436 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. VII. , No. 171 



of Italy indicates, that, with the exception of the 

 northern part of the Adriatic, the peninsula is 

 quite free from the disease. 



— Fish-commission car No. 1 left Havre de Grace, 

 Md., on Sunday last, with 1,500,000 young shad 

 for Broad and Saluda Rivers, South Carolina. On 

 its return it will take the same number of shad 

 fry to Portland, Ore., for stocking the Columbia 

 River basin. 



— The Hibbert lectures for 1886 are now being 

 delivered in London on Mondays, Wednesdays, 

 and Fridays, and are repeated at Oxford on Thurs- 

 days and Saturdays. The lecturer this year is 

 Professor Rhys of Oxford, and his subject is ' The 

 origin and growth of religion as illustrated by 

 Celtic Heathendom.' 



— Mr. D. P. Wainright of the coast survey has 

 completed the trigonometrical work in the vicinity 

 of Cape Fear River, North Carolina. The field- 

 parties from the south will begin to arrive in 

 Washington about the middle of June. Parties 

 will be sent east and north for field-work about 

 the first of June. 



— The ethnological collections of the British 

 museum are now said to be for the first time 

 adequately displayed. New rooms, formerly 

 occupied for zoology, have been devoted to them, 

 and recently thrown open to the public. The col- 

 lection is now thought to be the best and most 

 representative in the world. 



— Messrs. James Pott & Co. have brought out 

 an edition of Pressense's ' Study of origins,' which 

 first appeared in its English version in December, 

 1882. The author is a learned and accomplished 

 Protestant minister of Paris. His position is that 

 of a Kantian who firmly believes in God, the soul, 

 and the future life ; but he is liberal and broad, 

 vindicating the complete independence of science, 

 and saying unequivocally that neither the Bible 

 nor the councils have any prescriptive right to 

 control science. He is convinced that experi- 

 mental science is not hostile to the principles of 

 theism ; and that, if ' the possibility' of a divine 

 and moral world be conceded, there are processes 

 of experiment which will supply the demonstra- 

 tion. From this basis the author discusses the 

 problems of knowledge, being, and duty in the 

 light of modern German, French, and English 

 philosophical writings. 



— The publishing-house of Justus Perthes has 

 recently begun a new edition of Berghaus's 

 ' Physikalischer atlas,' which will contain seventy- 

 five maps. The first lieferung contains a map 

 showing the distribution of the flora of Europe ; 

 another, the isotherms of the world ; and a third, 



the soundings in the Mediterranean and Black 

 seas, and also the character of various portions of 

 the shore, which is undergoing rapid changes. 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 



*** Correspondents are requested to be as brief as possible. The 

 writer's name is in all cases required as proof of good faith. 



A thunder-squall in New England. 



The study of thunder-storms that was undertaken 

 as a special investigation by the New England 

 meteorological society in the summer of 1885 was 

 successful in gathering records from a good number 

 of volunteer observers, on which a tolerably com- 

 plete statistical account of the storms may be based : 

 thus there appears a distinctly earlier afternoon 

 maximum of storm-frequency in western than in 

 eastern Massachusetts, implying that distance from 

 some at present unknown district of origin, as well 

 as high temperature, exerts a control on the time of 

 the storm's arrival east of the Hudson. In several 

 of the better-developed storms the data accumulated 

 were sufficient to define the more prominent physical 

 features of the storm with considerable accuracy : 

 this was especially the case with the small but vio- 

 lent thunder-squall that crossed New England about 

 noon on July 21, 1885. The storm belongs to a class 

 first clearly defined by Dr. Hinrichs, director of the 

 Iowa weather-service, several years ago, and differs 

 distinctly from the tornado in having a blast of out- 

 rushing air in front of its rain. The example here 

 described came to us from western New York, where 

 certain observations furnished by Prof. H. A. Hazen 

 of the signal service reported it about six or sev^n 

 o'clock in the morning : two of our observers in cen- 

 tral and eastern New York recorded it at later hours ; 

 and at a little after ten o'clock it entered New Eng- 

 land near the notorious Boston Corners, the former 

 south-western angle of Massachusetts ; thence it fol- 

 lowed an almost due-east path, gradually broadening 

 its rain-area, as it advanced, until it ran out to sea a 

 little after noon, its average hourly velocity being 

 forty-eight miles. All observers agree in giving it 

 a rapid approach, a short, violent passage, and a 

 quick disappearance. Very soon after its clouds 

 were seen and thunder heard, the brief wind-squall 

 came rushing in advance of the pouring rain ; and 

 an hour or so later the whole storm was out of sight 

 in the east. With the wind came a rapid fall of 

 temperature and a distinct increase of pressure. 

 The thermograph, barograph, and anemograph 

 curves, furnished from the city engineer's office 

 in Providence, are here particularly interesting, 

 as they record fluctuations produced by the nearly 

 central passage of the storm. The temperature fell 

 13° in half au hour as the storm came overhead, 

 and soon rose again to a high afternoon max- 

 imum as the clouds cleared away. The barometer 

 quickly rose four-hundredths of an inch at the arrival 

 of the storm, and the wind increased from a gentle 

 breeze to a rate of about forty miles an hour. 



The persistent individuality of this storm, main- 

 taining a constant association of its several features 

 over the greater part of its observed path, justifies 

 the construction of a ' composite portrait,' by means 

 of which all the observations are thrown into their 

 proper position with respect to two governing lines, 

 — the rain-front and the storm axis. In this figure, 

 the curved lines, convex to the east, measure fifteen 



