432 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



M. Charles Richet, editor of the " Re- 

 vue Scientifique," Paris, is investigating he- 

 redity in man, and invites information from 

 correspondents respecting remarkable in- 

 stances of the transmission of powers. 



"Vegetable musk" is made from the 

 seeds of the Hibiscus abelmoschus, a mal- 

 vaceous plant. The ancient Egyptians used 

 to chew the seeds to stimulate their appe- 

 tites and make their breath fragrant, and 

 they regarded them as aphrodisiac and as- 

 tringent. Previous to the French Revolution, 

 when it was the fashion to powder the hair, 

 the seeds, called ambrette, were mixed with 

 starch and kept till the starch had absorbed 

 a suitable proportion of their perfume, when 

 the seeds were removed and the musky- 

 odored starch was put up in packets for sale. 

 Ambrette is now imported in large quantities 

 into Europe, and is used in the preparation 

 of the alkermes of Florence, and to adulter- 

 ate musk. 



"How Sea -Birds dine" is described in 

 " Nature " by a correspondent who caught 

 them in the act off the island of Mull. Ob- 

 serving them collected at a single spot, he 

 steamed toward it, and found that the center 

 of their gathering was a reddish-brown ball, 

 about two feet under the surface, composed 

 of herring-fry, which had been driven into 

 that shape by the divers surrounding the 

 shoal and hemming them in on all sides, " so 

 that the terrified fish huddled together in a 

 vain effort to escape inevitable destruction. 

 The divers work from below and the other 

 sea-birds feed from above ; and, as in some 

 cases after the birds had been at work for 

 some time I saw no ball, I suppose not one 

 •fish is left to tell the tale." The observation 

 was repeated several times. 



Asayama, one of the most noted volcanoes 

 in Japan, is the loftiest mountain in the 

 country which is in a constant state of ac- 

 tivity, and is nearest to the capital, and is 

 also situated in a district that is famous for 

 its health resorts. A correspondent who 

 visited it describes the roar on approaching 

 the edge of the crater as not unlike the 

 noise produced by the passage of a railway- 

 train across a bridge under which one is 

 standing. There was no shaking, but loud 

 hissing and bubbling constantly proceeded 

 from numberless vapor-jets in the inner face 

 of the crater-wall. The estimates of the 

 diameter of the opening vary widely. The 

 present crater is apparently the youngest 

 and innermost of three. 



The important treatise of Buys Ballot 

 on the distribution of temperature over the 

 earth contains very plain cartographic rep- 

 resentations of the variations of tempera- 

 tures from means of the parallels and the 

 difference between the temperatures of Janu- 

 ary and July. The least variations in the 

 latter point are on the equator, and the great- 

 est are in northeastern Asia (60°) and north- 



western America (40°), and in the southern 

 hemisphere, in Australia. 



OBITUARY NOTES. 



Mr. Robert Damar, of Weymouth, Eng- 

 land, a well-known naturalist and geologist, 

 died May 4th, in his seventy-fifth year. He 

 was an extensive traveler and assiduous col- 

 lector. Among the collections he made were 

 a series of fossil fishes from the cretaceous 

 beds of the Lebanon, Syria ; the most com- 

 plete specimen of the extinct Steller's sea- 

 cow, from Behring Island ; and a scries, 

 called complete, of the fishes of the Caspian 

 Sea. He had lately purchased the zoological 

 collections forming the Godeffroy Museum 

 in Hamburg, and had perhaps the largest col- 

 lection in England of recent shells. Be was 

 the author of a work on the " Geology of Wey- 

 mouth and the Island of Portland." He was 

 contemplating, at the time of his death, an- 

 other trip to Siberia, to procure an entire 

 mammoth's skeleton. 



Among recent deaths of scientific men in 

 Europe are those of the Finnish botanist, 

 Prof. Sextus Otto Lindberg; and Dr. Her- 

 mann Theodor Gayler, Director of the Botan- 

 ical Gardens at Frankfort. 



Warren De La Rue, F. R. S., an emi- 

 nent English physicist, died April 19th, aged 

 about sixty -three years. He was born in 

 Guernsey and educated in Paris; was in- 

 terested in photographic observations of so- 

 lar eclipses and of the transit of Venus in 

 1874; was associated with Prof. Balfour 

 Stewart and Mr. B. Loweny in the publica- 

 tion of " Researches in Solar Physics " ; car- 

 ried on a series of researches on the electric 

 discharge, the results of which were commu- 

 nicated to the Royal Society and the French 

 Academy ; was for two years President of 

 the Royal and for eleven of the Chemical 

 Society, and for three years a member of 

 the Council of the Society of Arts ; and was 

 a corresponding member of several foreign 

 scientific societies. 



Prof. Franz Cornelius Donders, of the 

 University of Utrecht, a distinguished phys- 

 iologist and ophthalmologist, died March 

 24th, in the seventy-first year of his age. 

 He studied in the Netherlands Military Hos- 

 pital School and the university, and was a pro- 

 fessor at Leyden and afterward at Utrecht. 

 He was the author of many works, among 

 them an inaugural dissertation on " Harmony 

 of Animal Life " ; " Dutch Contributions to 

 Anatomical and Physiological Knowledge " ; 

 " Metabolism of Tissue as the Source of the 

 Proper Heat of Plants and Animals " ; trea- 

 tises in optics, including his great work on 

 " Anomalies of Refraction and Accommoda- 

 tion"; and technical and special essays. He 

 has been called the first surgeon who ap- 

 proached the subject of lenses as aids to vis- 

 ion in a truly scientific spirit. 



