Janttaet 21, 1887.] 



SCIEI^CE. 



55 



Charles W. Kennard. It was also voted that the 

 admission-fee be hereafter fire dollars. 



— Since our last issue two men have died who 

 have been prominently connected with the science 

 of America. The one was Gen. W. B. Hazen, the 

 head of the U.S. signal service, and the other 

 Prof. E. L. Youmans, to whom Americans owe a 

 debt for his successful labors in rendering avail- 

 able to them much of the best scientific thought 

 of the time. 



— As is usual, the Athenaeum prints in its first 

 January number a series of essays on the conti- 

 nental literature for the past year. The article on 

 French literature is by Gabriel Sarrazin, and con- 

 tains incidentally a savage denunciation of M. 

 Zola. The article on Germany, from the pen of 

 Hofrath Zimmermann, is as interesting as usual. 

 Arminius Vambery writes of Hungarian litera- 

 ture, and R. Bonghi of that of Italy. 



— The Woman's journal has been emphasizing 

 the well-known fact that female teachers greatly 

 preponderate in this country. To so great an ex- 

 tent is this true, that, in respect of elementary 

 schools, those cities are the exceptions in which 

 male teachers are employed, save as principals, or 

 teachers of some special branch, say, German. 

 Taking the ten cities of Baltimore, Boston, Brook- 

 lyn, Chicago, Cincinnati, New Orleans, New York, 

 Philadelphia, San Francisco, and St. Louis to- 

 gether, there are 12,719 public-school teachers, of 

 whom 11,540 are women. The average percentage 

 of male teachers in these cities is 9. 



— The entrance of Sir Henry Roscoe upon a 

 political career necessitates the giving-up of his 

 chair at Owens college, Manchester. Mr. H. B, 

 Dixon of Trinity college, Oxford, has been called 

 to succeed him. 



— The Educational times says that "the friends 

 of education have much reason for rejoicing in 

 the fact that a large number of the memorials 

 which are to render her majesty's jubilee memor- 

 able will take an educational form. Technical 

 schools, colleges, and endowments of professor- 

 ships will be, in many cases, the visible signs by 

 which contemporai'y English loyalty will be evi- 

 denced to unborn generations." 



— According to the Journal of education, the 

 modern Greeks are, in one respect at least, aiming 

 as high as the ancient Greeks : they are begin- 

 ning to conquer the world — the world, at any rate, 

 of the east — by culture. A correspondent of the 

 Journal des debats gives some account, in this con- 

 nection, of the great adv^ance which higher educa- 

 tion in Greece has made of recent years. There 



are 33 gymnasia in the kingdom, 200 secondary 

 schools, and 1,717 primary schools. These are all 

 public. Among the private educational establish- 

 ments, the first place must be given to the Society 

 for the higher education of women, in connection 

 with which a lycee for girls was established a few 

 years ago, with a staff of 76 teachers and 1,476 

 pupils. Greeks send their girls there from all 

 parts of the east. Education is very liberally en- 

 dowed in Greece ; and the sums which Greeks 

 settled in foreign countries send home for this 

 purpose are very large. One result, of course, is 

 that the Greeks are almost entirely in possession 

 of the learned professions in Turkey. Illiteracy, 

 too, is rare in the kingdom : in the most out-of- 

 the-way hill countries you will see little scholars 

 reading their Plutarch's ' Lives.' 



— The Standard typograph company, whose 

 typograph was described and illustrated in Science 

 for Sept. 17, 1886, have published a little pamphlet 

 calling attention to recent improvements in their 

 machine. By the use of ' slugs,' or strips of metal, 

 instead of a single sheet, the Unes of type-impres- 

 sions may be spaced or ' leaded ' any desirable dis- 

 tance apart, in the same manner as ordinary type. 

 The use of what is known as ' self -spacing ' type, 

 that is, type v^'hose width of face is a certain de- 

 terminate multiple of an established unit, removes 

 some, though not all, of the difficulty in ' justify- 

 ing' or spacing uniformly between the words. 

 These two points are decided improvements ; but 

 the specimens of work given in the j)amphlet show 

 that many of the defects and imperfections pre- 

 viously mentioned in Science still remain. 



— In lecturing before the Society of natural 

 history at Berlin, Professor Strieker has employed 

 with much success an electric lamp of 4,000 can- 

 dle-power for the projection of microscopic sec- 

 tions upon a screen, employing a magnifying 

 power of six to eight thousand diameters. It is 

 stated that the definition obtained is very satis- 

 factory, 



— In a letter to a London newspaper. Sir 

 Edward Watkins advocates a system of experi- 

 mental boring, by the British government, with 

 a view to discovering natural gas in England, 

 The many advantages derived from the use of 

 such gas at Pittsburg and elsewhere in Pennsyl- 

 vania are stated as incentives to the undertaking 

 of such work by the government. 



— A new type of submarine torpedo-boat is be- 

 ing experimented with at the West India docks, 

 London, England, The peculiar feature of the 

 boat is the means adopted to secure immersion or 

 flotation, which consists in increasing or reducmg 



