54 
Notes. 
[January, 
high power, i-i2th in., was employed, and the effedt with 
Pleurosigma formosum was very good. Some experiments were 
tried with the ordinary condensing lens on opaque objects with 
good results, and when eledtricity can be more conveniently ob- 
tained the lamp will no doubt be used to a great extent. The 
source of power in this instance was a series of Bunsen cells. 
M. Jousset de Bellesme, a Professor at the School of Medicine, 
at Nantes, was about to deliver at the commencement of the 
college session a discourse entitled “ Reminiscences of Claude 
Bernard,” but was formally prohibited from so doing by M. 
Duvaux, the Minister of Public Instruction. The liberty of 
thought and speech is therefore not established in the French 
Republic. The most daring utterances in this discourse are : — 
“ He (Claude Bernard), amidst the almost general decay of 
French science, the fruit of official centralisation , has for a 
moment made other nations forget the alarming distance they 
have put between themselves and us ” ; and “ There are no 
stakes and fagots in our days, but there is the Academy. We 
are not afraid of being burnt alive, but of not being elected an 
Academician.” 
The latest “ refuter ” of Darwinism is one C. M. Renooz. He 
contends that man is the produdt of the Evolution not of animals, 
but of plants. 
M. W. D. Le Sueur (“ Popular Science Monthly”), in review 
ing Mr. Goldwin Smith’s critique on Mr. Spencer’s “ Data of 
Ethics,” pertinently remarks that “ with a strange inconsistency 
the partisans of a supernatural view of disease are always ready 
to apply themselves most vigorously to abating by natural means 
the chastisements which they say are meant for their good.” 
According to H. Cl. Zimmermann the atomic weight of ura- 
nium must be assumed 240. 
M. Rey de Morande seeks to explain the retreat of vegetation 
from the Polar regions by the gradual decrease in the diameter 
of the sun, which was once large enough to irradiate simulta- 
neously both the terrestrial poles. 
The new National Museum at Dublin, if built upon the plans 
drawn out by Mr. J. L. Robinson, will be a splendid and com- 
modious edifice, affording ample space for the National Library, 
and suitable rooms for the Royal Irish Academy and other scien- 
tific bodies. 
Dr. J. Burdon Sanderson, F.R.S., has been appointed to the 
new (Wayneflete) chair of Physiology at the University of 
Oxford. 
Mr. H. D. Valin accounts for the formation of prairies to the 
west of the Mississippi by the supposition that they represent 
