February 4, 1887.] 



SCIENCE, 



111 



medal and £.'5. Series viii. (to be sent in not 

 later than May 1, 1889): No. 27, 'On the chemis- 

 try of the Australian gums and resins,' the society's 

 medal and £25 ; No. 28, ' On the aborigines of 

 Australia,' the society's medal and £25 ; No. 29, 

 'On the iron-ore deposits of New South Wales,' 

 the society's medal and £25 ; No. 80, ' List of the 

 marine fauna of Port Jackson, with descriptive 

 notes as to habits, distribution, etc.,' the society's 

 medal and £35. The competition is in no way 

 confined to members of the society, nor to resi- 

 dents in Australia, but is open to all without re- 

 striction. No award will be made for a mere 

 compilation, however meritorious in its way : the 

 communication, to be successful, must be either 

 wholly or in part the result of original observa- 

 tion or research on the part of the contributor. 



— The annual report of the director of the 

 Harvard observatory, which was presented to 

 the visiting committtee on Dec. 7, has just been 

 printed as a part of the report of the president of 

 the university. Professor Pickering is to be con- 

 gratulated upon the highly satisfactory financial 

 basis on which the observatory is at length placed, 

 through the munificence of the late Robert Treat 

 Paine. About half of the Paine bequest, or f 164,- 

 198, is now available ; and the endowment of the 

 observatory, which was $164,000 in 1875, and 

 $227,000 in 1885, has now risen to $398,046. A 

 share of the increased funds must be applied, for 

 the present, to needed repairs, and to the publica- 

 tioia of observations already made. The 15-inch 

 equatorial is to have a new mounting, and Pro- 

 fessor Pickering hopes that at no distant day 

 means maybe found for replacing the observatory 

 building by one better adapted to the requirements 

 of modern astronomy. The report details the 

 work of the various instruments, particular at- 

 tention being given to the subject of photometry, 

 as in past years. The most important new work 

 of the observatory is in the field of stellar pho- 

 tography. For this investigation Mrs. Draper has 

 lent the 11-inch photographic lens employed by 

 her husband, the late Dr. Henry Draper, at his ob- 

 servatory on the Hudson, and has provided means 

 for its new mounting, as well as for the prosecu- 

 tion of the researches to which it is to be devoted. 

 We regret to note the resignation of Professor 

 Rogers, the first assistant for the past fifteen 

 years, and the observatory suffers a second loss 

 in the resignation from its staff off Mr. S. C. 

 Chandler, jun. 



— During the past week the U. S. fish commis- 

 sion made the following distribution of Cali- 

 fornia trout in the localities given : 300 yearling 

 trout were placed in S winks Lake, near Scottsboro, 



Ala.; 175 yearling in Sauters Creek, Ala.; 175 two- 

 year-old in Paint Creek. Ala.; 175 yearling in 

 Bear Creek, near Benton, Ala.; 75 yearling and 

 100 two-year-old in Flint River, near Brownsboro, 

 Ala.; 175 one-year-old in Crow Creek, Ala.; 175 

 two-year-old in Lookout Creek, near Rising Fawn, 

 Ga. ; 178 two-year-old in the South Fork of the 

 Chickamauga River, near Chattanooga, Tenn. 

 The next distribution of trout will be made during 

 the coming week, and will cover the states of 

 Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan. 



— It has been settled that the gift of President 

 White's valuable historical library to Cornell uni- 

 versity is to be followed by the erection of a large 

 library building by the college authorities. 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 



*t* Correspondents are requested to be as brief as possible. The 

 ijvriter's name is in all cases required as proof of good faith. 



Sources of nitrogen assimilated by growing 

 plants. 



In my address before section at Buffalo last 

 August, I gave a resume of the investigations made 

 up to that time in respect of the sources of nitrogen 

 consumed by plants. The general conclusions of 

 this paper were given in the abstract of the address, 

 which appeared in Science. Since that time two im- 

 portant investigations have been published, and I 

 feel that I ought to add an abstract of these as a sup- 

 plement to the one you made. 



Atwater (Amer. chem. journ., viii. Nos. 5 and 6) 

 has shown, in two papers recently published, that in 

 many cases there is a loss of nitrogen in germinating 

 plants : in other words, nitrogen that may be present 

 in a nitrified form, or in a form easily nitrified, may 

 escape assimilation by being set free by the denitri- 

 fying ferment described by Gayon and Dupetit and 

 Springer. The importance of this fact seems to have 

 been overlooked by most investigators, and the inti- 

 mate relation it has to all studies of nitrogen-assimi- 

 lation will not be denied by any one. Generally it 

 has been assumed, that, if plants show an amount of 

 assimilated nitrogen equal to that in the seed and 

 food supplied, it is a proof that no free nitrogen has 

 been consumed, either directly or indirectly. But 

 if it should be established that much assimilable 

 nitrogen in the seed or food may be lost, then the 

 above assumption cannot be true. As a contribution 

 to the study of this interesting problem, Atwater's 

 papers are worthy of careful consideration. 



Hellriegel(Zeif. d. Ver.f. d. Rubenzucker-Industrie, 

 November, 1886) has lately published a paper in 

 which he shows that an active nitrifying ferment 

 may prepare unassimilable nitrogen for plant-food. 

 While the Gramineae appear to possess little capa- 

 bility of being nourished by the nitrogen that can 

 be derived from the atmosphere, the Papillionaceae 

 possess this power to a remarkable extent. To a 

 sterilized earth free of nitrogen was added a few 

 cubic centimetres of an aqueous extract of earth 

 taken from a field where peas were in active growth. 

 Peas were sprouted in pots of nitrogen-free and 

 sterilized earth, and continued to grow until the 

 nitrogen-supply of the seed was exhausted. They 

 all then passed into a state of starvation. To some 



