i88i.] 
437 
Notes, 
According to M. A. Gaudry the Permian reptiles of France 
diminish the vast interval which exists at present between the 
reptiles and the monotrematous mammals. 
The ferment which M. Bechamp supposed he had discovered 
in chalk has been traced, by MM. Chamberland and Roux, to an 
experimental error. 
According to M. Tayon the production of wool in sheep is 
inversely as the secretion of milk. 
The “ Chemiker Zeitung ” states that all the English and 
French professors at the University of Yeddo, Japan, have been 
dismissed, and their places filled with Germans. The Japanese 
Minister of Public Instruction is a German professor. The 
Chinese are about establishing a German University at Pekin. 
These facts should be duly weighed by those who still doubt the 
superiority of German research over English cram and exam- 
inations ! 
J. Starkie Gardner (“ Geological Magazine ”) re-discusses the 
question of the permanence of continents and sea-depths. He 
considers that though the greatest depths of the ocean may have 
always been permanent, the banks and ridges, with islands occa- 
sionally rising to the surface and crossing the Atlantic or Pacific, 
must be either rising or sinking. 
Mr. C. S. Wilkinson, New South Wales Government Geologist, 
has discovered glacial boulders in secondary deposits, near 
Sidney. 
The working naturalists of Des Moines have organised a so- 
called “ Agassiz Field Club.” 
The larvae of certain Bombyliidse — so-called bee-flies — prey 
eagerly on the eggs of the dreaded American locust, Caloptenus 
spretus. 
Lord Walsingham enumerates forty-eight species of Tortricidae 
common to Europe and the Pacific coast of North America. 
A reprint of the compendium of the natural sciences, written 
in the ninth century by Rhaban Maurus, and used for a long time 
as a text-book at the College of Fulda, has recently appeared. 
It includes astronomy, geography, anthropology, and theoretic 
medicine, and in all these departments it ignores all fadts not to 
be found in the writers of classical antiquity. 
Dr. Hermann Mueller deals a crushing reply to Bonnier’s sup- 
posed refutation of the inter-relation of flowers and insedts. 
There are suspicions that the Phylloxera has found its way to 
the vineyards of Vidtoria. 
The larva of a Coleopterous insedt, supposed to be that of a 
Lytta , is found to destroy the eggs of the locust in the Troad. 
