May 9, 1890.] 



SCIENCE. 



287 



Iron does not seem confined to the one spot, iron and coal occur- 

 ring in juxtaposition throughout the hills skirting the road from 

 the capital to Kazvin, or even farther west. Much of the Persian, 

 iron is noted as containing hardly any sulphur and no phosphorus. 



— One of the important objects of the American Museum of 

 Natural History is the collecting and preserving a library of books 

 and pamphlets ; and to this object its trustees make an earnest 

 appeal to its friends for their cooperation. Two very valuable 

 libraries have been presented to the museum, — one on conchology, 

 by Miss C. L. Wolfe ; and the other on ichthyology, by Robert L. 

 Stuart. The paper-mills of our country are annually grinding up 

 tons and tons of old and new books of value to scientific institu- 

 tions, and in some cases making it almost impossible to obtain 

 them for the completion of sets. It is therefore desirable at once, 

 so far as practicable, to secure copies of every thing which has 

 been printed on natural history ; for in this age of scientific re 

 search there is nothing which may not at some time be useful. 



— The University of Pennsylvania authorities have at last taken 

 a hand in college athletics, and hereafter the students will be more 

 restricted in the various sports. The following rules, drawn up 

 by a committee consisting of several of the faculty and represen- 

 tative undergraduates, will in the future govern all college con- 

 tests : No student whose general average in the mid-term or term 

 report is below "medium" shall be permitted to engage in any 

 university athletic contests or match rowing-races, or play in any 

 match games of base-ball, foot-ball, cricket, tennis, lacrosse, etc. ; 

 no student shall train for or en^er any university athletic contest 

 or rowing-race, or play in any match game of base ball, foot-ball, 

 cricket, tennis, lacrosse, etc., without the consent in writing of 

 Dr. Leuf ; the university athletic contests and match rowing-races 

 shall be held only on Saturdays or holidays ; match games of base- 

 ball, foot-ball, cricket, tennis, lacrosse, etc , may be played on the 

 university grounds, on days other than Saturdays or holidays, 

 after 3 p.m.; no team, or crew, or representative of the athletic 

 clubs or associations, shall make more than one engagement each 

 week to play outside of Philadelphia, excluding Saturdays and 

 holidays. 



— At a recent meeting of the American Academy of Political 

 and Social Science, held in Philadelphia, Professor E. J. James of 

 the University of Pennsylvania read a novel and interesting 

 paper. He said that for the last nine months a most interesting 

 experiment in railroad management has been going on in Hun- 

 gary. Asa result, a new system of passenger tariffs was worked 

 out and put into operation on the first of August, 1889. The 

 method adopted was that commonly known as the zone-tariff 

 system, in which the rates are fixed, not according to the number 

 of miles travelled by the passenger, but according to the number 

 of zones traversed or entered upon during the journey. Starting 

 from a given centre, the railroads are divided into fourteen zones 

 or stretches. The first zone includes all stations within 35 kilo- 

 metres of the centre ; the second, all more than 25 and less than 

 40, etc.; each zone after the first, up to the twelfth, being 15 kilo- 

 metres long, or, as we should perhaps better say, wide. Tickets 

 are sold by zones, being good for all stations within the zone. 

 How radical a change this system implies for a large part of the 

 traffic can be seen in the extreme cases ; i.e , in those in which 

 the reduction has been the greatest The fare for all stations 

 in the fourteenth zone, which includes all stations more than 325 

 kilometres from the capital, are 8, 5 80 and 4 gulden respectively 

 for the three classes, corresponding to $3 88, $2 08, and $1.44. If 

 we had the same rate in this country, it would be possible to buy 

 a railroad-ticket to Chicago from New York for $2.92. The fare 

 from New York to Philadelphia would be 29 cents The simpli- 

 fication of the tariff is very great. Under the old system, the 

 number of distinct tickets which had to be kept in every large 

 office was nearly 700. It is now only 93. The railroad-tickets 

 are now placed on sale like postage stamps at the post-offices, 

 hotels, cigar-shops, and other convenient places. The public is 

 greatly pleased at the discarding of the complicated machinery of 

 ticket-selling as practised under the old system. The most in- 

 teresting thing, hoivever, in this experiment, is the way in which 

 the passenger traffic has increased under the stimulus of the new 



rates. The number of passengers during the last five months of 

 1887 was 2,389,400; during the same period of 1888 it was 2,381,- 

 200; while for the same jjeriod of 1889 — the first period under the 

 new system — it was 5,584,600, an increase of over 133 per cent. 

 The receipts from the traffic under the new system were over 18 

 per cent greater than under the old. In other words, passenger 

 traffic will respond to lower rates, — a thing which some railroad 

 managers have denied. It would be well for our own railroad! 

 managers, who complain that passenger traffic is not profitable,, 

 to look into the matter. The American people, reputed to be the- 

 most restless in the world, do not have nearly as many passengers 

 per head of the population as England, and it is far exceeded in- 

 the number of passengers to mile of railway by half a dozen, 

 countries of Europe. ^ 



— A writer in the North China Herald of Shanghai says that the- 

 climate of Asia is becoming colder than it formerly was, and its 

 tropical animals and plants are retreating southwards at a slow 

 rate. This is true of China, and it is also the case in western. 

 Asia The elephant in a wild state was hunted in the eighth cen- 

 tury B.C. by Tiglath Pileser, the King of Assyria, near Carche- 

 misb, which lay near the Euphrates in Syria. Four or five cen- 

 turies before this, Thothmes III., King of Egypt, hunted the same 

 animal near Aleppo. In high antiquity the elephant and rhi- 

 noceros were known to the Chinese, they had names for them, 

 and their tusks and horns were valued. South China has a very 

 warm climate, which melts insensibly into that of Cochin-China; 

 so that the animals of the Indo-Chinese peninsula would, if there 

 were a secular cooling of climate, retreat gradually to the south. 

 This is just what seems to have taken place. In the time of Con- 

 fucius, elephants were in use for the army on the Yangtse River. 

 A hundred and fifty years after this, Mencius speaks of the tiger, 

 the Leopard, the rhinoceros, and the elephant as having been, 

 in many parts of the empire, driven away from the neighborhood 

 of the Chinese inhabitants by the founders of the Chou dynasty. 

 Tigers and leopards are not yet by any means extinct in China. 

 The elephant and rhinoceros are again spoken of in the first cen- 

 tury of our era. If to these particulars regarding elephants be 

 added the retreat from the rivers of South China of the ferocious 

 alligators that formerly infested them, the change in the fauna of 

 China certainly seems to show that the climate is much less favor- 

 able for tropical animals than it formerly was: in fact, it appears 

 to have become dryer and colder. The water-buffalo still lives, 

 and is an extremely useful domestic animal, aU along the Yangtse 

 and south of it, but is not seen north of the old Yellow River in 

 the province of Kiangsu. The Chinese alligator is still found on 

 the Yangtse, but so rare is its appearance that foreign residents in 

 China knew nothing about it till it was described by M Fauvel. 

 The flora is also affected by the increasing coldness of the climate 

 in China. The bamboo is still grown in Peking, with the aid of 

 good shelter, moisture, and favorable soil; but it is not found natu- 

 rally growing into forest in North China, as was its habit two 

 thousand years ago. It grows now in that part of the empire as 

 a sort of garden plant only. It is in Szechuan province that the- 

 southern flora reaches farthest to the northward. 



— An interesting little railway has just been opened for 

 traffic in England, between Lynton and Lynmouth, which are 

 separated from each other by a cliff nearly 500 feet high, and 

 are only connected by a road so steep as to be almost imprac- 

 ticable for vehicles. The new line, according to Engineering, 

 is 800 feet long, with a uniform gradient of 1 in 14, which is 

 the steepest incline in the world. In spite of its shortness,, 

 the construction of the road has involved considerable difficul- 

 ties; deep cutting having to be made through solid rock, and 

 several streams of water having to be regulated. The motive 

 power is supplied by water which is brought by 4-incb pipes 

 from West Lynn, a distance of a mile, to a reservoir near the 

 top of the incline. Two cars connected by a wire rope are- 

 moved together, the one dragging the other up the line as it 

 descends, the necessary excess of weight being obtained by 

 filling a tank on the car at the top of the incline from the 

 reservoir already mentioned. Safety appliances have been 

 fitted to stop the cars in case of accident. 



