are preparing their licence-ès-sciences: the other visitors are either licentiates who are preparing their doctorate theses, or doctors who are pursuing new researches. The fauna is very rich, and the species are numerous. The tides being very high, there is a good deal to be found at low water, under the rocks, or in the pools. The laboratory is open from May to October.

The

In 1881, Professor de Lacaze-Duthiers began forming another laboratory, a winter one, on the Mediterranean coast. This is the laboratory Arago of Banyuls, close to the Spanish frontier. state had little to do with the establishment of this laboratory: Professor de Lacaze-Duthiers preferred asking money right and left, of the municipal boards, of the towns of Perpignan, Banyuls, etc., and succeeded in getting money enough to build a very commodious laboratory in a very short time. Having been an inmate of this laboratory during a whole winter season, the Banyuls laboratory is open from November to June, I am qualified to speak of it; and it must be said that the organization is a very good one.

As there is no tide in the Mediterranean, the animals are fetched by two or three boats belonging to the laboratory: they are furnished with all the necessary implements, and have a crew of four men. Those of Roscoff need only two or

three sailors.

At Banyuls the persons who work in the laboratory do not live in it: each has his workingroom, but one must lodge and board in the village, where good enough accommodations can be found. I had there a whole house, with accommodations for five persons, at the rate of twelve dollars a month. Living is cheap; and I can say from personal experience, that, for a biological student, nothing can be pleasanter than a season at Banyuls, where the climate is generally fine, and the scenery very pretty, looking out on the blue Mediterranean.

The laboratory comprises an aquarium, with tanks full of pretty and curious specimens of marine life, a library, a collection of preserved specimens, and accommodations for twenty-five persons. There are three boats and one life-preserver. Although the fauna is not as rich as it is in Roscoff, the animals are numerous. The Medusae, Siphonophora, and many other Coelenterata are especially pretty, and on some days are to be found in enormous numbers. The laboratory of Banyuls is especially reserved for students who have already taken their degree of licentiate, and are preparing a thesis, or for scientists who wish to study some zoological questions; but it is not open to beginners, to persons who have not yet had practical experience in zoölogy.

After having founded his first laboratory, that of Roscoff, Professor de Lacaze-Duthiers founded, in 1872, his Archives de zoologie expérimentale et générale, so as to be able to publish the works of his pupils and of the persons who come to his laboratories. This paper has succeeded so well, that it is at present overcrowded, and cannot accept all that is proposed for publication.

These results show that Professor de LacazeDuthiers's first seventeen years in the Sorbonne have been very useful to zoology, especially if one considers the number of papers he has published, and the number of pupils he has had, and has yet.

In consequence of Milne-Edwards's death, Professor de Lacaze-Duthiers has taken the professorship of comparative anatomy: that of zoology has been given to one of his best pupils, M. Delage. It is to be hoped that M. de Lacaze-Duthiers will be able to continue a long time making himself useful to science. The students, on hearing his address some days ago concerning his past work, all concurred in this feeling, and made it known by very liberal and hearty cheers.

In one of my last letters I spoke about the great services rendered by photography in the recent caving-in of a quarry near Périgueux. MM. Langlois and Siemens have continued taking photographs of the yet buried victims, and have disclosed new facts. The photographs, taken in the way I have already explained, show three corpses, of which one was immediately and easily recognized; another is supposed to be a man who was in the quarry at the time of the accident; the third is unknown. These photographs not only show all the tools and implements the victims had with them, such as saws, planks of wood, a cart, etc., but they also show that the unfortunate men must have lived some time, since one of them, who always wore short-cut hair, is seen on the photograph to have very long locks. It is certain that these men lived some time, and that the smoke perceived some days after the accident was due to their having built a fire to warm themselves or to do some cooking. The public feeling is very much excited against the directors of the quarry for not having earnestly tried to get at the victim when it might still have been useful.

At the last meeting of the Société de psychologie physiologique a good many strange facts were made known by different persons, concerning instances of somnambulic sleep induced at a distance. It would seem that certain persons are able to induce sleep in a subject, Madame B., by pure mental operation, by willing it, at a distance of some hundred yards. The fact is a very interesting one; but it seems that it would be better,

before trying to explain it, as some would like to, to see if the fact is real and positive. The persons who have witnessed it are certainly very trustworthy, but this is no guaranty that they had all the requisites for experimenting in a satisfactory manner. Deceitfulness is so frequent in persons of hysterical nature, and experimenting is so difficult, as the Hippocratic aphorism says, that such questions ought to be studied only by professional experimenters. One may be a sound philosopher or a good physician, and yet understand nothing about experimenting. As for medical students, their authority in such matters is of little worth. The society ought to appoint a committee to investigate the matters brought forward, and select some professional experimenters of a sceptical turn of mind, and somewhat more incredulous than are most of the persons who study, or pretend to study, somnambulic phenomena.

At the meeting of May 17 of the Academy of sciences, the academy presented M. Chevreul, the veteran of French science, with a very fine gift, in commemoration of his hundredth year. As he came into the room, the whole assembly rose, and the president, Admiral Jurien de la Gravière, made a little speech, in which he very appropriately remarked that what we honor and celebrate in your green and majestic old age is not, to be sure, the length of your life: it is, above all, the good use you have made of this exceptional favor of Providence." The gift made to M. Chevreul consists of a bronze by Dubois, representing 'Study and meditation.' It is allegorical, and does not at all represent M. Chevreul's features, which, it must be said, are not particularly handsome. M. Chevréul answered briefly and in very feeling terms. It is in August that M. Chevreul's hundredth year will close. It had been decided that it was better to anticipate the anniversary some weeks, because in August many members of the academy are out of Paris, taking some rest, or travelling, and because postponing is rather dangerous with a centenarian.

Dr. Worms has recently made known to the Academy of medicine the results of his investigations concerning Daltonism and other sorts of colorblindness among the personnel of the Northern railway. The number of persons examined is 11,173, and the proportion of defective color-vision is a very small one. Two persons only were utterly incapable of distinguishing one color from another; three were color-blind for red; six for green; eighteen mistook green for red; fifteen could not distinguish green from blue or gray; fifty-two had a certain weakness in color-vision. Upon the whole, the defects of color-vision are very scarce among the persons examined by M. Worms; and

there is not much danger to be feared for railroad travellers from these defects.

M. Balbiani, professor in the Collège de France, published some days ago, in the Revue scientifique, an interesting paper on viviparous fishes, in answer to a letter written by a person of New Orleans concerning a viviparous ray. It seems, from the letter, that this fish is very much disliked by fishermen, not only because it is viviparous, and so differs from other fishes, but because it seems also to have menses, like mammalia. Professor Balbiani contributes an interesting note on the subject, and explains in a very acceptable manner the appearance which so much troubles the New Orleans fishermen.

Among the recent publications of scientific interest, we may notice Professor Cornil's second edition of Les bacteries.' This book is a very good one, and the first edition was sold in a few months, so that a second has become necessary. Professor Cornil has added many new facts concerning bacteriology, and his book is more valuable than ever.

Professor Herzen of Lausanne has published a little work on digestion. He entirely confirms Schiff's theory of peptogenes, and shows how well conducted have been this physiologist's experiments. Professor Herzen was able to examine a man with a gastric fistula for some time, and has made very useful experiments concerning the therapeutics of dyspepsia. He shows how this disease ought to be treated, rationally, and his book is of practical as well as of scientific interest.

We may also notice the second edition of Professor Bouchard's Maladies dues au ralentissement de la nutrition' ('Diseases due to retardation of nutrition'). This book is always full of suggestive facts, and deserves the fame it has enjoyed since the day it came out.

M. Miquel, the well-known micrographer, recently read at the meeting of the Société de médecine publique, a paper on horal variations of aerial bacteria. There is a sort of tide with high and low water marks in the distribution of these micro-organisms. There is a first high-water between six and nine A.M., and a second from six to eight P.M. The minima are at two P.M. and two A. M. These differences are also perceived in open rooms, but not in closed apartments. The inference is, that it is better to ventilate rooms from eleven in the evening to five in the morning; but this is not always very easy and practical.

Some days ago M. Denika, a pupil of Professor de Lacaze-Duthiers, published a very interesting thesis on the structure of a gorilla embryo, studying all the particulars of the different systems of

the body, and establishing an interesting comparison with the organization of other monkeys. This gorilla embryo is the first that has been dissected yet, and studied with real care.

A new publication was started some time ago in Paris. It is the Grande encyclopédie,’— a cyclopaedia in which all facts at present known concerning science, literature, arts, legislation, etc., are condensed; it is a summary of present knowledge. The first volume is now ready. The whole publication will comprise some twenty or twenty-five quarto volumes. It is written by a number of contributors, and only by specialists, under the direction of a committee comprising MM. Berthelot, Hahn, Levasseur, Laisant, Marion, etc. It seems to be a very good idea; and, although the Grande encyclopédie' does not pretend to create the furor that Diderot and d'Alembert's did, from a philosophical point of view, it certainly will be of great use, if it continues as it has begun, being very complete and well prepared. There are no such cyclopaedias in France yet, written by competent persons; and there is no doubt that this publication really meets a general demand. It is printed with great care, and most of the articles are made up from the latest and best documents. It is to be expected that the public will look on it favorably, if it continues as it has begun, and if the contributors are always well chosen by the directing committee. It is time that France should have a cyclopaedia able to stand a comparison with those of England and of America.

At a recent meeting of the Academy of sciences, M. d'Arsonval presented a very well combined instrument devised for the investigation of the duration of different psychical or physiological phenomena. It is very useful, for instance, for the study of reaction-time, of perception-periods, and for the study of the dilemma-time in distinguishing two or more perceptions. The great advantage of this instrument is, that it disposes of the estimation of the experimenter himself, and gives much more exact results in the very delicate and difficult estimation of the duration of mental phenomena. M. d'Arsonval is a very able man in all that concerns mechanical contrivances; and his instrument, which I saw at the works of Ch. Verdin (the constructor) some days ago, is a very well contrived one. V.

Paris, June 15.

NOTES AND NEWS. CONGRESSMAN VIELE of New York made a strong effort in the house last week to secure an appropriation of ten thousand dollars to continue the National board of health. Representative

servers.

'Consanguinity in marriage' was the subject of an address by Dr. McKee at a recent meeting of the Ohio state medical society. The belief that consanguineous marriages are followed by evil effects upon the offspring is not accepted by the author, and the object of his address was to show its falsity. A very interesting and concise account is given of the Mosaic law, and also of that of the Greeks and Romans, in reference to the marriages between relations; and full quotations are made from the statistics of modern writers and obAmong the eighteen conclusions drawn as the result of the author's studies are the following: 1. Like breeds like, good or bad, entirely independent of consanguinity. 2. Intemperance, luxury, dissipation, sloth, and shiftlessness, as well as hygienic surroundings and innumerable other causes, should bear much of the responsibility laid at the door of consanguinity. 3. Data are of doubtful reliability, full of flaws and false reasoning. The noted cases are the unfortunate ones. The favorable are unknown or forgotten. It is the ill news which travels fast and far. 4. Statistics show about the same proportion of deaf-mutes, idiots, and insane persons, descendant from consanguineous marriages, to the whole number of those unfortunates, as the number of consanguineous marriages is to the whole number of marriages. 5. Consanguineous marriages which bring together persons having a disease or morbid tendency in common are dangerous to the offspring; not, however, one whit more so than the marriage of any other two persons not related, yet having an equal amount of tendency to disease in common. 6. The half a hundred abnormalities ascribed to consanguinity, including almost all

the ills that flesh is heir to, among others, whooping-cough, approaches the ludicrous. 7. Consanguineous marriages, no other objection being present, should not be opposed on physiological grounds. The address closes with an exhaustive bibliography of the subject, including some thirty writers, and extending, in point of time, from Moses to the present year.

A French journal cites the fact that a number of persons have recently been poisoned in France by eating asparagus grown in localities where small amounts of sulphide of carbon existed in the soil. The symptoms were those of cramps and diarrhoea.

Rumination is commonly supposed to be a digestive process peculiar to certain of the lower animals. There are, however, some forty cases on record where this power has been possessed by members of the human species. It usually commences so soon after birth that the affected individual cannot state its commencement, and appears to be present in males almost exclusively. It is in all its steps essentially the same as in the ruminating animals, and, as it mostly occurs in those who are large eaters, it is evidently one of nature's methods to provide for more thorough mastication in those who eat to excess, or do not take the necessary time to masticate their food properly in the first instance.

-The Boat-sailer's manual, by E. F. Qualtrough, U. S. N. (New York, Scribner, 1886, 24°), deserves and should command a ready sale among the many whose interest in the subject is awakened or revived by the triumphs of the Puritan or Priscilla. There is a great deal of information in it, most germane to the subject and very well arranged. The language is, however, unintelligible to the general reader; and the glossaries, of which there are two, are quite defective. They should be consolidated, to save the trouble of two searches, and even then there are forty-two words unknown ashore, used by the author and not defined.

-The annual report of the astronomer royal, Mr. Christie, was submitted to the Board of visitors of the Greenwich observatory on June 5, and gives an account of the progress and activity of the observatory for the year ending May 20, 1886. Copies of the original report have not yet reached this country, but the following particulars of its contents have been obtained from abstracts which have been published in The Athenaeum and Nature. The regular work of the transit circle and the altazimuth has been continued, and very satisfactory results have been

obtained with the apparatus for determining absolute personal equations brought into use with the former instrument some months ago. Spectroscopic observations include a considerable number made of the new star which burst out last August in the great nebula of Andromeda. The spectroscopic observations of Sirius indicate, as in the last three years, a displacement of the F line towards the blue: this displacement would correspond to a motion of the earth towards Sirius at a rate of something more than twenty miles per second, though, from the nature of the observations, the amount of such a motion cannot be considered as very accurately determined. For the year 1885, a photographic record of the sun's surface can be made out for 360 days by filling up the gaps in the series of Greenwich photographs from photographs obtained in India and the Mauritius. Observations of comets and of casual phenomena have been made with the equatorials; and the magnetic and meteorological observations, the time-service, etc., have been kept up as in previous years. The full import of the statement that the reductions of the observations are keeping pace with their registration, will be appreciated by all who are engaged in routine astronomical work. In regard to the new equatorial, Mr. Christie says, The construction of an objectglass of 28 inches aperture and of 28 inches focal length, with suitable tube, to be mounted on the south-east equatorial, has been authorized by the government, and the necessary funds have been provided in the estimates. The work has been intrusted to Mr. Grubb, with whom I have arranged the details of the tube, which is to be of special construction, adapted to the conditions of the mountings, and available for spectroscopy and photography as well as for eye observations. Grubb proposes to provide means for readily separating the lenses of the object-glass to such a distance as will give the proper correction for photographic rays."

Mr.

In connection with the recent notice of Professor Hull's Report on the geology of Palestine,' it has recently been stated (Geol. mag. Lond., September, 1884) that Dr. Schweinfurth, the wellknown African explorer, has recently announced the discovery of paleozoic fossils in the Wady Arabab, west of the Gulf of Suez, in sandstone hitherto regarded as Nubian sandstone.

The fossils have been submitted to Professor Beyrich, who identifies a species of Spirigera or Athyris, allied to A. concentrica, and stems of crinoids. The exposure seems to be not dissimilar from that of the Wady Narb on the other side of the Red Sea. Dr. Schweinfurth's paper is in the Bulletin

of the Egyptian institute for 1885 (Cairo, 1886). This discovery confirms the suggestion of Sir William Dawson as to the carboniferous age of the lower part of the Nubian sandstone of Egypt, based on a fossil plant and on its geological relations.

-The human spleen has been removed seven times in Italy, and in but two instances has the patient recovered. Prof. Antonio Ceci of Genoa has recently performed the operation, and his is one of the two successful cases. The patient was a poor girl, seventeen years of age, and the enlarged spleen weighed one-fifteenth of her entire bodily weight.

Malignant pustule is fortunately of very rare occurrence. A patient suffering from this disease has recently died in Guy's Hospital, London. He was employed on a wharf, in the handling of foreign hides, and undoubtedly contracted the disease from the hide of an animal which had been affected with the disease known by the French as charbon, by the Germans as milzbrand, but by English-speaking people as anthrax. The patient noticed a pimple on the back of his neck, which in twenty-four hours became greatly enlarged, and the glands of the neck were swollen. The surgeons removed the enlarged pimple at once, but without avail, the man dying in about four days from the time he first noticed the pimple. This disease may also be contracted by the bite of an insect, a fly for instance, which has been feeding upon the carcass of an infected animal. The microbe of the disease is a bacillus (Bacillus anthracis), and was observed in the blood of cattle as long ago as 1849 by Pollender, although its importance was first recognized by Davaine in 1850.

The evidence of the greater safety of ether than chloroform as an anaesthetic is accumulating very rapidly. In England during 1885 there were twelve deaths attributable to chloroform, and but three to ether.

-Physicians are now using aniline-oil as a local anaesthetic when simple operations, such as the opening of a felon, are to be performed. The finger, in such a case, is dipped for a short time in the oil, and, although the flesh may subsequently be cut to the bone, it is said there is absolutely no pain.

We learn from the Sidereal messenger for July that the contract for mounting the 36-inch objective has been awarded by the Lick trustees to Warner and Swasey of Cleveland, O., for $42,000. The telescope is to be fifty-seven feet long; the diameter of the tube, forty-two inches. Provisions are made by which it will be possible for the observer at the eye-end of the telescope to com

mand all the possible motions, and these same motions can also be controlled by an observer stationed on a small balcony twenty feet above the floor. It is expected that the mounting will be completed in April, 1887, and that the glass will be brought to Mount Hamilton and put in place some time during the summer following. The total cost of the equatorial and dome will be about $164,850; the cost of the dome being $56,850; the mounting, $42,000; the visual objective, $53,000; the additional photographic lens, $13,000.

- Mr. H. C. Wilson, assistant astronomer at the Cincinnati observatory, has accepted a position as computer under the Transit of Venus commission in Washington.

The Atlantic pilot chart' for July calls attention to the necessity for the establishment of a simple international code, by means of which passing ships can indicate readily and exactly the points where they have encountered ice. Many systems have been proposed, but that copyrighted by Mr. F. Wyneken of New York seems to be the best yet offered, and has been adopted by many transatlantic steamer companies according to the chart.

MM. Regnard and Loye recently made some investigations of interest on the body of a criminal who died under the guillotine. For physiological research the authorities arranged that possession should be given instantly after the execution. Immediately after the decapitation a temporary rigor of the whole muscular system took place. In lifting the body by the heels the whole frame was moved, and remained absolutely rigid and inflexible. Even the eyelids could hardly be forced open. Not a tremor of any sort was discernible. This state lasted between two and three minutes. At three minutes from decapitation voluntary reflex action had completely disappeared. Irritation of the soles of the feet, of the conjunctiva, of the spinal marrow, produced no effect. Only the pupils contracted slightly before a bright light. The first experiment was to determine the action of the pneumogastric nerve on pulmonary contractility. The investigations of Williams and Paul Bert have shown that in the dog the circular muscular fibres surrounding the bronchia are innervated from the vagus. But in the dog the pneumogastric is so intimately connected with the sympathetic, that it is difficult to determine to which of these nerves the action of the muscles of the lung should be ascribed. In man they are separated. In the present case the result of the experiment showed clearly that the action of the pneumogastric determined the contraction of the lung by the contraction of the circular fibres.