i;8 



SCIENCE. 



io6^° Fahrenheit. The disorder is not fatal, it hardly 

 requires any treatment even ; only in debilitated or 

 very old animals, or such as are overworked by inhu- 

 man owners, may fatal complications arise. Few 

 deaths have taken place ; a veterinarian in Yorkville 

 who has visited stables containing an aggregate of a 

 thousand affected horses, has had but a single death, 

 that of an animal overdriven while convalescing, and 

 in which pulmonary congestion resulted. 



There is as yet no proof that the affection is con- 

 tageous ; it is rather endemic than epidemic. The 

 rapidity with which it has successively appeared in 

 Boston, New York and Chicago, speaks more in favor 

 of an atmospheric cause than of transmission by con- 

 tagion. A Boston microscopist asserts that bacteria 

 or micrococci are active factors in its transmission, but 

 he makes the statement, rather as an inference, than 

 on the basis of observation. The same veterinarian, 

 to whom we owe the communication of several facts 

 here mentioned, tried to inoculate his own horse with 

 the disease, by introducing the discharged matter 

 from sick horses into its air passages, and failed in 

 this and other experiments of the same kind. It is 

 also observed that the endemic has appeared more 

 frequently and affected more horses in large, well 

 ventilated stables, in which the influence of outside 

 changes in the temperature is quickly felt, than in 

 close and confined quarters where the air is, if more 

 impure, warmer, and the oscillations of the outside 

 temperature less suddenly made manifest than in the 

 former. 



As far as this city is concerned, the acme of the 

 endemic is past, and owners of horses frightened by 

 sensational reports in the daily papers are recovering 

 their wonted composure. If it has done nothing else 

 the distemper has taught the one lesson, that when a 

 horse is ill, the policy of getting as much work out of 

 him as possible is, not to speak of its barbarity, ex- 

 ceedingly short-sighted, for no vigorous animals have 

 perished in this endemic, except such as those in 

 whose case this " penny wise, pound foolish " idea 

 had been carried out. 



Professor Edward C. Pickering, ofCambridgej 



describes a novel celestial object observed by him on 

 the 28th of August last, which presented a faint con 

 tinuOUS spectrum with a bright hand near each c\)i}. 

 Clouds interfered, and barely permitted an identifica- 

 tion with Oeltzen 17681, or a position in 1880 of 



K. A., 18I1. 1 m. 17s. ; Dec, 21 16'. 



The objei I might he mistaken for a temporary star, 

 like that in Corona in 1863, and the bands assumed 

 . 1 respond to the Hydrogen lines C and F. Pro- 

 fessor Pickering appeared to be unable to determine 



whether it was a nebula, a mass of incandescent gas 

 resembling a nebula in character but not in constitu- 

 tion, or whether it was a star with a vast atmosphere 

 of incandescent gas of a material not as yet known to 

 us. The discovery of this object, in his opinion, 

 greatly increases the difficulty of distinguishing be- 

 tween a star and a planetary nebula. 



The observation was made on the 24th of August 

 and described on the 2d of September, but in conse- 

 quence of the fact that Professor Pickering sent his 

 communication to a foreign journal, three thousand 

 miles away, it was thus the second week in October 

 when it came before the American public. 



SCIENCE IN FRANCE AND GERMANY. 



Dr. C. K. Akin has written a series of letters from 

 Pesth to Professor G. C. Stokes, Secretary to the Royal 

 Society, wrio was one ot the Royal Commission on 

 Scientific Instruction. These letters are dated 1870, but 

 are now published for the first time by The Journal of 

 Science, London. 



In what may be called a supplemental communication 

 Dr. Akin describes the condition of the most prominent 

 scientific institutions in France and Germany. His 

 remarks on the system of centralization, and abuse of 

 the authority of those who profess an infallibility in 

 respect to the human mind will be read with interest. 



He states that these scientific magnates, the recognized 

 "authority" in Germany, instead of rendering encour- 

 agement to students, positively check and impede all 

 progress outside of their own circle, keep out new men 

 with novel ideas as long as possible, so as to hold their 

 own sway. 



But we will leave Dr. Akin to make his own state- 

 ment : 



" The French Academy is in some respects similar to 

 the Royal Society, and the points in which it differs 

 from the latter are not, in my opinion, to its advantage. 

 In the first place, the members of the Academy are 

 salaried by the Government, but their emoluments are 

 not sufficient to live upon, or to keep them, so to speak, 

 in working order ; nor do they perform any specific 

 service to Science or the State for the money. The 

 Academy, next, is divided into a certain number of sec- 

 tions, according to the several branches of science, and 

 the number of members in each section is strictly 

 limited. As that subdivision is invariable, while the 

 relative importance of the sciences is fluctuating, the 

 abuse has crept in of electing members into a wrong 

 division. On the other hand, such a proceeding not 

 being always practicable, highly distinguished men are 

 excluded from the Academy for many years if their 

 proper sections happen to be full ; while if, from the 

 dearth of cultivators or accidents of mortality, the num- 

 ber of vacancies happens to be great, the standard of 

 admission is considerably lowered. The Academy pub- 

 lishes weekly its proceedings or " Comtes Rendus," 

 which, from the celerity and regularity of their publica- 

 tion, are a valuable means of conveying rapid infor- 

 mation ; on the contrary, its transactions or " Memoires" 

 arc issued in a very irregular and dilatory manner. 

 I he practice of examining and reporting upon commu- 

 nications submitted has fallen into almost complete 

 disuse ; and the prizes, which are in a considerable 

 number, are in a great part awarded upon the anti- 

 quated principle ol putting forth questions. I have thus 

 rapidly drawn the most distinctive features of the French 



