QCIBNCE. 



[Vol. VIII., No. 178 



it would violate the spirit of the trust to confine 

 the grants to persons in this country. There is, 

 so far as we are aware, no other endowment of 

 science so generously wide in its scope : we hope, 

 therefore, that it will always be employed to assist 

 only the very best work, and that the trustees 

 will so earn the faith of the public, that the en- 

 dowment will be very largely mcreased by liberal 

 patrons. 



In A RECENT NUMBER of Science (vol. vii. No. 

 160, supplement) we published several articles by 

 Mr. J. A. Allen and others on the destruction of 

 our native bii-ds. Facts and figures were pre- 

 sented, tending to show that the killing of birds 

 for millinery purposes and for food, together with 

 their destruction in wanton sport, was liable to 

 cause a serious diminution of our bii-ds, and per- 

 haps the extinction of some species useful to man 

 or desirable for their song. The views thus ex- 

 pressed were indorsed by a committee of the 

 Society of natural history of Cincinnati, in a re- 

 port to that body; and tliis report has brought out 

 a reply from Dr. F. W. Langdon in an address 

 before the same society, in which he dissents 

 from our conclusions. He points out that the 

 birds most largely used for miUinery purposes are 

 those living by the seashore, such as gulls, terns, 

 herons, and others, which are not song-buds nor 

 beneficial to the farmer. As for the destruction 

 of the birds in such places as the Everglades of 

 Florida, he thinks these are doomed to extirpa- 

 tion in any case when the growth of population 

 shall have led to the clearing and draining of the 

 swamps. He admits, however, that some song- 

 birds are made use of by milhners ; but he gives 

 some results of his own and others' observation 

 which seem to show that the number of such 

 birds destroyed is not very great. He adds that 

 most of our familiar song-birds, such as thrushes, 

 wrens, and finches, are in Httle demand for mil- 

 linery use, owing to their being usually of plain 

 colors, but does not seem to notice that then- skins 

 may be dyed. Mr. Allen, in his article above 

 referred to, had estimated the number of birds 

 required in this country to meet the demands of 

 the milliners at 5,000,000 a year ; but Dr. Langdon 

 thinks, that, even if this estimate is correct, the 

 loss of that number of birds in a year wiU have 

 no appreciable effect on the aggregate. He esti- 

 mates the total number of birds on the continent 

 at 3,000,000,000, and the annual increase at the 



same number ; and, allowing a second 5,000,000 

 for the demand from other countries than our 

 own, he finds the percentage destroyed each year 

 to be very small. He infers, therefore, that, even 

 if all the bu-ds destroyed were song-birds or birds 

 useful to the agriculturist, the annual loss would 

 have no practical effect on the fauna of the coun- 

 try at large. 



Mr. Francis Galton has been devoting the last 

 year or two to a study of stature as an hereditary 

 trait. From a large number of family records, in 

 which the heights of the members of at least three 

 generations are recorded, he attempts to assign 

 the proportionate contributions of each ancestor 

 towards the height of the descendant. He has 

 formulated a law which partly opposes and partly 

 supplements the common notion that the children 

 of parents both possessing certain qualities will 

 probably have the same qualities in even a greater 

 degree than either parent. This law maintains 

 that a constant tendency to mediocrity exists ; 

 that the qualities of the parents will not sum- 

 mate, but the average will be the probable result. 

 Perhaps none of his mgenious researches will 

 meet with more criticism than this, it seems to 

 run counter to so many well-known facts of 

 heredity. The research with regard to stature is 

 only a typical one. In a more recent report he 

 has carried over the same method to the con- 

 sideration of the color of the eyes as affected by 

 heredity, and shows the validity of the law in 

 this field. Mr. Galton has presented his views in 

 his presidential address before the British associa- 

 tion and in articles in the Journal of the anthro- 

 pological institute ; but the full paper wiU appear 

 in the Proceedings of the Royal society, and per- 

 haps a judgment ought to be suspended until aU 

 the facts are in. 



Several instances have been reported in the 

 past few months where lai'ge numbers of persons 

 have been made sick by ice-cream. The theories 

 which have been advanced to explain this result 

 have been many and various. By some it has 

 been attributed to the absorption of copper from 

 the vessels in which the cream was made ; others 

 have thought it due to decomposition of the gela- 

 tine which is now commonly used to give stiffness 

 to the cream ; while still others have thought it 

 might be traced to disease in the cows from 

 wliich the milk was obtained. Prof. V. C. 



