360 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. IX.. No. 219 



"the professorship of international law at Cam- 

 bridge. 



— Dr. Hall's lectures on education at the Johns 

 Hopkins university are given once weekly before 

 a class of twenty-nine students. 



— In the current number of Scribner''s maga- 

 zine are two articles that may fairly be classed as 

 educational. The first is by Prof. W. B. Scott of 

 Princeton, on 'American elephant myths,' in 

 which he discusses in an extremely interesting 

 manner the evidence, in tradition and inscription, 

 of the existence of elephants in America in an- 

 cient times, and recounts many of the popular 

 fallacies in regard to them. Prof. A. S. Hill of 

 Harvard closes the number with a short but vigor- 

 ous article on ' English in our colleges,' in which 

 he discusses the question of what branches of 

 English instruction are of greatest importance to 

 ■college students, and pays particular attention to 

 the methods of teaching English composition. 



— Archdeacon Farrar writes from East Africa 

 that the whole district of Magila, with its hun- 

 dreds of villages and thousands of people, has re- 

 cently been saved an invasion of small-pox, which 

 has prevailed in surrounding districts, by general 

 vaccination. He adds that this has commended 

 medical science to the people, and they come in 

 numbers to be vaccinated. 



— Dr. Gustav Berndt has prepared a mono- 

 graph on the Swiss Foehn, entitled ' • Der Foehn, 

 Ein Beitrag zur orographischen Meteorologie und 

 comparativen Khmatoiogie" (Gottingen, 1886). 

 This is the most considerable work of the kind ; 

 and, although devoted especially to the phenome- 

 na noted in Switzerland, it has also an intro- 

 ductory chapter giving the history of the theories 

 proposed to account for this wind, and a final 

 chapter describing analogous winds elsewhere. 

 The latter does not include any on this continent, 

 if Greenland be excepted. 



— Dr. Davenport, state analyst of Massachusetts. 

 Jias examined twenty advertised cures for the 

 opium-habit, and found that all but one contained 

 opium. This one was called ' double chloride of 

 gold,' but contained no trace of gold. 



— Superintendent Barringer's last report shows 

 that the number of children in Newark (N.J.) 

 of school age — between five and eighteen — is 

 42,263, an increase over the previous year of 454. 

 41 school-buildings are in use ; and 380 teachers, 

 of whom only 29 are males, are employed. The 

 total enrolment was 24,894, and the average per 

 cent of attendance, 89.2. 



— Lord Gifford, one of the judges of the Edin- 

 burgh court of session, who died recently, has be- 



queathed £80,000 to found lectureships on natural 

 theology at the four Scottish universities. Edin- 

 burgh gets £25,000 ; Glasgow and Aberdeen, £20,- 

 000 each; and St. Andrews, £15,000. 



— The Athenaeum states that the report on 

 education in the Bombay presidency for the year 

 1885-86, recently issued, is of unusual interest as 

 dealing with the important subjects of the trans- 

 fer of schools to local bodies, and the development 

 of technical education. With regard to the gen- 

 eral progress of education, the year's statistics are 

 the mobt favorable ever presented to the govern- 

 ment of Bombay. At the end of the year there 

 were 460,987 children in the schools connected 

 with the education department, the largest num- 

 ber previously recorded having been 438,416. One 

 specially favorable feature of the report is the 

 evidence it supplies of the progress of female edu- 

 cation, the number of girl pupils at the schools 

 having increased from 42,230 to 45,037. The 

 government consider that the report affords ample 

 proof of the capacity of private enterprise in re- 

 spect of the management of higher aided schools. 



— The Medical and surgical reporter records 

 the observations of Gelle in the relation between 

 sensibility of the tympanum and the direction 

 from which sound comes. When a sound strikes 

 the ear, it is referred to that part of the horizon 

 towards which the organ is directed at the mo- 

 ment of the most intense sensation. The knowl- 

 edge of the fact that the sound-producing body is 

 outside us, and the notion of the direction in which 

 it lies, are thus acquired at one and the same time. 

 How is the result obtained ? As a result of ex- 

 periments on two patients in Charcot's wards, 

 Gell6 concludes that the sensibility of the tym- 

 panum plays an important part in the effort to 

 perceive the direction of sound ; that the tym- 

 panum is sensitive to the vibrating sound-waves, 

 and this sensibility gives us the notion of exterior- 

 ity and of the direction of the sound. The pa- 

 tients were suffering with general anaesthesia, 

 and it was found that the drum-membrane might 

 be touched and pricked without the patient's hav- 

 ing the least sensation of pain or of contact. Al- 

 though the tick of a watch could be heard with 

 either ear, the patients were unable to say on which 

 side it was placed. 



— Mr. George J. Romanes has communicated to 

 the Linnean society the results of some experi- 

 ments made by him to test the sense of smell in 

 dogs. He finds that not only the feet, but the 

 whole body, of a man exhales a peculiar odor 

 which a dog can recognize as that of his master 

 amidst a crowd of other persons ; that the individ- 

 ual quality of this odor can be recognized at great 



