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SCIENTIFIC SUMMARY. 
ANTHROPOLOGY. 
NCI ENT Sources of Tin, — Professor Karl Ernst von Baer, only a few 
days before his death, prepared a paper on this subject, which has been 
published in the “ Archiv fur Anthropologie.” From the circumstance that 
almost all the ancient bronzes are found to contain the same proportions of 
the constituent metals, he is inclined to think that the use of bronze had 
spread from some single centre. The source of the tin used in the fabrica- 
tion of bronzes found in the Assyrian and Babylonian ruins he thinks may 
be found in Khorassan, where the existence of the metal was revealed by 
some inquiries that he set on foot, having been led to the belief in its occur- 
rence in that region by a statement of Strabo’s. The tin employed in 
Scandinavia and the countries surrounding the Mediterranean before the 
discovery of the Cornish mines, is supposed bv Von Baer to have been pro- 
bably brought by the Phoenicians from Banca ! 
The Bulgarians. — According to a report in u Nature ” (February 22, 
1877), Professor Virchow lately communicated to the Anthropological 
Society of Berlin, the results of numerous craniological measurements 
undertaken in Bulgaria. The general type is said to be evidently not 
Sclavonic but Finnish, and to point apparently to an emigration from the 
Turco-Finnish tribes of the Oural, to the region of the Danube. Two dis- 
tinct subordinate types are noticed ; one brachycephalic, regarded as pure 
Finnish ; the other macrocephalic, with a retreating forehead, strikingly 
resembling that of the Australian negro. The Bulgarians must have 
gradually adopted the Sclavonic language, and no trace remains of their 
original tongue. 
ASTRONOMY. 
Photographs of Stellar and Planetary Spectra .• — It is rather singular 
that while American and English astronomers succeeded almost simul- 
taneously in solving the difficult problem of estimating the rotation 
of the sun spectroscopically, they should in like manner have attained almost 
simultaneously the mastery of another difficult task. At Mr. Huggins’s 
Observatory, arrangements have been in progress during the last two years 
for applying photography to the spectra of the stars. For this purpose Mr. 
Huggins has replaced the 15-inch refractor before used by him with a 
reflector 18 inches in diameter. The motion of the driving clock was found 
