July 24, 1885.] 



SCIENCE. 



food, or of money expended in its purchase, may be 

 saved ? 7°. In what way can information be distrib- 

 uted upon this subject, so as to enable working-people 

 to use true economy in the purchase and in the prep- 

 aration of food?" The attention of the chairman, 

 Edward Atkinson, has been lately called to the great 

 dearth of the statistics of consumption ; and he has 

 been promised the valuable aid of the chiefs of the 

 several bureaus of statistics of labor, and of Prof. 

 W. O. Atwater of Middletown, Conn., in making 

 preparation for this discussion. 



— Prof. Robert H. Thurston of Stevens institute, 

 Huboken, N.J., has accepted the post of professor 

 of mechanical engineering, and director of Sibley col- 

 lege, in Cornell university, Ithaca, N.Y. 



— An expedition under the auspices of the Royal 

 geographical society of Vienna was to start in June 

 of this year for the region of the Kongo. Its primary 

 object is to explore the territory lying on the water- 

 shed between the Kongo and the Nile, with a view 

 to extending the exact geographical knowledge of 

 that region, and also to studying its natural history 

 and ethnology, and investigating the commercial re- 

 lations of the new Kongo state. A secondary object 

 will be to obtain news of a former party of explorers, 

 who have been for two years kept confined in the 

 region of the upper Nile on account of the Mahdi 

 affair. On account of the same revolt, the present 

 party will be obliged, instead of taking the usual Nile 

 route, to go to the mouth of the Kongo, and work up 

 that river lo the region of the intended explorations. 

 From Stanley Pool two steamers belonging to English 

 parties ply up the river ; and the leader of the expe- 

 dition, Dr. Oscar Lenz, hopes to be able to use one of 

 these to reach a suitable point on the upper Kongo 

 for the starting-point of his explorations. From this 

 point on. Dr. Lenz has formed no definite plans, but 

 will proceed according to the necessities of the occa- 

 sion, knowing that the territory is as yet completely 

 unexplored, and that every step will add to our geo- 

 graphical knowledge. He hopes to return in about a 

 year and a half; and, indeed, the sum of twenty-five 

 thousand florins, which has been raised for the ex- 

 pedition, will cover the expenses for no longer time 

 than this. 



— The French Academy of sciences has awarded" 

 the Institute's biennial prize of twenty thousand 

 francs to Dr. Brown Sequard. 



— The Japanese have at last, says Nature, after 

 much hesitation, promulgated a patent law. As in 

 America, with respect to copyright, it was argued, 

 that, with no patent protection, the Japanese got the 

 benefit of the inventions of the whole world. The 

 new law appears, like many other recent Japanese 

 laws, to be compiled from similar laws of other coun- 

 tries, — a clause from England here, from France 

 there, from Germany in another place, as seemed ad- 

 visable in the circumstances. The term of protection 

 is fifteen years. *' Articles that tend to disturb social 

 tranquillity, or demoralize customs and fashions, or 

 are injurious to health," and medicines, cannot be 

 patented. The inventions must have been publicly 



applied within two years; and patents will become 

 void when the patented inventions have been im- 

 ported from abroad, and sold, — an illiberal provision, 

 which prevents the patenting of foreign inventions 

 in Japan, unless the inventor also manufactures 

 them in the country, and which therefore renders 

 the new law practically useless to any but the Jap- 

 anese inventor. The fees are low, amounting to 

 about three pounds sterling for fifteen years' protec- 

 tion, the one payment down being sufficient; while 

 there are no annuities or annual payments for keep- 

 ing the protection in force, as in many European 

 countries. The punishments for breaches of the reg- 

 ulations are sufficiently severe to act as a warning 

 against infringement. 



— The organizing committee of section A of the 

 British association has arranged for the following 

 discussions at the Aberdeen meeting : 1°, On kinetic 

 theories of gases; and, 2°, On the standards of white 

 light. 



— Professor Loomis's twenty-first 'Contribution 

 to meteorology' {Amer. journ. science, July) re- 

 turns to the discussion of the direction and velocity 

 of movement of low-pressure areas, — cyclones, — 

 which had already been treated in several earlier 

 papers. The numerical results now attained agree 

 closely with those already published. The average 

 progressive velocity of cyclonic storms is given as 

 follows: Bay of Bengal and China Sea, 8.4 miles per 

 hour; West Indies, 18.7; Europe, 16.7; middle lati- 

 tudes of Atlantic Ocean, 18.0; United States, 28.4. 

 When this is combined with the results given in Fin- 

 ley's paper on storm-tracks, we find that our lake 

 region possesses the unhappy pre-eminence of being 

 visited by the most numerous and fastest-moving 

 storms in the world, as far as the world is now 

 known. Taking further account of the strong con- 

 trasts of winter temperatures between the Gulf of 

 Mexico and the Hudson-Bay region, which supply 

 the winds in the front and in the rear of the storms, 

 we find sufficient explanation of the frequent and 

 violent changes of weather in our interior states. 

 Professor Loomis examines also the degree of cor- 

 respondence between the average course of storms 

 and the mean direction of the wind. While the two 

 are not coincident, they are evidently connected, 

 and, as the author points out, the departures of one 

 from the other are probably due to the control ex- 

 erted on storm-tracks by rainfall, as well as to the 

 fact that the mean direction of the wind is derived 

 from truly superficial observations, while the course 

 of the storm marks the path of a commotion that 

 affects a considerable thickness of atmosphere. It is 

 found that for the mid-Atlantic, near latitude 50° 

 north, the average storm-path corresponds very closely 

 with the average wind direction ; but in the western 

 part of the Atlantic the storms turn 30° to the north 

 or left of the wind, while in the eastern part the de- 

 viation is changed to 30° to the south or right of the 

 wind. This may find explanation in the effect that 

 the sea between the continents has on the direction 

 of the winds near the shores. The ratio between 

 the mean progress of storms and mean velocitv of the 



