FEBRUARY 22, 1884,] 
trical machines, with kites, ete. But Mr. Rus- 
sell predicts his speedy loss of position in the 
modern social scale, if, having no correct un- 
derstanding of cause and effect, he pretends 
to pull down the clouds with a wire, or frighten 
them with a few crackers. In this habit of 
belief, apparently so thoroughly ingrained in 
human nature, that a comparatively slight arti- 
ficial commotion in the atmosphere is enough 
either to bring rain out of a clear sky, or to 
superinduce a calm in violent storms, there is, 
it must be confessed, something akin to the 
popular conception of homoeopathy. But in 
countries other than Australia it may be pos- 
sible that the necessary condition of unstable 
equilibrium is more frequently attained, when 
artificial rain might be a matter of easy pro- 
duction. For Australia, however, there can 
be little doubt that Mr. Russell is in the right ; 
and when, as he remarks, so many proposals 
are put forward, some even going so far as 
to propose that his government should take to 
cannonading the sky, it is time that some one 
took the matter up. 
Tue Philadelphia papers are vigorously dis- 
cussing Dr. Harrison’s plan for a biological 
institute in that city, and the outlook for it 
appears favorable. The only exception that 
has been taken to the plan has been doubt 
as to the desirability of creating an independ- 
ent institution, when the work might better 
be intrusted to the already existing academy 
or university. This is comparatively unim- 
portant: what is essential is a separate and 
ample endowment in safe hands. Yet it must 
be said, that neither of those establishments 
carries on its work primarily for the training 
of investigators, which is the special aim of 
the proposed institute; and such an institute 
Philadelphia absolutely requires, if it would not 
lose the position it has long held in American 
science. ‘The academy certainly has neither 
room nor funds for the purpose; and being at 
this moment before the public, asking for a 
large sum of money for building-purposes, only 
to carry out more fully work in which it has 
long been engaged, it would be hampered 
SCIENCE. 
215 
rather than aided by the partial endowment 
which would probably result for either pur- 
pose. 
Tue legislatures of Virginia and Maryland, 
stirred by the approaching failure of the oys- 
ter-crop, are moving for protection for the 
beds in apparent good faith. Something will 
doubtless be done; but the devastation has 
gone so far, that no immediate improvement 
can reasonably be expected. 
ReEtTurNInG to the question of the use of 
copper as a prophylactic in cholera cases, so 
much discussed during the recent Egyptian 
epidemic, Mr. Vulpian presented a note to the 
French academy, at a recent meeting, writ- 
ten by Mr. Axel Lamm of Stockholm. Mr. 
Lamm states, that it is a fact that the workers 
in the copper-mines of Fahlun, in Dalecarlia, 
did escape during the epidemic of 1834. Judg- 
ing by this, plaques of copper were tried as a 
remedy, placed on the stomachs of the patients 
in the cholera hospitals. The only result was 
the formation of verdigris if the plaques were 
not properly cleaned, and consequent ulceration 
from its caustic action. Fahlun has escaped 
five or six times, however, when Stockholm 
has not; and Mr. Axel Lamm suggests the 
possibility of the great amount of sulphuric- 
acid gas in the air being the reason, but he 
has not as yet made any further investigations. 
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 
*,* Correspondents are requested to beas brief as possible. The 
writer’s name is in all cases required as proof of good faith. 
Macrospores in the rocks about Chicago. 
SINCE submitting the committee’s report on this 
subject (see p. 237) to the Chicago academy of science, 
I have continued the investigation of drift material 
in this vicinity, and from other parts of the north- 
west. So far as examined, all of the clays on the 
west shore of Lake Michigan, from Kenosha, Wis., 
on the north, to the Indiana state line on the south, 
contain an abundance of the disks, or macrospores, 
referred to in that paper, both free in the clay and 
in situ in fragments of shale. These clays range from 
some seventy feet above the level of Lake Michigan 
to (I aim advised) over two hundred feet below its 
surface. 
In the examination of clays from other localities, I 
get some very unexpected results. In several speci- 
mens of ‘blue bowlder clay’ kindly sent to me by 
Prof. N. H. Winchell, state geologist of Minnesota, 
and ‘‘taken from fourteen to twenty-one feet below 
the surface, when digging a well at Litchfield, Meeker 
