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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



The Fnnction of a University. — Presi- 

 dent D. S. Jordan has a warning in one of 

 his recent papers against attaching too much 

 significance to numbers in estimating the 

 usefulness of a university. The kind of 

 work that students are doing is the really 

 important consideration. One student in 

 quaternions, or in Germanic philology, or 

 trained to carry a scientific investigation to 

 an end, is worth more than a dozen in trigo- 

 nometry, or stumbling over the elements in 

 Whitney's Grammar, or learning to analyze 

 flowers or identify the muscles of a cat. 

 Great numbers may mean crowded class- 

 rooms, overworked professors, and drudg- 

 ery, instead of investigation, and the univer- 

 sity a huge machine for lower education 

 rather than a center for the discovery and 

 dissemination of truth. " The highest func- 

 tion of the real university is that of instruc- 

 tion by investigation." 



Death of the Rev. M. J. Berkeley.— The 



Rev. M. J. Berkeley, the distinguished Eng- 

 lish botanist, died July 30th, at Sibbertoft, 

 near Market Harborough, in his eighty-sev- 

 enth year. While his knowledge was very 

 general, he was most eminent in crypto- 

 gamic botany, and particularly in the prov- 

 ince of the fungi, in which he was a leading 

 authority. He was born near Oundle in 

 1803. Having been graduated from Christ's 

 College, Cambridge, he took orders as a 

 clergyman, and occupied curacies in various 

 places, adding to his income at times by 

 taking pupils, and pursuing during his whole 

 life the scientific researches that have given 

 him fame. His earliest work was among 

 the mollusca, but he soon turned his atten- 

 tion to botany, particularly to the study and 

 classification of the cryptogams. Among his 

 earlier researches were those into the nature 

 of yeast and the vine mildew, the latter re- 

 sulting in the discovery of the sulphur rem- 

 edy. His descriptions of the British fungi 

 in Dr. Hooker's " British Flora," published 

 in 1836, constituted for more than twenty- 

 five years the only text-book on the subject 

 possessing any degree of completeness. The 

 portions of Lindley's " Vegetable Kingdom " 

 relating to fungi are also mainly Mr. Berke- 

 ley's work, and much of the matter relating 



to other orders of cryptogams was contrib- 

 uted by him. A more important and com- 

 prehensive work was his " Introduction to 

 Cryptogamic Botany," published in 1857. 

 He was associated with Lindley from an 

 early period in the preparation of articles 

 for the "Journal" of the Royal Horticult- 

 ural Society relating to the influence of 

 parasitical plants on growing crops and the 

 application of vegetable physiology to pur- 

 poses of cultivation. He was a valued con- 

 tributor and kind of advisory editor to the 

 " Gardener's Chronicle " from its establish- 

 ment in 1841 to within a few years of his 

 death; and in it he published a series of 

 articles on vegetable pathology, which have 

 not been collected. His researches on the 

 potato disease made clear that it was caused 

 by a fungus. Travelers became accustomed 

 to submit to him for examination the fungi 

 collected by them, and until within a year 

 or two of his death he continued to publish 

 descriptions of plants of this class from all 

 parts of the world. He is credited by the 

 " Athenaeum " with having been among the 

 first to recognize the necessity of studying 

 the whole life-history of the plants before 

 pronouncing a definite opinion as to their 

 place in a natural scheme of classification ; 

 and to advocate and practice the culture of 

 them for the observation of the transitions 

 of their forms. 



The Yellowstone Park Country.— Ac- 

 cording to Mr. Arnold Hague, geologist, the 

 country across the Yellowstone Park plateau 

 and the Absaroka Range presents a contin- 

 uous mountain mass seventy-five miles in 

 width, with an average elevation unsur- 

 passed by any area of equal extent in the 

 northern Rocky Mountains. It is exception- 

 ally situated to collect the moisture-laden 

 clouds which, coming from the southwest, 

 precipitate immense quantities of snow and 

 rain upon the cool table-land and neighbor- 

 ing mountains. The climate, in many re- 

 spects, is quite unlike that of the adjacent 

 country, the amount of snow and rainfall 

 being higher, and the mean annual tempera- 

 ture lower. Rain-storms occur frequently 

 throughout the summer, while snow is likely 

 to fall at any time between September and 

 May. Protected by the forests, the deep 

 snows of winter lie upon the plateau well 



