452 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. VIII., No. 19S 



fauna of North America, with remarks on the 

 anatomy and origin of blind forms ; C. H. F. 

 Peters, A chart of the stars in the group Praesepe ; 

 C. H. F. Peters, A catalogue of stars from posi- 

 tions in various astronomical periodicals ; O. T. 

 Sherman, A catalogue of bright lines, observed in 

 the atmosphere of /3 Lyrae ; W. L. Elkin, On the 

 relative motions of the Pleiades group deduced 

 from measurements made with the Kdnigsberg 

 and Yale college heliometers ; C. A. Young, Some 

 observations with Pritchard's wedge photometer ; 

 C. Abbe, The question of barometer exposure ; G. 

 W. Hill, On the construction of new tables of 

 Saturn ; E. Pumpelly, On the relation of the 

 Green Mountain rocks to the Taconic ; T. Sterry 

 Hunt, Hardness and chemical indifference in 

 solids ; Alfred Russell Wallace, On wind as a 

 seed-carrier in relation to one of the most difficult 

 problems in geographical distribution ; W. M. 

 Davis, The mechanical orginof the triassic mono- 

 clinal in the Connecticut valley. 



— The committee having in charge the presen- 

 tation to Prof. Edward Zeller of Berlin, as a com- 

 memoration of the fiftieth anniversary of his at- 

 tainment of his doctorate, of the bust of the cele- 

 brated historian and philosopher himself , moulded 

 by Professor Schaper, met and presented the bust 

 to Professor Zeller on Oct. 31. On the long list of 

 subscribers to the commemoration are a number 

 of English and American professors and students 

 of philosophy, among them those of President 

 Angell of the University of Michigan, Professor 

 Bain of Aberdeen, President Bascom of the 

 University of Wisconsin, Professor Burt of Ann 

 Arbor, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler of Columbia 

 college, Prof. Edward Caird of Glasgow, Prof. G. 

 H. Howison of the University of California, Prof. 

 T. H. Huxley of London, Prof. Benjamin Jowett 

 of Oxford, Prof. George T. Ladd of Yale college, 

 Dr. James Martineau of London, Prof. George S. 

 Morris of Aixn Arbor, Prof. George H. Palmer of 

 Harvard college, Prof. W. H. Payne of Ann Arbor, 

 ex-President Noah Porter of Yale, President 

 Robinson of Brown university. Prof. J. G. Schur- 

 man of Cornell university, and Prof. C. W. 

 Shields of Princeton college. 



— AppalacMa, vol. i. No. 1, has been repub- 

 lished, and copies will be furnished by the sales- 

 agents, W. B. Clarke & Carruth, Boston, Mass. 



— The London literary journals announce that 

 two interesting manuscripts have lately been pre- 

 sented to the British museum by her majesty's 

 consul at Chungking, China. The larger of the 

 two fills seventy-three folios, and is in the Lolo 

 character, being written in verse of five characters 



to a line. The smaller one is of thirteen folios, 

 and is in the writing of the Shiu-kia, a Shan tribe 

 of the southern portion of the province Kwei- 

 chow. This is the first specimen of the writing 

 of this tribe to reach Europe. The characters are 

 adaptations of contracted forms of an early kind 

 of Chinese writing, with an admixture of pic- 

 torial signs. The work is one on divination, each 

 sentence closing with words of good or evil 

 augury. 



— Previous to 1879 typhoid-fever was very prev- 

 alent in Vienna, Austria. At that time the 

 drinking-water was the water of the Danube. In 

 that year a new source for the city's water was 

 drawn upon, and since then the disease has very 

 much decreased. 



— The citizens and authorities of Chicago are 

 very much interested at the present time in the 

 solution of the problem of preventing the further 

 contamination of the water-supply of that city. 

 The plan which seems to promise the best results 

 is to divert all the sewage from the lake to the 

 river, and to pump from the river into the canal 

 12,000 cubic feet per minute for every 1,000 of the 

 population. The report of Dr. Ranch, submitted 

 to the Illinois state board of health at its last 

 meeting, shows that by the adoption of such a 

 plan the water of the lake would be in all respects 

 adapted for domestic purposes, and would be en-^ 

 tirely free from contamination, while at the same 

 time no contamination will result in the water of 

 the river at jDoints where other cities take their 

 water-supply. 



— The Russian government is about to have 

 constructed a petroleum pipe-line, with a capacity 

 of 160,000,000 gallons of oil a year, extending from 

 Baku, on the Caspian, to the Black Sea, a distance 

 of about six hundred miles. 



— Mr. Daniel G. Brinton has been elected pro- 

 fessor of American linguistics and archeology in 

 the University of Pennsylvania. 



— A lady aged sixty-two had for many years 

 suffered from neuralgia of the face and ear, and 

 had also had an abscess form in the right ear. She 

 subsequently contracted what she supposed was a 

 severe cold in the head, and, while blowing the 

 nose forcibly, expelled what proved to be a wis- 

 dom-tooth. She remembered that some thirty 

 years before, she had suffered from ' cutting a wis- 

 dom-tooth,' but she was at that time relieved with- 

 out tlie appearanoe of the tooth. It doubtless 

 found its way upward into the upper jaw, and 

 finally liberated itself by ulceration through the 

 nose in the manner described. 



— From a series of experiments by Zott, of 



