6o 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XIX. No. 4O9 



tliey would be crowded upon each other and unite in a main 

 trunk almost parallel to the Platte, like the lower Loup. The 

 two causes, headwater erosion and Pliocene channel-filling', 

 have worked together harmoniously. The former has swept 

 the upper courses westward by a series of captures ; the latter 

 has crowded the mouths of the tributaries eastward and made 

 them coalesce into a single large tributary. Thus a num- 

 ber of separate tributaries entering the Platte nearly at right 

 angles have been wheeled into an oblique position, and 

 evolved into one great tributary system, whose volume rivals 

 that of the parent stream. L. E. Hicks. 



NOTES AND NEWS. 



A TELEGRAM has been received announcing the illness of the 

 Right Rev. John J. Keane, D.D., president of the Catholic Uni- 

 versity of America, and requesting that the date on which his ad- 

 dress, before the Brooklyn Institute, on "Leo XIII. and the Social 

 Problems of the Day " is to be given be postponed until Bishop 

 Keane is able to come to Brooklyn to deliver it. 



— Thi se who interest themselves in the aboriginal languages of 

 Australia, will hear with much satisfaction that the vernacular of 

 the natives of the MacDonnell range. South Australia, has been 

 studied and committed to writing by their missionary, Rev. H. 

 Kempe, who resides on the Finke River mission. His grammar and 

 vocabulary occupy the first fifty-four pages of the Transactions 

 of the Royal Society of South Australia (Vol. XIV., Part I., July, 

 1891, 12mo), a periodical edited by Professor Ralph Tate, Adelaide, 

 W. C. Rugby, publisher. 



— On the 9th of January representative scientists from tlie 

 different parts of the State met in Austin, at the University of 

 Texas, and organized a Texas Academy of Science. The officers 

 are: president. Dr. Everhart, professor of chemistry, Austin; vice- 

 president, Mr. Dumble, state geologist, Austin; treasurer, Profes- 

 sor Nagle, Agricultural and Mechanical college, Bryan; honorary 

 secretary, Dr. Macfarlane, professor of physics, Austin; members 

 of council, Dr. Halsted, professor of mathematics, Austin; Mr. 

 von Streeruwitz, State Geological Survey ; and Dr. Simonds, pro- 

 fessor of geology, Austin. 



— At the late annual meeting of the Iowa Academy of Science 

 Mr. R. Ellsworth Call exhibited a remarlsable specimen of the hu- 

 man hyoid bone, taken from a male subject. The basi-hyal was 

 excessively irregular on the anterior surface with complete oblit- 

 eration of the median vertical ridge ; the anterior aspect was also 

 somewhat concave. The right cerato-hyal was entirely wanting; 

 the left was nearly as long as the thyro-hyal on its side, and was 

 styliform in shape. It was completely ankylosed to the basi-hyal. 

 On the side on which the cerato-hyal was wanting there was no 

 evidence of any structure corresponding to the cerato-hyal and no 

 indication of a synovial bursa or structure which would show that 

 it had ever existed. In addition, the muscles of that side were 

 attached to the basi-hyal, and this was believed to be the cause of 

 the disappearance of the vertical median ridge and the cause of 

 the roughened characters presented by the anterior surface. 



— The second annual meeting of the Nebraska Academy of 

 Sciences was held at the University of Nebraska, commencing 

 Thursday, Dec. 31, 1891. The programme was as follows: the 

 president's address, Specialization in Science (Dr. Kingsley being 

 absent, the address was read by Dr. C. E. Bessey) ; The Slime 

 Moulds of Crete, by A. T. Bell; The Evolution of Oxygen by 

 Plants, by A. F. Woods; Additions to the Flora of Nebraska, by 

 by Professor G. D. Swezey; The Flora of the Black Hills, by Dr. 

 C. E. Bessey ; Metabohsm, by Dr. H. B. Lowry ; A Bacterial Dis- 

 ease of Corn, by H. B. Duncanson; Notes on the Flora of the 

 Artesian Well at Lincoln, by J. R. Sohofield. The officers for 

 1892 are: president. Dr. Charles E. Bessey, University of Ne- 

 braska, Lincoln; vice-president. Professor G. D. Swezey, Doane 

 College, Crete; secretary, W. Edgar Taylor, State Normal School, 

 Peru; custodian, Lawrence Bruner, University of Nebraska, Lin- 



coln; trustees, Ex-Superintendent E. T. Hartley, Lincoln, and Dr. 

 H. B. Lowry, Lincoln, 



— In a paper presented to the Iowa Academy of Sciences, re- 

 cently. Miss Minnie Howe, assistant in biology in the West Des 

 Moines High School, described a series of experiments made by 

 her at the Iowa State University during the winter and spring of 

 1891, together with their results. The problem which Miss Howe 

 attempted to solve was the separation of the Bacterium, Bacillus 

 subtillis, from the yeast plant ISaceharoinyces cerevisice found to- 

 gether in ordinary soft yeast. She sought, also, to obtain pure 

 cultures of each and to determine the part that each played in 

 bread-making- It was found that bread made of sterilized flour 

 and raised with the pure bacillus culture was light, but not as 

 spongy as ordinary bread, sweet, close-grained, rather dark-col- 

 ored, smelling and tasting much like " salt-raised " bread. Bread 

 raised with the pure yeast culture under exactly the same condi- 

 tions as the first was somewhat light, swret, not so fine-grained 

 nor as light as either ordinary bread or that made with bacteria. 

 It had a peculiar insipid taste, w^itb an odor unlike that of either 

 of the other kinds. The result of these experiments seems to 

 show that neither the yeast plant nor the bacillus alone will make 

 as good bread as both together; that either without the other will 

 produce alcoholic fermentation and cause bread to rise; that the 

 bacillus is rather more efficient alone than the yeast. Further 

 experimentation is projected along the same line, since no one 

 set of experiments can be regarded as conclusive. 



— "The influenza is once more in the air," says the British 

 Medical Journal, "wafted hither and thither -throughout the 

 habitable world, a formidable, disabling, and fatal pandemic. 

 Once more we are urgently asked on all sides, ' Have we a specific ? 

 Can we offer a cure ? ' It is the old delusion and the everlasting 

 and uni-easoning, but excusable, impatipnce for the miracu- 

 lous and the impossible.. 'Disease comes by Providence 

 and goes by medicine ; ' that is a durable and popular formula. Of 

 specifics for sale there are, of course, a legion. To sell them is 

 the business of the quacks; the Matteis, the Hollo ways, the Mor- 

 risons abound in specifics. There are a dozen available for chol- 

 era, for typhoid, for small-pox, for hydrophobia, for carcinoma — 

 all equally plausible and equally useless except for commerce — 

 and why not for influenza? But is there a specific for any dis- 

 ease ? It is more than doubtful. The more we know of the nature 

 and cause of disease, of its origin and life-history, the less we are 

 inclined even to expect the discovery of specifics. Disease we 

 know not as an entity, an enemy to be struck down with a club, 

 or to be expelled by a drug, but as a process, the change of tissues 

 and of fluids, the growth of a microbe, the proliferation of a cell, 

 the secretion of a virus. We can modify the processes, we can 

 lessen their virulent products, we can fortify against their worst 

 effects; we can aid the evolution and perhaps guide it to health; 

 sometimes we can arrest it; and often we can anticipate it. Thus 

 we know how to ward off many diseases. Cholera, typhoid, 

 small-pox, hydrophobia are enemies whom we can meet at the 

 gate and forbid their approach. Deaths from either of these pre- 

 ventable diseases are, for the most part, violent deaths, inflicted by 

 the ignorance of the people, the neglect of the sanitary authorities. 

 Populus vuH inori. In their search for specifics they parley with 

 the enemy and lose their lives. Of influenza we know less than 

 of most other infections; it is aerial, communicable from person 

 to person, and along the lines of travel. For it, as for scarlet 

 fever, we have only isolation as a preventive and palliatives as a 

 treatment. Perhaps one day we shall know more ; but there does 

 not seem any likelihood of the discovery of a specific, and judging 

 from numerous analogies it is far from certain that there is in this 

 any ground for reproach. At any rate, it comes badly from a 

 public and from a generation which is content to leave Great 

 Britain without even one Institute of Preventive Medicine, and 

 which is left to an appeal for funds from a Lister and a Roscoe to 

 found such an institute — in which lies a chief hope for further 

 life-saving and the advance of preventive and curative knowledge 

 — while millions are lavished on weapons of destruction, or the 

 more obvious means of charitable relief to physical suffering; and 

 finally on the purchase of fraudulent ' specifics.' " 



