a 
MAY 23, 1884.] 
messages arriving in the numbers are deciphered in 
the same manner by means of the blocks. 
— An attempt will be made to place the collections 
of the late Dr. Engelmann, of which he made no dis- 
posal, in the Shaw botanic gardens of St. Louis. 
— In a recent article on the Edinburgh university 
festival, Nature says, ‘‘Silently and unconsciously, 
perhaps, the universities are passing from the exclu- 
sive domination of the older learning. At Edinburgh 
the emancipation is far advanced, but has yet to take 
shape in a definite re-arrangement of the curriculum 
of study. No thoughtful scientific man would advo- 
cate a merely scientific education. The foundations 
of every man’s culture should be laid broad and deep 
in those humanizing departments of thought which 
the experience of centuries has proved to be ad- 
mirably fitted for the mental and moral discipline 
of youth. But the day is not far distant when it 
will be acknowledged that modern science must be 
admitted to a place with ancient philosophy and 
literature in the scheme of a liberal education, when 
in all our universities provision will be made for 
practical instruction in scientific methods, and when 
at least as much encouragement will be given by 
fellowships and scholarships to the prosecution of 
original scientific research as has hitherto been 
awarded to classical study or learned indolence.’’ 
— Dr. V. B. Wittrock, curator of the herbarium of 
the Royal academy of sciences, Stockholm, Sweden, 
has issued, in a handsome folio volume, the first fas- 
ciculus of his Erythraea exsiccata, in which he pro- 
poses to represent and illustrate all the known species 
and forms of this critical genus. He wishes to include 
the American forms, and, likewise, the few Europe- 
an ones which are naturalized in North America. 
In this view, he invites the correspondence and co- 
operation of those American botanists to whom spe- 
cies of Erythraea are accessible. No truly indigenous 
species occurs on our Atlantic border: so this an- 
nouncement is particularly addressed to botanists in 
Arkansas, Texas, and especially New Mexico and 
California. 
— Antimony ores have been found in numerous 
parts of New South Wales. The ore consists of oxide 
and sulphide of antimony, and occurs in original 
bunches, occasionally of a considerable size, enclosed 
in a quartz matrix, which forms the chief constitu- 
ent of the lodes. 
— Whoever wishes to consult a concise compilation 
ou primitive metallurgy will find Dr. Andree’s Die 
metalle bei den naturvolkern (Leipzig, 1884, 166 p.) a 
most useful work. The subject is divided according 
to the geographical distribution of the peoples using 
the metals. The first two chapters, about one third 
of the book, are given to the discussion of iron and 
copper among the Africans; another third is taken 
up with the consideration of Asiatic metallurgy; and 
this is followed by five chapters on the iron, copper, 
bronze, and gold of America, with a final chapter on 
the use of iron in the South-Sea Islands. There are 
fifty-seven figures of various native blast-furnaces, 
bellows and tongs, of Africa, Asia, and Malaysia, and 
SCIENCE. 
639 
of the metal implements and ornaments of America. 
These all are referred to their original sources. A 
great number of authorities have been consulted, and 
all are noted conscientiously. The work deserves a 
place in the working-library of every student of the 
primitive arts; while its method and style are such as 
to interest the general reader. 
—In a lecture on the dawn of mind, delivered at 
Owens college, Manchester, Eng., March 28, by Mr. 
G. J. Romanes, he claimed that the whole structure 
of mind took its rise from excitability, or the aptitude 
to respond to nervous stimulus, which was a charac- 
teristic of all matter that was alive. Next to excita- 
bility, in an ascending scale, they had the functions 
of discrimination and conductibility. Discrimination 
he believed to be a function of all nerve-cells: it was 
the power to discriminate one stimulus from another, 
irrespective of the degrees of their mechanical inten- 
sity. Conductibility was a function which admitted 
the possibility of reflex action, and of the co-ordina- 
tion both of muscles and of ideas. In the faculty of 
discrimination they had the physical aspect of that 
which elsewhere was called choice; because choice, if 
it was analyzed, was merely the power of discriminat- 
ing between one stimulus and another. With theaid 
of an elaborate diagram, Mr. Romanes traced what he 
held to be the various grades in the process of mental 
evolution from excitability as the root of the mind. 
The diagram had forty lines orlevels. Any given level 
represented the earliest stage in the development of 
all the faculties named therein; the animals in which, 
and the age of the human being at which, they first 
appeared; also the grade of development at which 
human intelligence was arrested in idiocy and deaf- 
mutism.’ The diagram was not, he said, a mere pro- 
duction of his imagination, but was the result of his 
study of the subject. At the bottom, on a level 
with excitability, he placed protoplasm. Reason, he 
thought, arose out of the powers of perception; for 
the simplest possible perception involved some act of 
inference,— an act unconsciously performed, perhaps, 
but performed all the same. Regarding reason in its 
lowest phase, it must be placed immediately above the 
association of ideas, because they might regard it as 
a process of unconscious or deliberate inference, and 
this occurred in monkeys, dogs, and elephants. Next 
above reason he placed indefinite morality, or the germ 
of conscience. Indefinite morality was the feeling of 
dislike at offending those for whom the child or ani- 
mal having it feltan affection. Definite morality was 
much higher in the scale: it was, in fact, at the top, 
on a level with man. A child at birth he placed, 
in this process of mental evolution, on a level with 
jelly-fish; at five months old, he put the child on a 
level with pigs, horses, and cats; and at nine months, 
on a level with the anthropoid apes. He could not 
help feeling that the doctrine of evolution, as a whole, 
was a somewhat hard doctrine, — hard as an answer 
to the question which must at some time, or in some 
shape, have occurred to most: ‘Shall not the Judge 
of the whole earth do right?’ The answer that 
evolutionists made to that seemed to him to be a 
hard one; for it said, that in the order of nature the 
