526 
inches, uniform with the seventeen others; and New 
Jersey will then have, beyond comparison, the finest 
map of any state in the country. 
— Reports from Mount Hamilton, California, say 
that this has’ been the most stormy winter known 
since observations were begun at the Lick observa- 
tory. The bad weather did not begin tili so late in 
January that a drought in California was feared; but 
there have been forty inches of rain and melted snow 
up to April 4, and at that date the mountain was 
covered with two feet of snow. The anemometer 
cups were blown away, with the wind-gauge indicat- 
ing sixty-five miles per hour. The lowest tempera- 
ture was + 12°; and at this temperature outside, water 
did not freeze within the uncompleted buildings. 
— A communication from A. W. Howitt of Gipps- 
land, Victoria, states that he is engaged in pre- 
paring an account of the ceremonies practised by 
the Australian aborigines in the initiation of their 
youths to the privilege of manhcod. He has recently 
had an opportunity of witnessing some of these cere- 
monies, never before practised in the presence of 
white men. 
—Mr. J. Park Harrison writes to the editor of 
The academy concerning Saxon sun-dials, as follows: 
“The extreme rarity of Saxon sun-dials, or, perhaps, 
the paucity of dials that have been recognized as 
such, will render the discovery of an example in 
Daglingworth church, near Cirencester, of some in- 
terest to antiquaries. In this case there can be no 
doubt that the dial is coeval with the church, which 
has been pronounced by several of our best authori- 
ties to be Saxon. As in other equally early examples, 
the five principal hours are marked on the stone, and 
the dial is placed over the south doorway. At Dag- 
lingworth it has been well protected by a porch of 
somewhat later date. I hope that this notice may 
lead to a careful examination of the walls of other 
early churches.”’ 
—Jean Baptiste Syne the eminent. French 
chemist, and leader of the French academy, died 
April 11, at the age of eighty-four. He was born 
at Alais, Gard. His early scientific education was in 
the study of pharmacy in his native village, and, later, 
in Geneva. At the age of twenty-one he found his 
way to Paris, where he continued to be prominent 
till the last year of his life. 
— A paper on the structure and formation of coal, 
read by Mr. E. Wethered before the Geological so- 
ciety of London, March 5, is an attempt to show, 1°, 
tha: some coals are made up of spores, while others 
contain few or no spores, these variations often oc- 
curring in the different layers of the same seam or 
bed; 2°, that the so-called bituminous coals are large- 
ly made up of a brown amorphous substance, or 
bitumen, to the formation of which wood-tissue cer- 
tainly contributed much more than spores. In an 
appendix to this paper, by Professor Harker, he re- 
fers the spores found in the coals to the modern 
genus Isoétes, and suggests for them the generic title 
Isoétoides. In the discussion, Mr. Carruthers dis- 
sented from the view that the coal-spores are related 
SCIENCE. 
oe ee 
[Von IIL, No. 64.. 
to Isoétes, or any other form of submerged vegeta- 
tion, believing them to belong to Sigillaria and Lepi- 
dodendron. Professor Dawkins agreed with Mr. | 
Carruthers, and also followed Professor Huxley in 
holding that the resinous or bituminous portion of 
coal is chiefly due to the spores, and cannot be de- 
rived from woody tissue by ordinary process of decay. 
Similar views were expressed by Mr. Newton, Prof. T. 
Rupert Jones, and Mr. Bauerman. 
— The members of the Scientific society of Indi- 
ana university are giving special attention to the 
local vertebrate fauna, and to the fishes recently 
collected at Havana and Key West, which are in the 
museum of the university. 
— The Engineer for March 21 states that Caille- 
tet, so well known in connection with the tiquefac- 
tion of gases, has constructed an apparatus for the 
continuous production of intense cold, which con- 
sists of a closed steel cylinder containing a coil of 
copper pipe which projects from each end of the 
cylinder. 'Two copper tubes are also screwed into 
the cylinder; and one of these communicates with 
the mercurial piston-pump already used by Cailletet, 
while the other receives the ethylene which has been 
compressed by the pump, and cooled by methyl! chlo- 
rate. By this arrangement he forms a circuit in 
which the same quantity of ethylene is repeatedly 
evaporated in the copper coil, producing intense cold, 
and then compressed again by the pump being suf- 
ficiently cooled with methyl chloride, and ready for 
evaporation again. ‘This process goes on as long as 
the sucking and compressing pumps are working. 
— The report of the English secretary of legation _ 
at Rome, concerning the new national library there, 
is given at length in the Journal of the Society of 
arts for March 21. The Italian government has taken 
over from the Jesuits the celebrated Collegio romano 
and its observatory. Various scientific societies 
have their rooms on the ground-floor. The first and 
second floors contain the ancient library, formerly in 
two divisions, one accessible only to the priests. A 
new hall has been built capable of containing 2,400 
volumes, and a reading-room capable of holding two 
hundred persons. With the addition of the cele- 
brated Casanatense, the richest ancient public library 
in Rome, the Victor Immanuel institute has space for 
1,000,000 works. It seems as if the monks had made 
no additions to the library for nearly a century, and 
the first thing to which the resources of the library 
had to be applied was the purchase of modern clas- 
sics, Shakspeare, Goethe, etc.: the collections Didot, 
Hachette, and Brockhaus have been purehased.. 
From November, 1881, to November, 1882, there 
were 4,594 scientific works bought, while the govern- 
ment. officials sent in 16,186 pamphlets and other 
documents. The library is open from nine o’clock 
until three, and in winter it is open in the even- 
ing from seven o’clock until ten. sa 
— Dr. A. B. Griffiths, who has for some time Boum 
devoting his time to the study of the origin of petro- 
leum, and advocates the organic view, writés to the 
Chemical news that he has found phenol in the stem, 
