538 



SCIENCE, 



I Vol. IV., No. 97. 



seriously I speak of it. I look upon our English 

 system as a wickedly brain-destroying piece of bond- 

 age under which we suffer. The reason why we con- 

 tinue to use it is the imaginary difficulty of making 

 a change, and nothing else; but I do not think in 

 America that any such difficulty should stand in the 

 way of adopting so splendidly useful a reform." 



— Professor George Davidson of the Coast and 

 geodetic survey, San Francisco, informs us that the 

 account of the volcanic eruption of Mount St. Au- 

 gustin, Cook's Inlet, Alaska, prepared by him, and 

 published in Science, No. 54, Feb. 15, 1884, was wholly 

 derived from an account by Capt. Sands, and is seri- 

 ously in error. It appears that Capt. Sands saw the 

 eruption only from a distance of about fifty miles, in 

 unfavorable weather, and therefore derived his in- 

 formation about details from the natives or from his 

 imagination. The splitting of the island in twain, 

 the formation of new islands, etc., appear not to have 

 occurred. According to Capt. Cullie of the Alaska 

 commercial company, who visited the island, there 

 has been a great land-slide on the north-north-west 

 side of the mountain, leaving a precipitous bluff over 

 which has poured lava and eruptive matter filling up 

 tbe rocky boat-cove there. He further reports that 

 a reef running westward, and formerly submerged, 

 is now elevated to tbe sea-surface. The volcano 

 above the great slide was actively smoking or steam- 

 ing at the time of his visit last summer. This infor- 

 mation is in confirmation of that printed in Science, 

 No. 73, June 27, 1884. 



— Lord Rayleigh has resigned the Cavendish pro- 

 fessorship of experimental physics at Cambridge, 

 Eng. 



— The department of biology of the University of 

 Pennsylvania was formally opened on the 4th with 

 an inaugural address by Professor Harrison Allen, 

 one of the principal promoters of the enterprise. 



— Mr. H. E. Dore of Portland, Ore., has discov- 

 ered Zonites cellaria Muller somewhat abundantly 

 in that city, while tbe native helices appear to be 

 receding from the vicinity of civilization. The in- 

 truder, now for the first time reported from that 

 region, is a European species living in damp places, 

 and apparently with a penchant for travel. It was 

 introduced at Charleston, S.C., nearly a century ago, 

 and described by Say as a new species. It has been 

 found along our eastern coast in many cities, and 

 in Manila, Japan, the Hawaiian Islands, and many 

 other widely distant regions which are visited by 

 European ships, and seems to flourish equally well 

 everywhere. 



— In the journal of the Anthropological institute 

 of Great Britain for November, 1884, Dr. Flower dis- 

 cusses the size of teeth as a race-character in man. 

 His observations were made upon all those skulls, out 

 of the three thousand in the collection of the museum 

 of the Royal college of surgeons, which retained the 

 bicuspid and molar teeth of either side in the upper 

 jaw. These five teeth he measured in a straight line 

 along the crowns, from the anterior margin of the first 



bicuspid to the posterior margin of the last molar, to 

 get the ' dental length.' This absolute length is not 

 sufficient in comparing races, for smaller races might 

 naturally be supposed to have smaller teeth ; so that it 

 was necessary to find some standard of length as indi- 

 cating the general size of the cranium, with which to 

 compare the dental length. For this purpose, there 

 was chosen the length of the base of the skull from 

 the anterior margin of the foramen magnum to the 

 point where the nasal bones are set upon the frontal. 

 The expression in figures, of the proportion between 

 the length of these five teeth and that of the base of 

 the skull, is known as the ' dental index.' The aver- 

 age dental indices of the human races represented 

 in the collections examined range between forty and 

 forty-eight: and for convenience of classification they 

 are divided into microdont, with proportionally small 

 teeth, index below forty-two ; mesodont, with me- 

 dium-sized teeth, index between forty-two and for- 

 ty-four; megadont, with large teeth, index above 

 forty-four. Six gorillas, six chimpanzees, and as 

 many orangs, examined, were found to be strongly 

 megadont; while a male siamang proved to have mo- 

 lar teeth scarcely larger, in proportion to the skull, 

 than the higher races of man. The megadont human 

 races are the Tasmanians, Australians, Andamanese, 

 and Melanesians of various islands. The mesodont 

 races are the African negroes of all parts; Malays of 

 Java, Sumatra, etc.; American Indians of all parts; 

 and the Chinese. The microdont races are the low- 

 caste natives of central and southern India; the Poly- 

 nesians; the ancient Egyptians; mixed Europeans, 

 not British ; and the British. While the separation 

 into groups is necessarily arbitrary, it seems to be not 

 wholly unnatural, since it accords in a general way 

 with the familiar classification based on color; the 

 microdont section including all the so-called Cauca- 

 sian or white races, the mesodont the Mongolian or 

 yellow races, while the megadont is composed exclu- 

 sively of the black races, including the Australians. 



— The Royal academy of sciences in Turin cele- 

 brated its hundredth year in July, 1883, and, in com- 

 memoration of its centennial, has issued a quarto 

 volume of nearly six hundred pages. In this may be 

 found biographical sketches of the three founders of 

 the academy, — La Grange, the famous mathema- 

 tician; Saluzzo di Monesiglio, the physician and 

 chemist; and Cigna, the anatomist and natural phi- 

 losopher. The two first named were successively 

 presidents of the academy ; and they were followed by 

 Morozzo, a physician and mathematician. His name 

 is followed by that of Napoleon Bonaparte, who was 

 chosen president while he was first consul. A brief 

 history of the academy is given, and lists of the 

 officers and members, an analytical table of the 

 contents of the society's transactions, and, finally, an 

 elaborate alphabetical index to names and subjects, 

 mentioned in the transactions. Among the associates 

 of the academy are our countrymen, James D. Dana 

 and George Bancroft, who are foreign members, and 

 William D. Whitney, who is a corresponding member. 



— Prof. T. C. Mendenhall has been appointed chief 

 electrician of the U. S. signal-bureau. 



