296 
doubt, whether larger springs could be made to show 
results which would even approach these figures; and 
on this account the experiments about to be tried 
might be looked for with some interest. —— Mr. 
H. C. Liiders exhibited specimen of rolled and 
annealed phosphor-bronze of maximum ductility, 
and consequently of minimum tensile strength, and 
submitted the following data of the test thereof: 
length, 2”; diameter, 0.57”; subjected to a strain of 
13,620 pounds, equivalent to 53,400 pounds per square 
inch; elongation, 70.5%; reduced area at point 
where fracture would occur, 0.3”; elastic limit, about 
18,000 pounds per square inch. MHard-rolled rods, 
tested without turning off the surface, have shown 
a tenacity exceeding 90,000 pounds per square inch. 
— Mr. Howard Murphy presented for Mr. Louis C. 
Madeira, jun., the Record of American and foreign 
shipping, containing an interesting set of drawings 
for the details of construction of iron ships. 
Mr. Percival Roberts, jun., gave some account of the 
results of experiments, now being conducted by Mr. 
James Christie at Pencoyd, upon the relative elas- 
ticity of iron and steel structural shapes. 
NOTES AND NEWS. 
WE noticed a fortnight ago the presentation of the 
Lyell medal of the Geological society of London to 
Professor Leidy; and we now learn that the council 
of the society at the same time awarded to Mr. Leo 
Lesquereux the sum of twenty pounds sterling from 
their Barlow Jameson fund, in recognition of the 
value of his services to geological science. ‘The great 
extent and value of Mr. Lesquereux’s contributions 
to our knowledge of the fossil flora of North America 
are well known, and will be still better appreciated 
when his volume on the tertiary plants, now com- 
pleted, but not yet distributed, shall be issued. 
— Any contributions that American biologists may 
feel disposed to make toward the Hermann Miller 
foundation, referred to in our last issue, can be sent 
direct to the treasurer of the committee, Wilhelm 
Thurmann, Lippstadt, Germany, or they will be re- 
ceipted for and forwarded by Professor William 
Trelease, Madison, Wis. 
— The death (March 2) is announced of Isaac Tod- 
hunter, whose name has been a terror to the average 
college-student of the present generation. He was 
born at Rye in 1820, and was senior wrangler in 1848. 
A large portion of his energy was devoted to the pro- 
duction of the invaluable mathematical text-books 
and treatises which are so well known. 
— Capt. Bernard, in the course of a journey into 
the far interior of Algeria, twenty kilometres north 
‘of the Bou Saada River, found a singular flat-topped 
butte whose elongated rocky summit rises sixty-five 
feet vertically from the talus which crowns its sloping 
base. This place, called by the Algerians ‘ El Gueliaa,’ 
forms arocky table one hundred and seventy-five feet 
wide by six hundred feet long, reached by a stairway 
cut on the northern side. On this plateau has been 
erected a structure, still in a remarkable state of 
SCIENCE. ‘ 
[Vor. IIL, No. 57. 
preservation, and, from the nature of its materials, 
apparently of Roman origin. On the east is a large 
rectangular stone building, containing eight or ten 
apartments opening upon an inner court. North of 
this building a vaulted cistern is dug in the rock: 
sixty feet to the west are two others, side by side, 
one vaulted over, and the second open to the sky. It 
is very difficult to say how these cisterns were filled, 
as there are no springs, or traces of wells, in the vicin- 
ity. It was evidently a post established for some 
special purpose. At Mesaad oasis a hillock thirty or 
thirty-five feet high bears the broken remains of a 
Roman gate. The Arabs have tunnelled or ditched 
the hillock for brick-clay; showing, that beneath the 
Roman remains now so long abandoned, and over 
the beds of chalk, salty earth, and clay, which form 
the mound, there are abundant remains of an earlier 
occupation, apparently for a considerable period, by 
a race whose stone weapons and tools, fragments of 
stone and ivory, and other rejectamenta, are their 
only memorial. 
| 
— The expedition charged by Russia with the task 
of exploring the ancient bed of the Oxus has con- 
cluded its work. The former path of the stream has | 
been subjected to careful levelling from Khiva to the . 
Caspian; proving that it is possible to turn the river 
into its old course only at the expense of a canal two 
hundred kilometres long, which is equivalent to a | 
permanently adverse decision on its practicability. | 
— 
—Signor F. P. Moreno, director of the anthropo- 
logical museum of Buenos Ayres, was authorized in 
1882 to undertake a journey into the interior of Bo- 
livia for purposes of anthropological study. He now 
reports having visited the provinces of Cordoba, San 
Luis, and Mendoza as far as the slope of the Andes. 
During a year’s travel he has studied the modern, as 
well as the traces of the former, inhabitants, and has 
exhumed in many places bones, weapons, inscrip- 
tions, and relics of burials, and has made plans and 
photographs of the remains of ancient villages. He 
believes he has obtained full material for a study of 
life in these regions before the Spanish conquest. 
He visited the whole extent of the so-called road of 
the Incas to the Uspallata Pass, when compelled to 
return by the advent of winter, and has pretty thor- 
oughly explored the range of the same name. 
— The material accumulated by the Krause broth- 
ers in Alaska, 1881-82, is being rapidly worked up. 
In the Botanisches centralblatt (Cassel, 1883, Nos. 
41-43) Karl Miller publishes an account of the mosses 
of the Chukchi peninsula. He finds twenty-eight 
new out of seventy-five species collected, certainly 
a rather unusually large proportion. One of these, a 
cleistocarpous form allied to Voitia, is erected into a 
new genus by the name of Krauseella. 
Dr. Hartlaub, in Cabanis’s journal, enumerates the 
birds obtained at the head of Lynn Canal, near the — 
mouth of the Chilkat River, 8. E. Alaska. Lagopus — 
leucurus, Certhia familiaris, Dendroica Townsend1, 
Sialia arctica, Chrysomitris pinus, Sphyropicus ruber, 
and Tinnunculus sparverius are noted as new to the 
region, though several of them may be only occa- 
