July 9, 1886.] 



SCIENCE, 



31 



the ills that flesh is heir to, — among others, 

 whooping-cough, — approaches tlie ludicrous. 

 7. Consanguineous marriages, no other objec- 

 tion being present, should not be opposed on 

 physiological grounds. The address closes with 

 an exhaustive bibliography of the subject, includ- 

 ing some thirty writers, and extending, in point 

 of time, from Moses to the present year. 



— A French joui-nal cites the fact that a num- 

 ber of persons have recently been poisoned in 

 France by eating asparagus grown in localities 

 where small amounts of sulphide of carbon existed 

 in the soil. The symptoms were those of cranaps 

 and diarrhoea. 



— Rumination is commonly supposed to be a 

 digestive process pecuKar to certain of the lower 

 animals. There are, however, some forty cases 

 on record where this power has been possessed by 

 members of the human species. It usually com- 

 mences so soon after birth that the affected indi- 

 vidual cannot state its commencement, and ap- 

 pears to be present in males almost exclusively. 

 It is in all its steps essentially the same as in the 

 ruminating animals, and, as it mostly occurs in 

 those who are large eaters, it is evidently one of 

 natiu-e's methods to provide for more thorough 

 ixiastication in those who eat to excess, or do not 

 take the necessary time to masticate their food 

 properly in the first instance. 



— The 3oat-sailer's manual, by E. F. Qual- 

 trough, U. S. N. (New York, Scrihner, 1886, 24°), 

 deserves and should command a ready sale among 

 the many whose interest in the subject is awak- 

 ened or revived by the trium^jhs of the Puritan or 

 Priscilla. There is a great deal of information in 

 it, most germane to the subject and very well 

 arranged. The language is, however, unintel- 

 ligible to the general reader ; and the glossaries, 

 of which there are two, are quite defective. They 

 should be consolidated, to save the trouble of 

 two searches, and even then there are forty-two 

 words unknown ashore, used by the author and 

 not defined. 



— The annual report of the astronomer royal, 

 Mr. Christie, was submitted to the Board of 

 visitors of the Greenwich observatory on June 

 5, and gives an account of tlie progress and 

 activity of the observatoi'y for the year end- 

 ing May 20, 1886. Copies of the original re- 

 port have not yet reached this country, but the 

 following particulars of its contents have been ob- 

 tained from abstracts which have been published 

 in The Athenaeum and Nature. The regular work 

 of the transit circle and the altazimuth has been 

 continued, and very satisfactory results have been 



obtained with the apparatus for determining ab- 

 solute personal equations brought into use with 

 the former instrument some months ago. Spec- 

 troscopic observations include a considerable num- 

 ber made of the new star which burst out last 

 August in the great nebula of Andromeda. The 

 spectroscopic observations of Sirius indicate, as in 

 the last three years, a displacement of the F line 

 towards the blue : this displacement would corre- 

 spond to a motion of the earth towards Sirius at a 

 rate of something more than twenty miles per 

 second, though, from the nature of the observa- 

 tions, the amount of such a motion cannot be con- 

 sidered as very accurately determined. For the 

 year 1885, a photographic record of the sun's sur- 

 face can be made out for 360 days by filling up 

 the gaps in the series of Greenwich photograiDhs 

 from photographs obtained in India and the 

 Mauritius. Observations of comets and of casual 

 phenomena have been made with the equatorials ; 

 and the magnetic and meteorological observations, 

 the time-service, etc., have been kept up as in 

 previous years. The full import of the statement 

 that the reductions of the observations are keeping- 

 pace with their registration, will be appreciated 

 by all who are engaged in routine astroaomical 

 work. In regard to the new equatoi'ial, Mr. 

 Christie says, "The construction of an object- 

 glass of 28 inclies aperture and of 28 inches focal 

 length, with suitable tube, to be mounted on the 

 south-east equatorial, has been authorized by the 

 government, and the necessary fvmds have been 

 provided in the estimates. The work has been 

 intrusted to Mr. Grubb, with whom I have ar- 

 ranged the details of the tube, which is to be of 

 special construction, adapted to the conditions of 

 the mountings, and available for spectroscopy and 

 photography as well as for eye observations. Mr. 

 Grubb proposes to provide means for readily sepa- 

 rating the lenses of the object-glass to such a dis- 

 tance as will give the projDer con-ection for photo- 

 graphic rays." 



— In connection with the recent notice of Pro- 

 fessor Hull's ' Report on the geology of Palestine,' 

 it has recently been stated {Oeol. mag. Lond., 

 September, 1884) that Dr. Schweinfurth, the well- 

 known African explorer, has recently announced 

 the discovery of paleozoic fossils in the Wady 

 Arabah, west of the Gulf of Suez, in sandstone 

 hitherto regarded as Nubian sandstone. The fos- 

 sils have been submitted to Professor Beyrich, 

 who identifies a species of Spirigera or Athyris, 

 allied to A. concentrica, and stems of crinoids. 

 The exposure seems to be not dissimilar from that 

 of the Wady Narb on the other side of the Red 

 Sea. Dr. Schv^'einfurth's paper is in the Bulletin 



