Professor P. P. Penhallow, having studied the relation of annual rings to the age of trees, concludes that the formation of rings of growth is chiefly determined by whatever operates to produce alternating periods of physiological rest and activity. In cold climates the rings are an approximately correct, but not always certain, index of age; but in warm climates they arc of little or no value in this respect. The influence of meteorological conditions in determining the growth of each season is most important, particularly with reference to rainfall. Periodicity in rainfall corresponds with periodicity in growth.
Some of the German journals describe a plant which has lately been discovered to have electrical properties. It is called the Phytolacca electrica. It gives a slight electric shock to the hand when its stalk is broken, and affects the magnetic needle, disturbing it considerably if brought very near. Its energy varies during the day, being strongest at about two o'clock in the afternoon and falling away to nothing at night.
H. A. de Abbadie states that the mercurial bath at his observatory in France, about a mile and a half from the Spanish frontier, was subjected to extraordinary and almost continuous agitations during all of last winter, beginning with the 1st of December. The oscillations sometimes reached 30" and were on one day, the 23d of December, as frequent as four in a second. He believes there was a connection between the oscillations, or the cause of them, and the earthquakes in Spain.
A lecture on fish-culture, delivered recently in Hull, England, by Mr. W. Oldham Chambers, was illustrated by object-lessons of living specimens of the white-fish and other foreign species.
James McFarlane, of Towanda, Pennsylvania, author of a valuable work on the coal-fields of America, and of the "Geologists' Traveling Hand-book," died suddenly on the 11th of October. He was engaged at the time of his death in the revision for a new edition of the "Geologists' Traveling Hand-book," in which are given descriptions of the geological formations along all the railroad routes of the country.
Mr. Thomas Bland, an eminent conchologist, died in New York on the 20th of August last, in the seventy-seventh year of his age. He was born in England, and inherited a taste for conchology from his mother. He removed to Barbadoes in 1842, and thence to Jamaica. He became superintendent of a gold-mine in New Granada in 1850, whence he removed to New York in 1852. Here he became associated with Mr. W. G. Binney in the study of our land-shells and in the publication of works which have greatly elucidated the subject. The catalogue of his scientific writings contains seventy-two titles.
Edward Henri von Baumhauer, Secrery of the Dutch Scientific Society at Haarlem, and editor of its "Archives," died last year, in the sixty-sixth year of his age.
Dr. J. J. Baeyer, a distinguished authority in geodesy, founder of the European Gradmessung, and president of the Central Bureau of the society, and of the Royal Prussian Geodetic Institute, died September 10th, aged ninety-one years.
W. Woodbury, the inventor of the Woodbury type process for multiplying photographic pictures, died in Margate, England, September 5th, from the effects of an overdose of laudanum, which he was accustomed to take to allay sleeplessness. He was fifty-one years of age. Notwithstanding the value of his inventions and the great use that has been made of them, it is said that he left his family poor.
Dr. Nicolas Joly, honorary professor in the Faculty of Sciences and in the Medical School of Toulouse, France, died in that city October 17th, in the seventy-fourth year of his age. He was best known, perhaps, by the controversy which he, with MM. Pouchet and Musset, carried on with M. Pasteur in 1863, on the theory of spontaneous generation, from which M. Pasteur came off with all the honors of victory. He was the author of numerous publications of merit in zoölogy and prehistoric ethnography; and was one of the founders of "La Nature," and a frequent contributor to its pages.
Dr. Thomas Davidson, F. R. S., of Muirhouse, Midlothian, Scotland, the highest authority on British fossil Brachiopoda, died at West Brighton, England, October 16th, in his sixty-ninth year. Up to 1871 he had published forty-nine books and papers, chiefly devoted to his specialty in paleontology. He received medals from the Royal and Geological Societies, and from Sir R. Murchison, and a testimonial from the Paleontographical Society in recognition of his labors.
Charles Rodin, a French physiologist, who introduced the study of histology into his country, died early in October last, in his sixty-fifth year. In announcing his death to the French Academy of Sciences, the president of that body remarked upon the fact that M. Robin had not been able to accept the new facts added by his pupils to the science to which he had given a start, and that he had never been "converted to the doctrines of bacteriology."
