724 General Notes. [ November, — 
_with four additional Esquimaux and their families, making in all 
sixteen souls with four sledges and about sixty dogs, started for 
King William Land. 
GEOGRAPHICAL News.—The long sojourn of the Russian troops 
in Bulgaria and Roumelia has been fruitful of results to geograph- 
ical knowledge. A series of astronomical and geodetic observa- 
tions have fairly completed a network of triangulation and maps, 
based on the data thus obtained, which will soon appear. The 
council of the Royal Geographical Society have determined to 
provide instruction in surveying and mapping, including the fixing 
of positions by astronomical observations, for those of their 
countrymen about to visit the less known portions of the globe. 
Commander V. L. Cameron, the well known African explorer, 
the Academy states, has made an interesting journey throug 
Syria and along the Tigris to Bagdad, in order to ascertain the 
practicability of a railroad from the Mediterranean to the Persian 
ulf. He found that there were no physical difficulties in the 
way, and that the local traffic alone would prove remunerative. 
The committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund (English) 
will issue a subscriptional large paper edition of their survey of 
Western Palestine. The number of copies will be limited to 250. 
The work will comprise six or more quarto volumes and the 
great map in twenty-six sheets. The price will be twelve guineas. 
No cheaper edition is to be published. The American Survey 
map of Eastern Palestine is to appear in the same form a little 
later——H. M. S. Alert, Sir George Nares commander, on her 
voyage to Magellan straits, in the autumn of 1878, took sound- 
ings over the Hotspur and Victoria banks. These singular iso- 
lated shoal banks, lying between the parallels of 18° and 21° S., 
and distant fifty to sixty leagues from the South American con- 
tinent, average in their depths from twenty-five to thirty and 
thirty-five fathoms, and so far as explored are composed of dead 
coral worn down to a level surface and smoothed with a very thin 
incrustation of fine Polyzoa. The observations of Sir George 
Nares lead him to infer that these banks were once reefs of living 
coral with shallow water over them which have subsided to their 
present depth, but that the subsidence was too rapid for the reef- 
building coral animals to keep pace therewith, and the banks are 
now at too great a depth for the coral to exist. ` 
; MICROSCOPY.! 
Tue Posrat Microscoprcat Crus.—This club, whose work 
was: suspended last winter on account of postal difficulties, has 
resumed its operations again. It was presumed by many t at 
the effect of the new postal law which went into effect last spring - 
would be to permit the mailing of slides as heretofore. It was 
found, how , that the singl odent} which hadalwaysbeen 
-1 This department is edited by Dr. R. H. Warp, Troy, N. Y. 
