Apkil 3, 1885.] 



SCIENCE. 



283 



NOTES AND NEWS. 



It is announced that the next meeting of the Amer- 

 ican association for the advancement of science will 

 be held on Aug. 26 and following days, at Ann Arbor, 

 Mich. The vote of the association at the Philadelphia 

 meeting was to hold the 1885 meeting at Bar Harbor, 

 Mount Desert Island, Me., provided suitable accom- 

 modations could be secured; but, failing that, the 

 meeting would be held at Ann Arbor. The decision 

 was left to the permanent secretary. The correspond- 

 ence of this officer has developed the fact that it 

 would be quite impossible to hold the meeting at Bar 

 Harbor in August, as the hotels would be overcrowd- 

 ed. It would only be possible in July or in the latter 

 part of September. The decision to meet at Ann 

 Arbor was also re-enforced by the invitations which 

 have been received from the mayor of that city, and 

 the president of the University of Michigan, cordially 

 urging the association to decide to visit that place; 

 and, as the meeting will fall in vacation, there will 

 be ample accommodations, as fifteen hundred stu- 

 dents and four hundred members of professors' fami- 

 lies are cared for in term-time. The university offers 

 to open its halls for the sectional meetings. There is 

 no doubt that the association will thoroughly approve 

 the decision of the permanent secretary. 



— Mr. J. A. Allen, who for many years has had 

 charge of mammals and birds at the Museum of 

 comparative zoology at Cambridge, has accepted 

 the curatorship of mammalogy and ornithology in 

 the American museum of natural history in New 

 York, where he will enter upon his new duties about 

 May 1. 



— The friends of rational work in physiology have 

 achieved well-merited success in the university of 

 Oxford. Early in March, in an overflowing ' convo- 

 cation,' says Nature, the battle of vivisection was 

 fought out a third time. The victory of sound sense 

 over false sentiment has again been won ; and on 

 this occasion the vote is unmistakable. In spite 

 of the most vigorous exertions of the opponents of 

 physiology, the decree to endow the physiological 

 laboratory — as the other scientific departments in 

 the university are endowed — has been carried by the 

 large majority of one hundred and sixty-eight. The 

 dean of Christchurch opened the debate in a moderate 

 speech recommending the grant. He pointed out 

 that the vote was for teaching-purposes, and in no 

 way concerned vivisection ; for Professor Burdon San- 

 derson had given the most complete assurances that 

 he would not use painful experiments on living ani- 

 mals for the x>urposes of teaching. Canon Liddon 

 opposed the decree, on the ground that the council 

 should have introduced further safeguards against 

 the indiscriminate use of vivisection. He admitted 

 that vivisection was justified in certain cases, and 

 spoke of it as a painful necessity. The bishop of Ox- 

 ford denied the moral right of man to inflict pain in 

 order to advance knowledge, and declared vivisection 

 to be degrading to the sensibility and humanity of 

 the operator. The vote was supported by Professor 



Dicey and Sir W. Anson, and unintentionally dam- 

 aged by Dr. Acland. The last speakers were much 

 interrupted by a clamor which prevented their re- 

 marks being heard. The announcement of the result 

 — placets, 412; non-placets, 244 — was received with 

 great enthusiasm, both in the arena and in the un- 

 dergraduates' gallery. It is to be hoped that this 

 decisive vote will put an end to the warfare waged 

 against the teaching of physiology in Oxford. 



— In an article in the March number of the North- 

 American review, on 'the moral aspects of vivisec- 

 tion,' treated solely from an ethical point of view, 

 Prof. Noah K. Davis concludes that " whoever hinders 

 the physiologist in his duties by exciting public odium, 

 commits a trespass on him, and on society at large, in 

 whose interest he is laboring, and so does a multiplied 

 wrong." 



— The journal of the English Society of arts, in 

 speaking of the testing of house-drains by smoke in 

 order to ascertain whether the joints are tight, de- 

 scribes the ' Innis' smoke-rocket,' which can be used 

 in place of the iron vessel for fire, and the pump or 

 fan for forcing the smoke into the drain, and which 

 is found to be much more handy and simple. The 

 rocket is made of a composition that will generate 

 an abundance of smoke, packed in its case hard 

 enough to burn ten minutes, thus giving time for the 

 inspector to light it, introduce it into the drain, insert 

 a plug behind it, walk through the house to inspect 

 the joints, and finally reach the roof, where the smoke 

 is issuing from the soil-pipe. A wet cloth thrown 

 over the top of this pipe may be used to cause a slight 

 pressure in the pipes below, and thus render the test 

 more severe. Such a test would appear to be more 

 satisfactory than the introduction of peppermint-oil, 

 and to imitate the action of sewer-gas in attempting 

 to pass the usual traps. 



— The Academy announces the initial number of a 

 journal entitled Parallax, and supposably intended to 

 be published monthly. It is edited by Mr. John 

 Hampden, the valiant champion of the theory that 

 the earth is a circular plane. The Academy is dis- 

 posed to welcome the new periodical, as the profes- 

 sedly comic papers have been painfully dull of late. 

 Mr. Hampden retains all his well-known ingenuity 

 of vituperative expression. To call Sir Isaac Newton 

 'a fanatical pantheist' is a happy thought which 

 would certainly not have occurred to everybody. 



— We learn from Nature that the trade in children 

 within the province of Yakutsk is the subject of an 

 interesting note in a recent number of the Izviestiya. 

 The Irkutsk geographical society had received a note 

 from one of its members, who thus depicted the lot 

 of girls within the province : In the last century the 

 poorest Yakute, who had no means of supporting a 

 large family, took his new-born child in a covering 

 of birch-bark, and hung it on a tree in the forest to 

 die from hunger. But the richer Kussian merchants 

 began to buy children from their poorer Yakute 

 clients, and so several Russians purchased whole 

 families of servants. This custom induced the 

 Yakute communities to take care of the poorest chil- 



