36 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XVII. No. 418. 



And if this is not enough his estate will add 

 to this. 



A special hall will be set aside for it, to be 

 known as ' Bishop Hall,' where it will be dis- 

 played in the finest solid gilt-bronze, plate- 

 glass cases, but it will not be upon exhibition 

 until a year from this time. 



This is the finest collection of jade objects, 

 engraved and jeweled, that exists in any public 

 museum or private collection. It numbers 

 more than one thousand specimens and fully 

 represents all phases of the artistic develop- 

 ment of this interesting material. The col- 

 lection was started by the purchase of the 

 Hurd jade vase from Messrs. Tiffany & Co., 

 in 1878. This was one of the finest pieces 

 that ever left China, and led to Mr. Bishop's 

 taste for collecting such objects. 



The collection will be described in a volume, 

 which when published will probably be one 

 of the most remarkable, expensive and sumpt- 

 uous books ever issued, limited to an edition 

 of one hundred copies. 



Nearly ten years ago, Mr. George F. Kunz 

 began the preparation of a mineralogical, 

 geological and archeological description of 

 the collection, to be published in this great 

 catalogue, upon which Mr. Bishop had ex- 

 pended more than $100,000 at the time of 

 his death. The scientific investigation was 

 given entirely to Mr. Kunz, and he associated 

 with him about twenty of the most eminent 

 men in various related lines upon both sides 

 of the water; and a more thorough investiga- 

 tion of this mineral has been made than was 

 ever perhaps undertaken upon any other 

 known mineral. The specific gravity, the 

 tensile strength, the compression test, the 

 sonorousness of the mineral from a musical 

 point of view; a chem.ical investigation, a 

 microscopical study, a microscopical examina- 

 tion of the thin sections; the origin of the 

 mineral, the mining, the archeological his- 

 tory; the cutting, drilling, polishing, and 

 many other phases, were gone into most thor- 

 oughly; and where a specialist existed who 

 more minutely understood any special branch, 

 he was called upon by Mr. Kunz to carry out 

 the work. 



The volume upon publication will go only to 

 public institutions. The foreign etchings 

 by French and Chinese colonists are un- 

 equalled. Many of the color illustrations are 

 by Prang, who made those in ' Gems and 

 Precious Stones of North America,' so well 

 known by our readers. It was this work that 

 suggested the color illustrations for the Bishop 

 book on Jade, as well as for the magnificent 

 Walters book on Chinese porcelains. 



SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS. 



The Nobel Prizes, if the statement now 

 cabled from Sweden is correct, have been 

 awarded as follows : Medicine, Major Ronald 

 Eoss, of the School of Tropical Medicine, 

 Liverpool. Ghemistry, Professor Emil Fischer, 

 of Berlin. Physics, divided between Pro- 

 fessors Lorenz and Zeemann, of Holland. 



The Cambridge Philosophical Society has 

 elected as honorary members Professor H. F. 

 Osborn, Bayley Balfour, A. H. Becquerel, E. 

 Fischer, Richard Heymons, J. H. van't Hoff, 

 M. Jordan, W. K. von Rontgen, Corrado 

 Segre and Hugo de Vries. 



Mb. Philip MacMillen, director of the 

 Queensland Botanic Garden at Brisbane, has 

 been elected a corresponding member of the 

 Royal Botanic Society of London. 



W. H. Osgood, of the U. S. Biological Sur- 

 vey, has just returned from a biological ex- 

 ploration of the base of the Alaska Peninsula 

 and the region between Lake Clark and 

 Nushagak River. This work is in continu- 

 ation of his previous explorations of the Yukon 

 River and Cook Inlet regions, the results of 

 which have been already published in North 

 American fauna. 



Professor J. C. Arthur has been granted 

 a month's leave of absence by the authorities 

 of Purdue University, and will spend January 

 at the N. T. Botanical Garden in researches 

 on the genera of the Uredineae and their types. 



Dr. M. a. Howe, assistant curator of the 

 N. Y. Botanical Garden, has returned from a 

 six week's collecting trip along the coast of 

 Florida, bringing a large number of speci- 

 mens of the algal flora of the Key^. Professor 



