370 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. V., No. 117. 



TIF LIS AND BAKU. 



After haviog laboriously waded through 

 half a dozen of the ponderous tomes with 

 which English travellers — and American too, 

 for that matter — conscientiously afflict man- 

 kind, it is realty a pleasure to take up this 

 light, and we fear ephemeral, narrative of 

 the exploits of Mr. Orsolle. To be sure, 

 there are few dates and no statistics in the 

 volume. Neither are there any pictures, not 

 even a portrait of the author. There is a 

 map, but as it was evidently drawn to illus- 

 trate a condition of affairs considerably ante- 

 rior to our author's journey, and as no attempt 

 seems to have been made to adapt it to the 

 book it accompanies, it is of little use ; nev- 

 ertheless, it is a good map, in its way, and, 

 a few years ago, might have been regarded 

 with a more favorable e3'e. 



It was in Jul} 7 , 1882, that Orsolle said good- 

 by to his mother, and made the best of his 

 way to the ' gare du nord,' where his trav- 

 elling companion, M. Ad. Nihlein joined him. 

 Thence by Cracow, Odessa, and Sebastopol, 

 he proceeded to Poti, where he arrived on the 

 14th of August. From Poti, at that time the 

 Black-Sea terminus of the Caucasus railway, 

 he journeyed to Tiflis. His description of the 

 latter place occupies a dozen pages, and will 

 well repay a cursory perusal. At Titlis he left 

 the railroad, and travelled in the manner of the 

 country, which he found much more agreeable 

 than did O'Donovan, to Kars, the ruins of 

 the ancient city of Ani, of which a plan is 

 given, and Erivan. Thence, by a route not 

 to be traced on the l Carte pour le voyage 

 de M. Orsolle,' he found his way to the Tifiis- 

 Baku railway, and eventually to the Caspian 

 itself. 



There are many descriptions of Baku in the 

 books, but none so interesting as this. M. 

 Orsolle does not tell us how many gallons of 

 oil are refined per hour, nor does he go into 

 the details of the use of the refuse products 

 of that distillation on the Caspian steamers. 

 He gives no information on such points ; but 

 he does tell us what Baku is like, who its den- 

 izens are, and how they eat, drink, play, bathe, 

 and exist. We say exist, because, judging 

 from this description, it is a bare existence that 

 the Bakunians lead in their naphtha-soaked 

 town, which, he says, is destined to become the 

 Marseilles of the Caspian. 



The remainder of the book is devoted to 

 Teheran and north-western Persia, and pos- 

 sesses no especial interest at the present time. 



Le Caucase et la Perse. Par E. Orsolle. Paris, Plon, 1885. 



NOTES AND NEWS. 



The following is a complete list of the papers read 

 at the meeting of the National academy of sciences, 

 April 21-24:- J. S. Billings and Dr. Matthews, U.S.A., 

 Methods of measuring the cubic capacity of crania; 

 S. H. Scudder, Winged insects from a paleontological 

 point of view; A. S. Packard, The Syncarida, a hith- 

 erto undescribed group of extinct malacostracous 

 Crustacea, The Gampsonychidae, an undescribed 

 family of fossil schizopod Crustacea, The Anthra- 

 caridae, a family of carboniferous macrurous decapod 

 Crustacea, allied to the Eryonidae; Alexander Agas- 

 siz, The coral reefs of the Sandwich Islands, The ori- 

 gin of the fauna and flora of the Sandwich Islands; 

 T. Sterry Hunt, The classification of natural silicates; 

 Elias Loomis, The cause of the progressive move- 

 ment of areas of low pressure; C. B. Comstock, 

 The ratio of the metre to the yard ; C. H. F. Peters, 

 An account of certain stars observed by Flamsteed, 

 supposed to have disappeared; J. E. Hilgard and 

 A. Lindenkohl, The submarine geology of the ap- 

 proaches to New York; Theodore Gill, The orders of 

 fishes; J. W. Powell, The organization of the tribe; 

 G. W. Hill, On certain lunar inequalities due to the 

 action of Jupiter, and discovered by Mr. E. Neison, 

 E. D. Cope, The pretertiary Vertebrata of Brazil, 

 The phylogeny of the placental Mammalia; C. A. 

 Young, Some recent observations upon the rotation 

 and surface-markings of Jupiter ; H. A. Rowland, 

 On the value of the ohm ; F. A. Genth and Gerhard 

 vom Rath, On the vanadium minerals — vanadinite, 

 endlichite, and descloizite — and on iodyrite, from 

 the Sierra Grande Mine, Lake Valley, N. Mex. ; A. N. 

 Skinner (by invitation), On the total solar eclipse of 

 Aug. 28, 1886; Theodore Gill and John A. Ryder, 

 The evolution and homologies of the flukes of ceta- 

 ceans and sirenians; Ira Remsen, Chemical action 

 in a magnetic field; A. Graham Bell, The measure- 

 ment of hearing-power; A. Graham Bell and F. Delia 

 Torre, On the possibility of obtaining echoes from 

 ships and icebergs in a fog. The following biographi- 

 cal notices of deceased members were also presented: 

 of Dr. J. J. Woodward, U.S.A., by J. S. Billings; of 

 Gen. A. A. Humphreys, U.S.A., by H. L. Abbot; and 

 of William Stimpson, by Theodore Gill. 



— At a recent meeting of the Bavarian geograph- 

 ical society, Professor Rutzel communicated some 

 particulars concerning a map which he is designing 

 to show the political circumstances of Africa; the 

 actual limits of the various states, native and other, 

 being defined according to the extent of the territo- 

 ries actually possessed by each. The map will show 

 several 'centres' of state formation. The whole of 

 the continent is, however, far from being divided 

 amongst the existing tribes, as there are many dis- 

 tricts which do not belong to any of them. The ex- 

 isting native states, moreover, such as the Sunda 

 and the Zulu kingdoms, are of varying importance, 

 and subject to very different systems. The native 

 states, it is asserted, rest mainly on the boundary be- 

 tween the Sahara and the Sudan, the high plateau 

 of east Africa, and the Guinea coast. The remain- 



