OCTOBEE 25, 1901.] 



SCIENCE. 



661 



mont, Jefferson County, N. Y., investigating 

 ancient village sites. In this region there are 

 mounds of various sizes, in the top of each of 

 which is a saucer-shaped depression that is in 

 every case about eight feet in diameter. It 

 seems possible that these mounds may be the 

 remains of earth-covered houses of various 

 sizes, which had smoke holes approximately of 

 the same diameter. 



Dr. Marcus S. Farr, assistant in geology 

 at Princeton, and Mr. Earl Douglass, fellow in 

 biology, with a party of students spent the 

 summer in geological explorations in the south- 

 ern part of Montana. Valuable fossils were 

 collected and are now being mounted at Prince- 

 ton. 



It appears that there will be no further con- 

 test in regard to the will of the late Jacob S. 

 Rogers and that the Metropolitan Museum of 

 Art will receive over $5,000,000 for its endow- 

 ment. It is perhaps scarcely necessary to state 

 that the Museum includes archeology, as well 

 as the fine arts, in its scope, and this large be- 

 quest will thus directly contribute to scientific 

 work. 



The principal buildings for the St. Louis 

 Exposition, as oflicially decided upon, will in 

 many cases be larger than buildings constructed 

 for similar purposes at previous expositions. 

 There is to be an agricultural building, 700 by 

 2,000 feet ; a manufacturers' building, 600 by 

 600 feet; a liberal arts building, 600 by 1,200 

 feet ; a social economy building, 550 by 700 

 feet; a transportation building, 600 by 1,200 

 feet ; an education building, 550 by 700 feet ; 

 an art building, 300 by 600 feet, with two 

 wings, each 200 by 300 feet; a mines and 

 metallurgy building, 600 by 1,200 feet ; an elec- 

 tricity building, 600 by 550 feet, and a Govern- 

 ment building, to cover 100,000 square feet. 

 The estimated cost of these buildings is $7,000- 

 000. To these will probably be added build- 

 ings for fish and fisheries, for machinery, for 

 forestry and for horticulture. 



We learn from Nature that a small residen- 

 tial laboratory has been opened at the Hakgala 

 Botanic Gardens, near Nuwara Eliya, at an 

 elevation of 5,600 feet above sea-level. The 



laboratory is a branch of the Peradeniya Insti- 

 tution, and consists of a small building contain- 

 ing a working room 21 feet x 12^ feet, a living 

 room, two bedrooms, kitchen, etc. The cli- 

 mate is temperate, fires being required in the 

 evenings at least. The botanic garden itself is 

 said to be very beautiful, and occupies an un- 

 rivaled position for the study of equatorial hill 

 vegetation, for on one side there are jungles 

 stretching for 25 miles or more into the wet re- 

 gion of the hills, on the other grassy plateau 

 reaching for an equal distance into the dry re- 

 gion, and extending from 3,000 to 7,000 feet 

 above sea-level. The garden itself contains 

 both jungle and pa tana reserves of several 

 hundred acres. 



A COMMITTEE appointed by the recent Ger- 

 man Geographical Congress has offered a prize 

 of at least $150 for a paper on ' The changes 

 in the course of the Rhine between Bonn and 

 Cleves in historic times, and how have they 

 affected the settlements on its banks ? ' 



The foreign journals report that the Berlin 

 Academy of Sciences and the Danish Academy 

 at Copenhagen have decided to prepare a collec- 

 tion of all the medical works of antiquity under 

 the title of 'Corpus Veterum Medicorum,' and 

 will cause a thorough examination to be made 

 of all libraries. Oriental and European, which 

 are likely to contain MSS. dealing with med- 

 ical subjects. 



The letter press of Britton and Brown's 'Il- 

 lustrated Flora,' with some abridgment and 

 numerous emendations, but without the illus- 

 trations, has been compressed into a single 

 portable volume, which is to be published at 

 once by Henry Holt & Co., under the title, 

 Britton's 'Manual of the Flora of the Northern 

 States and Canada.' 



A representative of Reuter's Agency re- 

 ports an interview with Herr Oscar Neumann, 

 the eminent German explorer, who has recently 

 completed an eighteen months' journey in Cen- 

 tral Africa from Zeila to Khartum. Traveling 

 for the most part through absolutely unknown 

 country, he made some valuable discoveries, 

 and has brought home the largest zoological 

 collection ever made in Central Africa. He 

 was also enabled to make a complete geological 



