A committee of the Paris Academy of Sciences has matured a plan for the foundation of an Institut Pasteur for the treatment of rabies, to be open to Frenchmen and to foreigners bitten by dogs or other rabid animals. A public subscription is to be instituted in France and abroad for the foundation of the establishment. The management and application of the subscription will be under the direction of a committee, of which Admiral Jurien de la Gravière, President of the Academy, is chief.
Dr. Dubois, of Paris, has been making experiments on the properties of vaseline as food. Two dogs were fed on soup in which the usual fat was entirely replaced with vaseline. With this diet, the animals even slightly increased in weight; their general state was good, with no loss of appetite, vomiting, or diarrhoea. Whence the experimenter infers that the carburets of hydrogen forming vaseline, though they favor neither oxidation nor saponification like fats, are readily tolerated in the alimentary canal of dogs.
The Marquis de Nadaillac gives man's range of endurance of temperature as equivalent to at least 132° C., or 236° Fahr. His estimate is based on the recorded facts of -65° C., or -85° Fahr., observed in the Kara Sea, and 67·7° C, or 151·8° Fahr., in the country of the Tuaricks, in Central Africa.
Dr. Andries, having calculated that accidents from lightning have increased by from three to five fold during the last fifty years, finds that the causes which have been assigned for the phenomena do not account for all. He regards the main cause as lying in the enormous increase in manufactories, locomotives, etc., which fill the air with smoke, steam, and particles of dust of all kinds, while the increased populations contribute their share to the impurity of the atmosphere. His own experiments and those of others have shown that all the electrical phenomena of the air increase in intensity with the increase of dust in it.
The London Sanitary Protection Association registers more than 1,000 members, and reports 1,264 inspections during the year. The general character of the houses inspected was found to be as insanitary as ever, only 5 per cent being found in perfect order, and 9·5 per cent in fairly good order; while in 60 per cent foul air was escaping directly into the house, and in 24 per cent sewage was partly retained under-ground by leakage or choking of pipes.
A periodical descriptive of the contents and additions to the collection has been started by the administration of the Ethnological Section of the Royal Museum at Berlin. The first number contains an account of Dr. Nachtigal's ethnological collections, and other papers of similar interest.
The death is announced of Dr. Moser von Moosbruch, agricultural chemist, of Vienna.
M. Felix Leblanc, Professor of Chemistry in the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, Paris, is dead. He was for a long time a collaborator with Dumas; and has left his mark in chemical science, particularly in the matter of studies of carbonic oxide, ne also gave much attention to electrical investigations, and was a member of the committee on experiments of the International Electrical Exposition of 1881. He was chief inspector of gas in the city of Paris, and Vice-President of the Society for the Encouragement of National Industries.
Johann Jacob von Tschudi, an eminent observer of South American phenomena, died in St. Gall, Switzerland, on the 24th of January last. He was born at Glarus, in 1818, and went from school to Peru, where he lived five years. He gave the public the best account of Peru, and also published books on the fauna of that country, and the ancient Quichua language, a travel-sketch of the Andes, an account of the Brazilian province of Minas-Geraes, the "System of the Batrachians," and finally, a comprehensive book of travels in South America, in five volumes. He was a brother of Friedrich von Tschudi, author of the "Thierleben der Alpenwelt."
Mr. Richard Edmunds, a student of extraordinary agitations of the sea and earthquake-shocks, and of antiquities, died recently at Plymouth, England, in his eighty-fifth year. The results of his seismological investigations are published in the "Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal," the British Association Reports, and the "Transactions of the Royal Society of Cornwall." He also published, in 1862, a book on the "Antiquities, Natural History, Natural Phenomena, and Scenery of the Land's End District."
Dr. T. Spencer Cobbold, Fellow of the Royal and Linnæan Societies, has recently died. He was born in 1 828, and received a medical education in practice and at the University of Edinburgh. He was an eminent physician and medical professor. He devoted much attention to the study of morphology and the investigation of the life-history of animal parasites. He prepared the article on "Ruminantia" for the "Cyclopædia of Anatomy and Physiology." In 1868 he was appointed, by the Trustees of the British Museum, Swiney Professor of Geology.
