 3,600 feet high." 



— The naval board charged with the duty of supervising and 

 reporting upon the test of the 15-inch pneumatic gun last January 

 have just made their official report to the secretary of the navy, 

 who pronounces it satisfactory. The report is to the effect that 

 more than one-half the projectiles, fired at ranges of 300, 1,700, 

 and 2,100 yards, fell within the specified target limits, an area of 

 fifty by a hundred and fifty feet. 



— The annual address of the president of the New York Micro- 

 scopical Society, Charles F. Cox, read Jan. 4, 1889, was on " The 

 Spontanepns Generation Theory, and its Relation to the General 

 Theory of Evolution." The close of the address was as follows : 

 " In the domain in which Mr. Darwin worked, I look upon natural 

 selection as a well-established principle. In the developmental 

 idea as extended and expounded by Herbert Spencer, I find much 

 that appeals strongly to my sense of fitness and consistency, and, 

 if possible, I could see the hypothesis become a proven law of 

 nature without a shock to my mental or moral status. I have no 

 fear of any thing that is true. But what I have endeavored to 

 show is, (i) that a transition from not-living matter to living forms 

 is an essential step in the process of evolution ; (2) that at the point 

 at which experimental proof is applicable (namely, to present and 

 continual archebiosis), the theory of such a transition is discredited, 

 if not disproved ; (3) that scientists generally accept this conclu- 

 sion, and that those who are not thorough evolutionists are confined 

 to the mere belief that the step from the not-living to the living 

 was taken at some remotely early period, beyond the reach of 

 evidence. And finally, I submit, as a consequence of these premises, 

 that the general theory of evolution is still in the stage of hypoth- 

 esis, and that in the gap between lifeless substances and Uving 

 forms we have the veritable ' missing link.' " 



— Thanks to strict preservation, and to the fact that the inhabit- 

 ants are realizing the value of the bird, according to Natttre, the 

 eider has greatly increased in nuqiber in Iceland during recent 

 years. The people do all in their power to attract the bird to their 

 property. Among these attractions are bells worked by the wind 

 or by water, the hanging-up of dress material of a glaring color, 

 and the keeping of brightly colored fowls. A society has been 

 formed for the granting of premiums for the kilhng of animals 

 preying upon the eider, and last year 1,155 such prizes were 

 awarded. 



— In a late number of L' Architecture, M. Edmond Pottier con- 

 tributes a letter on antique polychromy, combating the idea that a 

 Greek temple was an edifice painted in ever}' part, from the steps 

 to the cornice, which appears to be entertained by some French 

 archseologists. He observes that no monument, except the temple 

 at ^gina, offers traces of color on the shafts of the columns, and 

 that a comparison cannot be instituted between that case and such 

 a building as the Parthenon, inasmuch as the latter was in marble 

 and the former in porous stone, to which it might have been 

 thought desirable to give a surface finish of paint, without implying 

 that the same treatment would be applied to marble. 



