134 General Notes. [ February, 
weather the fungus would probably not have a deadly effect. 
The attention of our readers has never been called to Baron Osten 
Sacken’s second edition of the Catalogue of the described Dip- 
tera of North America, published about a year since by the 
Smithsonian Institution. It is invaluable as a work. of reference. 
American students in foreign laboratories do work of as high 
an order as their German, French or English fellow students of 
the same schools. No better work in embryology has been done 
than that comprised in Mr. C. O. Whitman’s essay on the embry- 
ology of the little leech, Clepsine. We now draw attention to 
the able paper of two recent Princeton graduates, Messrs. Scott and 
Osborn, who have worked up the early development of the com- 
mon European newt, published in the Quarterly Journal of Micro- 
scopic Science for July last, and now issued in pamphlet form. . 
ANTHROPOLOGY. ? 
Ravu’s PALENQUE TABLET..—The latest contribution to know- 
ledge issued by the Smithsonian Institution, is No. 331 of its 
publications, a quarto of seventy-six pages, by Dr. Charles Rau, 
on the Palenque Tablet in the United States National Museum. 
The contents of the work are as follows: “ Chapter 1—History 
of the Palenque Tablet; Chapter 11.—Explorations of Palenque ; 
Chapter 11.—The Temple of the Cross; Chapter 1v.—The Group 
of the Cross ; Chapter v.— Aboriginal writing in Mexico, Yucatan 
and Central America ; Appendix.—Notes on the Ruins of Yuca- 
tan and Central America.” In the first chapter we have a minute 
relation of the manner in which the tablet found its way from the 
Temple of the Cross to its present position in the National Mu- 
seum. In the second chapter Dr. Rau gives a narration of the 
various explorations .of these interesting ruins. The name 
_ Palenque is derived from a village about eight miles away, called 
Santo Domingo del Palenque. The ruins were discovered in 
1750, by a party of Spaniards, and surveyed for the first time by 
order of Ramon de Ordoñez in 1773-1784. The first explora- 
tion which lead to any result was that of Capt. Antonio del Rio 
in 1787; his manuscript was published in London, in 1822, with 
drawings from Castañeda, the artist of Dupaix. Capt. William 
Dupaix, in 1808, visited Palenque, with an artist named Castaneda. 
The MSS. and drawings will be found in Vols. rv, v, vi, of Kings- 
borough. Baron de Waldeck lived two years at Palenque making 
surveys and sketches, 1832-4. His plates, with text by De Bour- 
bourg, was published in Paris, in 1866, by the French Govern- 
ment. 
When Dupaix visited Palenque the three slabs constituting the 
Group of the Cross were all in place. But at the time of Wal- 
deck’s visit, the right one, now called the Smithsonian Tablet, 
1 Edited by Prof. Or1s T. Mason, Columbian College, Washington, D. C. 
