1870. | | Scientific News. | 343 
Parties will also be sent into Montana, the main breeding place 
of the destructive swarms periodically visiting the Western Mis- 
sissippi States. - 
— The cryptogamous division of the Herbarium of the Boston 
Society of Natural History has been enriched by the discovery 
of a valuable collection of lichens. This was formerly the lichen- 
herbarium of Dr. Thomas Taylor, an Irish botanist, to whom Sir 
W. J. and Sir Joseph Hooker communicated the whole of their 
expeditions. Dr. Taylor published descriptions of these plants 
in the London Journal of Botany, 1844-46, and many of the speci- 
mens are the originals of the descriptions. In 1850, Mr. John A. 
Lowell purchased the collection from Dr. Taylor's heirs, and it 
formed a part of the herbarium subsequently presented by him 
to the Society. The knowledge of the structure of lichens has 
been greatly advanced since Dr. Taylor’s day, by the use of the 
microscope, and the nomenclature has undergone extensive 
changes. This herbarium, though consisting of over a thousand 
Species, might have remained comparatively useless to the Ameri- 
country could have done, and has given it an authentic value 
otherwise unattainable. 
— The French Academy of Science has elected M. Marey, 
Professor of Animal Mechanics in the College de France, to M. 
Claude Bernard’s vacant chair. : 
—In a recent report to Parliament, it seems that last year 
21,682 fatal cases from the attacks of wild animals had occurred 
in ten provinces of India, the largest number being in Bengal, 
namely, 10,062. The deaths from snake bites alone in the Pun- 
jaub last year, were 828 against 979 in the preceding year. 
— As our readers are aware, the three great geological surveys 
under Hayden, Powell and Lt. Wheeler are, by Act of Congress, to 
be discontinued after the 30th of June, and to be replaced by a new 
U. S. Geological Survey in charge of Mr. Clarence King, late 
geologist of the Survey of the Fortieth Parallel. It was as far as 
we are aware the original understanding when the matter was re- 
ferred by Congress to the National Academy of Sciences to sim- 
ply consolidate the existing geological surveys, but the report of 
the Committee was so worded that these surveys were abolished 
VOL. XII1.—NO, Vv. 24 
