1896.] Editor's Table. 201 



or the revenues might be reduced or suspended. The teachings on 

 certain subjects might be interfered with or controlled by the appoint- 

 ing power, and the appointments to positions would probably become 

 political perquisites. Nothing more disastrous to the proper conduct 

 of a university can be imagined, and an institution established under 

 such conditions would soon cease to be a credit to the nation. We 

 hope that the project will not prevail, not only for these reasons but for 

 another. This is, that the Government has in connection with its 

 departments various commissions and bureaus, which occupy them- 

 selves with original scientific research in connection with the various 

 economic objects of their care. These should be continued and ex- 

 panded if possible, and not, as is sometimes the case, weakened by 

 insufficient appropriations. If the Government at Washington will 

 support this work it will be doing more for education than any univer- 

 sity can do, and will continue to add to its credit among nations in 

 the future as it has done in the past. 



— The X-rays of Roentgen will prove of some utility to some 

 branches of biological research by disclosing the characters of mineral 

 substances enclosed within the walls of animals and plants. A good 

 many characters of the skeleton, for instance, may be detected in 

 specimens which cannot be spared for maceration, and other applica- 

 tions will occur to both botanists and zoologists. We present, as an 

 illustration, a sciagraph of a species of sunfish (Lepomis), made by 

 Messrs Leeds and Stokes, of Queen & Co., of Philadelphia. 



— Another excellent journal, this time a French one, has been led 

 astray by attaching too much importance to the romances of the Ameri- 

 can newspaper reporter. We refer to the story published some months 

 ago by a San Francisco journal that a physician of that city had suc- 

 ceeded in grafting some snakes together by their tails. The fictitious 

 character of the narrative is demonstrated by the statement that the 

 said physician selected snakes in which the vertebral column does not 

 extend to the end of the tail. If the editor of the journal had referred 

 the question to the professors of the Museum of Paris, he would have 

 learned that snakes of this kind exist only in the imagination of the 

 author of the canard. 



— We published a statement some months ago that Mr. L. O. How- 

 ard of U. S. Dept. of Agriculture had discovered that the application 

 of oil to water where mosquitoes breed, destroys both the eggs and the 

 larvse of those pestilent insects. We are reminded by an exchange 

 that the alleged discovery was made by Mrs. Eugene Aaron in Phila- 



