September 12, 1884.] 



SCIENCE, 



265 



the work was undertaken with eight men, the remain- 

 der of the caravan waiting for Giraud near Kazembe. 

 Harassed by the natives, their boat was finally aban- 

 doned near the cat aract of Mombottuta. At ten days' 

 march they reached the chief of the Muaumi, who 

 detained them in semi-captivity two months. Finally 

 escaping, they crossed Itahua, and reached Tangan- 

 yika and Karema by the 14th of February last. Gi- 

 raud intended to remain there about a month, then to 

 return to M'para, and attempt to reach Leopoldville 

 by traversing Marungu and the Lualaba on about the 

 6th parallel. 



— Bishop Levinhac has left Tabora, and is momen- 

 tarily expected at Zanzibar. The stations under his 

 supervision were nourishing at last accounts, as were 

 those of the Peres du Saint-Esprit. 



— ' Bird nomenclature of the Chippewa Indians ' is 

 the heading of an instructive linguistic article in- 

 serted by W. W. Cooke in the July number of the 

 Auk. The Ojibwe names of one hundred and twenty- 

 six birds, most of them with their etymologies, are 

 enumerated in this paper; and it may be safely said 

 that only a naturalist can obtain the Indian equiva- 

 lents of so many species with so much accuracy as 

 we see it done by Cooke. These Indians give names 

 to all winter residents, since at that time bird-life is 

 so scarce that each one is accurately noticed; but of 

 summer residents they know with distinctness only 

 those hunted for food. 



As stated by Cooke, nearly one-half of the bird 

 names given by Bishop Baraga in his celebrated 

 Ojibwe dictionary have wrong definitions. If true, 

 this will go to show, that, to take down correctly the 

 Indian equivalents for objects of nature, the collector 

 has to be a linguist and a naturalist at the same time; 

 but it is by no means certain that the Indian names 

 of birds and other animals do not sometimes shift 

 from one object to another similar one. Ridgway, 

 Cope, Gabb, and others have paid considerable atten- 

 tion to the gathering of Indian terms of natural his- 

 tory; and it is desirable that other naturalists follow 

 their example, giving the etymology of each name, if 

 traceable. 



— Many local names occurring along the Mosel 

 and the Middle Rhine have, through their quaint and 

 foreign sounds, proved attractive to historians and lin- 

 guists. Hubert Marjan, their most recent investiga- 

 tor, has just published the fourth instalment of his 

 critical researches (Rheinische ortsnamen, 39 p.) on 

 the subject, in which he follows the only true method 

 to disclose the origin of names, which is the historic 

 one. The early orthographies of names, as found in 

 Roman authors and in the more ancient mediaeval 

 parchments, necessarily come nearer to the original 

 forms than the name-forms we use to-day: hence 

 Marjan bases his conclusions upon the earlier forms, 

 and in the majority of instances his results meet our 

 approval. The most ancient topographic names of 

 these parts are Celtic; but the names of Low-Latin 

 and Romance origin far exceed the Celtic ones in 

 number, the German names being late additions. 

 Thus Nehren is derived from nucaria{silva), ' walnut- 



grove;' Tholey from tilietum, 'linden-grove;' Kar- 

 meten from carpinetwn, 'horn-beech grove;' Znns 

 from uncia, 'agricultural field;' Ulpenich from Ul- 

 pius, a man's name. In the mountainous tracts of 

 the Hunsriick, Maifeld, and Eifel, our author dis- 

 covers a considerable sprinkling of Slavic names, but 

 neglects to follow up their etymons through all the 

 eight or ten Slavic dialects known to us. The exist- 

 ence of Slavic names in these western countries is 

 explained by the historic fact, that, after a Gothic 

 war, the emperor Constantinus settled three hundred 

 thousand Sarmatae in various parts of the Roman 

 dominions, a part of which can be historically traced 

 to the Hunsriick and to the plateau of Langres in 

 France (about A.D. 334). Prof. A. Bacmeister had 

 previously (1870) attempted to trace local names of 

 Bavaria and eastern Wurtemberg to a Slavic origin. 



— We reproduce from La Nature a cut illustrating 

 an experiment which shows the pressure of the air 

 most markedly. A thin strip of board is rested on 

 the edge of a table, its inner end being covered by a 



sheet of paper, as shown. When arranged in this 

 manner, it will be found that a sharp blow may be 

 given the board, without effect, even if it would fall 

 of its own weight without the paper. 



— At a meeting of the Royal astronomical society 

 on June 13, Mr. Ranyard read a paper on the cause 

 of blurred patches in instantaneous photographs of 

 the sun. If the image of a bright star in a reflect- 

 ing telescope is observed out of focus, ripples of light 

 may be seen passing across the bright disk, which is 

 really an image of the speculum, with the flat pro- 

 jected on its centre. That these ripples are due to 

 the unequal refraction of heated air-currents, Mr. 

 Ranyard showed by placing a hot iron in the tube 

 of the telescope, which increases the distinctness of 

 the ripples, as well as the velocity with which they 

 move across the image. In the image of a uniform 

 bright disk, their effect is to give rise to areas of greater 

 and less brightness, which float across the field as 

 the heated air rises. This was proved by means of 

 instantaneous photographs of the sun, taken with a 

 heated iron in the mouth of the telescope, and when 

 the sun was near to the heated roof of a house. 



