i88 3 .] 
St > 
NOTES. 
The Royal College of Science and South Kensington . — We 
quote the following' letter from the “ Freeman’s Journal,” and we 
trust that some Irish member will take the advice of our esteemed 
friend and contributor, Professor R. Galloway : — 
“47, Leeson Park, November 21st. 
“ Sir, — The Lord Mayor desires decentralisation as regards 
Irish institutions. Allow me to state two fadfs, out of many, to 
show the desirability for this change. The Department of Science 
and Art at South Kensington governs, as most of your readers 
know, the Royal College of Science in Stephen’s Green ; that 
College costs the taxpayers as much as one of the Queen’s 
colleges. Last session (1881-82) the Professor of Botany and 
the Professor of Zoology had one solitary paid student between 
them. Two scholarships are given away at the end of each 
session. Last session there were only two students for the two 
scholarships, and there would not have been two except that one 
had been sent over from England. 
“ If any Irish member would move for and obtain a Parlia- 
mentary inquiry into that institution, the fadts that would be 
revealed would be so astounding that it would result, I feel 
certain, in the decentralisation both of that and the other Govern- 
ment institution in Kildare Street. — I am, Sir, 
“ Robert Galloway.” 
Professor S. Thompson points out the little-known fadt that 
Swammerdam anticipated the famous initial experiment of 
Galvani by more than a hundred years. Being on a visit in 
Tuscany, in 1678, the illustrious Dutch naturalist showed to the 
Grand Duke that when a portion of muscle of a frog’s leg hanging 
by a thread of nerve bound with silver wire was held over a 
copper support so that both nerve and wire touched the copper, 
the muscle immediately contradfed. 
The Rev. L. J. Templin (“ Kansas Review of Science ”) makes 
some remarkable comments on the “wastes of Nature,” both in 
the organic and in the inorganic world. 
Mr. Merrick, in an elaborate memoir sent to the Entomolo- 
gical Society, contends that the distribution of the Tortricidas 
points to the former existence of a great southern continent, by 
which Australia, Africa, and South America were connected at 
an early epoch. He strongly condemns the present classification 
