January 29, 1892.] 



SCIENCE. 



61 



— The Rain Convention at Millers, South Dakota, was largely 

 attended, and as a result it is believed that twenty counties will 

 accept the offer of a Kansas artificial rain company to produce 

 rain during the crop season at $500 a county, on the understand- 

 ing that if there is no rain there will be no pay. 



— Professors. Ward Loper, last year lecturer on biology and 

 geology in Trinity College, Hartford, and later connected with the 

 United States Geological Survey in Colorado, has been appointed 

 assistant to the Board of Management of the United States Exhibit 

 at the World's Fair. He will select and classify fossils. 



— It is expected that the Spicer Library of the Brooklyn Poly 

 teohnic will be catalogued and opened for sudents by May 1. 

 $10,000 had been expended for books and nearly 10,000 selected 

 volumes have been placed upon its shelves, comprising the latest 

 works In philosophy, law, history, science, and general literature. 

 The entire cost of the new building, including land and equip- 

 ment, has been estimated at $350,000. 



— The next meeting of the New York Section of the American 

 Branch of the Society for Psychical Research will be held at Room 

 10, Columbia College, Law Building, Wednesday, Feb. 10, at 8 

 P.M. Professor William James will preside. The programme 

 will be as follows : 1. Routine business. 2. Address by Professor 

 James, on the Census of Hallucinations. 3. Report of some ex- 

 periments in automatic writing, by B. F. Undei wood (to be read by 

 R. Hodgson, secretary of the American branch). There will be no 

 admittance except by ticket. Special tickets are sent for mem- 

 bers and associates. Other tickets, each of which will admit three 

 persons, will enable members and associates to introduce their 

 friends. Exti-a tickets may be obtained by members or associates 

 on application to the secretary of the section, J. H. Hyslop, Co- 

 lumbia College, New York. 



— The New York Tribune states that among the many proposed 

 additions to Columbia College is a new school, to be known as the 

 School of Pure Science. The announcement has met with the 

 approval of the many friends of the college. Up to the present 

 time the greater part of the scientific work has been done under 

 the direction of the faculty of the School of Mines. In the new 

 school the course will be three years, and will lead to the degree 

 of Doctor of Philosophy. A student in the School of Arts will be 

 able to spend his senior year in that department, take the degree 

 of A.B., and at the end of the second and third years, respectively, 

 in the new school, take the degrees of M. A. and Ph. D. The fac- 

 ulty in the School of Pure Science will be made up principally of 

 the teachers in the School of Mines. The college proper will 

 name a department, in accordance with the recommendations of 

 Professor Charles F. Chandler, dean of the School of Mines, where 

 pure scientific research can be carried on. 



— The floating of the particles of cloud or fog, Herr von Frank 

 of Graz seeks to explain {Nature, Jan. 14) by the presence of an 

 envelope of aqueous vapor. As an approximate average value for 

 the diameter of droplet with envelope he gives 0.7 mm. Suppos- 

 ing one cubic metre of cloud to hold 3 grammes of water, there 

 would be an interval of 0.2 mm. between the envelopes. When 

 clouds pass over the sun, the shadows of objects are perceptibly 

 lengthened when the darkening occurs, and the author attributes 

 this to refraction by the vapor envelopes. Agajn, it is difficult to 

 see how water droplets in the form of cloud or fog could exist at 

 such various temperatures, did not the vapor envelopes, as bad 

 conductors of heat (compare Leidenfrost's drops), guard the drop- 

 lets to some extent from evaporating and freezing. The minute 

 particles must soon be dissipated by the sun's rays, if they were 

 not in a kind of spheroidal state. This heating expands the en- 

 velopes, so that the cloud tends to rise ; and various phenomena in 

 nature may be thus explained (e.g. the rise of mist in Alpine 

 valleys). Once more, liquid droplets have been observed (by Ass- 

 raann) floating in air of -^10° C°. On meeting a solid body these 

 froze to ice-lumps without crystalline structure. Here, according 

 to Herr von Frank, the vapor-envelopes prevent freezing till they 

 are ruptured by the solid; the droplet thus loses the bad conduc- 

 tor of heat which protected it, and solidifies so quickly that no 



crystals can form. The author supposes that with much aqueous 

 vapor in the air larger drops form, the clouds floating lower; with 

 less aqueous vapor, the drops are smaller and the clouds higher; 

 the thicknes of envelope, however, being the same for large and 

 small drops under like conditions of temperature and pressure. 



— A despatch to the New York Tribune, dated San Francisco, 

 Jan. 24, states that H. W. Turner, a geologist of Washington, 

 D.O., who for two years past, under the auspices of the California 

 Division of Mining Geology, has been exploring the gold regions 

 of the Sierras, arrived there the day before. Mr. Turner obtained 

 from a gulch at Cave City, Calaveras County, a meteoric stone 

 that will excite no little interest in the scientific world. It is al- 

 most as large as one's fist, and around a good portion of it is a 

 solid film of gold. In one place the gold shows for about an inch 

 square. Hitherto, in all discoveries, no meteoric iron has been 

 found in connection with gold. " It demonstrates," Mr. Turner 

 says, " that there is gold in the worlds of space from which mete- 

 oric u-on has fallen. The specimen will be boxed and sent to 

 Washington. Other pieces will probably be forwarded from Cal- 

 averas. I have examined it very carefully. It is extremely 

 tough, and it is almost impossible to break it. In my opinion it 

 has fallen from one of the stars. This demonstrates that there is 

 gold in some of the stars, at least. I shall send this piece to the 

 Smithsonian Institution." 



— In the Rcpertorium filr Meteorologie (Vol. XIV. No. 10), M. 

 E. Berg discusses the frequency and geographical distribution of 

 heavy daily rainfalls in European Russia, excepting Finland and 

 the Caucasus. The observations, says Nature, refer to the years 

 1886-90. a rather short period; but in previous years there were 

 not suflicient stations for such an investigation. The paper deals 

 exclusively with falls of between 1.4 and 3 inches, distributed 

 according to months, for the various governments of the empire. 

 The results show that the frequency of heavy falls is subject to 

 considerable fluctuation from year to year. The regions of great- 

 est frequency occur on the south east coast of the Crimea and the 

 extreme south-west of the empire; on the eastern side of the 

 Dnieper, the region extending to Smolensk and farther north- 

 wards is also subject to very heavy falls. The northern limit of 

 daily falls of over 3 inches, so far as relates to Central Russia, is 

 the Government of Moscow. The yearly range of frequency 

 reaches a maximum in summer, and, except in the south-eastern 

 districts, the frequency in autumn is greater than in spring. In 

 July and August the great falls extend over very large districts, 

 and at other seasons are generally regulated by the course of the 

 barometric depresssons. The following is the average yearly fre- 

 quency of the heavy falls for the whole empire, arranged accord- 

 ing to seasons: winter, 0.8; spring, 14.3; summer, 106.4; autumn, 

 20.8. The maximum amount which fell in any day was over 8 

 inches, in Bessarabia. 



— Thomas Whittaker has just ready a second edition of St. 

 Clair's " Buried Cities and Bible Countries," the work on Palestine 

 exploration that was well received last fall. 



— E. »& F. N. Spon & Co. expect to have ready very shortly the 

 second edition, revised and enlarged, of "The Maintenance of 

 Macadamized Roads," by T. Codrington; also the second edition, 

 revised and enlarged, of " The Municipal and Sanitary Engineer's 

 Handbook," by H. P. Boulnois. 



— The prospectus is issued of a Forstlichnaturwissensehaftliche 

 Zeitschrift, an organ for laboratories of forest-botany, forest-zool- 

 ogy, forest-chemistry, agriculture, and meteorology. It is to ap- 

 pear monthly in Munich, under the editorship of Dr. Carl Freiherr 

 von Tubeuf; the first number is announced for the cui-rent 

 month. 



— A work on the great earthquake of Japan, by Professor John 

 Milne and Professor W. K. Burton, is now in the press at Tokyo. 

 It wiU be illustrated by 25 large photo-plates. For the sake of 

 comparison, there will be two plates showing on a small scale the 

 effects of earthquake in Italy and other countries. All the plates 

 are to be on the finest quality of Japanese paper. 



