SCIENTIFIC SUMMAET. 
221 
The New Gas and its Prospects. — Mr. Crookes, F.R.S., gives in the 
Chemical News ” Feb. 21st, an account of a visit he paid to the new works, 
and of the results, as far as he can judge of them. He does not seem at all 
to report favourably — indeed we do not see that he could do otherwise. The 
following is a quotation from the Report : ^^The new process claims to effec 
a great saving in regard to expense. One ton of coal by the old process 
yields, in round numbers, 10,000 cubic of feet of gas ; whereas by the new 
one ton of coke should yield from 130,000 to 150,000 cubic feet, or possibly 
even more. The result is stated in the Prospectus to be that the labour of 
twenty-nine out of every thirty men will be saved. In another part of the 
same Prospectus, we are, however, told that the saving of labour will be ‘ to 
the extent of 50 per cent.,’ so that there appears some ambiguity in the 
matter. Messrs. Quick and Son, the engineers, report, as the result of their 
experiments and calculations, that ‘ gas of 16|- candle-power may be manu- 
factured at a cost of Is. 7|d per thousand cubic feet.’ Such a consumma- 
tion is devoutly to be wished, but its realisation must obviously depend upon 
a somewhat complex set of conditions. The managers of the undertaking 
do not hope, we understand, to get their processes adopted in large English 
towns, for the present at any rate. Probably they are wise, for if they did 
they would at once be met with the difficulty — Where is the necessary coke 
to come from if the old mode of gas-making be abandoned P Charcoal, or 
even wood, would hardly be proposed as a substitute in this country. In 
many foreign countries the case is very different, and it certainly appears 
possible, or even perhaps probable, that in places where wood is cheap and 
coal very dear, this process, or some slight modification of it, may be adopted 
with advantage.” 
ZOOLOGY AND COMPARATIVE ANATOMV. 
American Dredging expeditions . — Some of the results, on a smaller scale 
than we may expect from the Challenger ” expedition, but still important 
enough, have been published by those who accompanied one of the late 
American excursions. They have been put together in form of a set of 
contributions to ^‘Silliman’s American Journal ” [Jan. 1873 and following 
numbers]. They are, however, much too long for abstract, but nevertheless 
the objects to be attained by the expedition are very distinctly defined in a 
series of statements extending to about a dozen of which the following 
struck us as zoologically of most importance : — 1st, the exploration of 
the shores and shallow water for the purpose of making collections of all 
the algae and marine animals living between tides, on every different kind 
of shore, including the numerous burrowing worms and Crustacea, and to 
ascertain as much as possible concerning their habits, relative abundance 
stations, &c. 2nd, the extension of similar observations by means of the 
dredge, trawl, tangles, and other instruments, into all depths down to the 
deepest waters of the Bay of Fundy, and to make a systematic survey, as 
complete as possible, of all the smaller bays and harbours within our reach, 
both to obtain complete collections of the animals and plants, and to ascer- 
