December 18, 1885.] 



SCIENCE. 



537 



portant changes in its observation work about the 

 fii'st of January. The most notable is the intro- 

 duction at the most important stations, and as 

 rapidly as possible throughout the whole service, 

 of the whirling psychrometer instead of the still 

 wet and dry bulb now in use. An entirely new 

 set of hygrometric tables has been computed for 

 the reduction of observations made by the new 

 method, a suitable whirling - machine has been 

 devised and adopted, and machines for station use 

 are now being constructed. It is also understood 

 that the service has determined to use for this 

 instrument thermometers with cylindrical bulbs, 

 instead of the spherical bulbs at present used, on 

 account of the greater sensitiveness of the former. 

 The introduction of these improvements consti- 

 tutes a decided advance in the hygrometric 

 methods of the service. Z. 



Washington, D.C., Dec. 14. 



LONDON LETTER. 



At the election of the council and officers of the 

 Royal society, which took place on St. Andrew's 

 day, Prof. G. G. Stokes, the senior secretary of 

 the society, was unanimously chosen as Professor 

 Huxley's successor. He graduated at Cambridge 

 in 1841 as senior wrangler and first Smith's prize- 

 man, and was elected to his present office, the 

 Lucasian professorship of mathematics, eight years 

 afterwards. He was elected into the Royal so- 

 ciety in 1851, and became its secretary in 1854. 

 Professor Stokes's successor as secretary to the 

 Royal society is Lord Rayleigh. 



The award of one of the royal medals to Prof. 

 E. Ray Lankester by the council of the Royal 

 society will meet with the warm approval of all 

 Enghsh biologists, and is a fitting recognition of 

 his many contributions to zoological science, which 

 range over a great variety of subjects, the earliest 

 of them being now some twenty years old. Pro- 

 fessor Lankester was for some years the only 

 representative at Oxford of the modern school of 

 zoology, and since his appointment to the zoolo- 

 gical chair at University college he has trained 

 several students of the greatest promise. He is 

 also well known as the editor of the Quarterly 

 journal of microscopical science, which, owing 

 in great measure to his influence, has risen from 

 being an organ of almost pure microscopy to the 

 position of a first-class zoological journal. It is a 

 good sign of the activity of the young biologists 

 who are now being turned out from the univer- 

 sities of Oxford and Cambridge, London and 

 Manchester, that the supply of contributions dur- 

 ing this year has been more than sufficient for the 

 regular quarterly issue of the journal. A supple- 

 mental number was published in July, and the 



first part of a new volume has just ajjpeared, 

 bringing up the total issue for the whole year to 

 six parts instead of four, as has hitherto been the 

 rule. The journal will in future appear at irreg- 

 ular intervals, just as the German zoological 

 serials do, according to the amount of material 

 in the editor's hands. 



The 30th of November (St. Andrew's day), which 

 closed Professor Huxley's term of office as president 

 of the Royal society, has witnessed the retirement 

 of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, a former occupant 

 of the presidential chair, from the directorship of 

 the Royal gardens, Kew. He was appointed as- 

 sistant director in 1855, and succeeded to his present 

 office ten years later, on the death of his father, 

 the late Sir William Hooker. His admiaisti-ative 

 work has been well described as " performed in 

 such wise as to win, along with national applause, 

 the gratitude of the scientific world." It may 

 almost be considered as certain that the vacancy 

 will be filled by the promotion of his son-in-law. 

 Prof. W. T. Thisleton Dyer, who is the present 

 assistant director, and has been largely instnimen- 

 tal in bringing about the revolution in botanical 

 teaching which has taken place ui this country of 

 late years. 



As in the case of Professor Huxley, Sir Joseph 

 Hooker's retirement from the routine of official 

 duties will enable him to devote more time to 

 purely scientific work than he has hitherto been 

 able to give ; and he will therefore be able to has- 

 ten the completion of his great monograph on the 

 flora of British India. 



At a recent lecture on the electric telegraph, de- 

 livered to the members of the Bnkbeck institute, 

 in London, by William Lant Carpenter, the fol- 

 lowing figures were given on the authority of the 

 British general post-office, to indicate the increase 

 of the use of the telegraph since the adoption of 

 the ' twelve words for sixpence ' (address included) 

 rate : The total present mileage is 156,000 miles, 

 and the number of instruments employed is 17,100, 

 of which 26,000 miles and 900 instruments are due 

 to the increase. In the week ending Nov. 14, 

 1885, 895,781 messages were sent, showing an in- 

 crease of 40.3 per cent over the corresponding 

 week of 1884. In London, however, the increase 

 is 60 per cent ; and in that city alone the * regis- 

 tered addresses ' have increased from 2,000 to 9,000. 

 The average price of messages is 8d., as compared 

 with 13d. under the old tai'iff. When the lines 

 were purchased by the government in 1870, the 

 average number of messages weekly was only 

 126,000, and the press messages, then barely 5.000 

 words per day, now exceed 1.000,000. 



The electric lighting industry iu England has 

 been, as is generally known, almost throttled in its 



