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SCIENCE. 



[Vol. VII. , No. 155 



tions : first, that its cost shall not exceed four 

 annas per eighty pounds ; and, secondly, that the 

 preparation shall be such that edible salt cannot 

 be extracted from it by the ordinary processes 

 used by native salt-workers. 



— The vaccine from re vaccinated children is of 

 doubtful protective potency, according to the ob- 

 servations of M. Blot, recently reported to the 



Academie de medecine. 



— According to La nature of Jan. 2, an inter- 

 esting ethnological discovery has just been made 

 at Dampont, near Paris. An ancient burial-place 

 of the polished-stone age has been there exhumed, 

 and found to contain various portions of skeletons, 

 implements, pottery, etc. Three crania had been 

 trepanned, and so skilfully that it appears like 

 the work of a surgeon. 



— Within late years surgical operations upon 

 the stomach for the extirpation of tumors or the 

 removal of foreign bodies have been attempted a 

 number of times, but almost invariably with un- 

 favorable results. A case, the second on record, 

 is just reported from England, where a large mass 

 of hair, weighing about a pound, was removed 

 from the stomach of a young lady, through an in- 

 cision five inches in length, with recovery. 



— Two editions of Coulter's ' Rocky Mountain 

 botany ' (New York, Ivison, Blakeman, Taylor & 

 Co.) are offered to the public : one of them is 

 uniform with Gray's manual of the botany of the 

 eastern United States ; the other is printed on 

 thin, strong paper, and bound in a flexible and 

 durable cover for the needs of the tourist. Of the 

 merits of the work, it is of course too early to 

 speak. The special descriptions which have been 

 carefully and laboriously brought into a compen- 

 dious arrangement for practical use by every day 

 students, must now be subjected to criticism in 

 the fields and parks, and on the slopes of the 

 mountains of the central chain. It will not 

 be surprising if some of the work done in the 

 study will have to be modified by repeated ex- 

 aminations of the specimens in their homes. But, 

 so far as a careful inspection of the attractive 

 pages of this volume can at present show, the 

 work has been conscientiously and thoroughly 

 done, and is a substantial boon to our students of 

 botany. 



— The preparation of a new geological map 

 of France, on the scale of 1 : 500,000, has been 

 undertaken by Messrs. G. Vasseur and L. Carez, 

 according to Comptes rendus of Dec. 28. The first 

 parte have been already presented to the academy. 

 Tin- work will comprise forty-eight parts, and will 

 require five years for its completion. Five plates 



are already printed, mostly of the northern regions. 

 Each large stratigraphic group will be represented 

 by a single color, with shadings for the subdivis- 

 ions, as proposed by the international congress at 

 Bologne. The work will be accompanied by a 

 volume of explanatory text. 



— The university of Basle, Switzerland, pos- 

 sesses a human skeleton, prepared in 1543 by the 

 founder of anatomy, Andreas Vesalius. It is the 

 only known relic of this greatest of all human 

 anatomists ; which fact, together with its great 

 age, makes it especially precious. In the times of 

 Vesalius the dissection of the human body was 

 permitted by the authorities only with the greatest 

 reluctance ; and the history of the present skeleton, 

 as recently given by Professor Roth, is particularly 

 interesting. On the 12th of May, 1543, the body of 

 one Jacob Karrer, who had been beheaded, was 

 handed over to the university for dissection by 

 Vesalius. Not for two years had such an oppor- 

 tunity occurred, and one can imagine the interest 

 with which for many days the students and 

 teachers followed the words and demonstrations of 

 the great master. At the completion of the dis- 

 section the skeleton was prepared by his own 

 hands, and presented to the university. It was in 

 this year that his great work on human anatomy, 

 the foundation of the modern science, appeared. 

 Who knows how much we are indebted to this 

 very subject for the discovery of much that is 

 taught to-day, — discoveries for which the author 

 was condemned to death, and escaped oniy to die 

 in exile from starvation ? 



— The trustees of Cornell university have filled 

 the newly established Sage professorship of ethics 

 and philosophy by the election of Prof. J. Goold 

 Schurmann, Ph.D., at present professor of philos- 

 ophy at Dalhousie college, Halifax, N.S. Pro- 

 fessor Schurmann is thirty-two years of age, and 

 has studied at London, Edinburgh, and in Ger- 

 many. As Hibbert travelling scholar, he collected 

 the materials for an essay on ' Kautian ethics and 

 the ethics of evolution,' which attracted some 

 attention among specialists in philosophy when 

 it was published, in 1881. 



— Prof. Charles E. Hamlin, of the Agassiz muse- 

 um of natural history, died at Cambridge, Jan. 3 r 

 aged about sixty years. 



— Prof. A. M. Mayer, by the use of a simple 

 form of vitroscope with electric registration of 

 seconds, has reached some valuable and interest- 

 ing results as to the conditions and limits of 

 accuracy in this method for determining the rate 

 of standard forks (Mem. not. acad. sc., iii.). He has 

 also investigated the amount of change in the 



