how enthusiastically he watched the birds and other living things on his estate, and how graphically and accurately he could describe them. The following, taken from a letter to Lord Litford, should endear him to every ornithologist: "Anent the dipper, I need not say how I agree with you in loving them. I have three salmon streams in my estates which they haunt. I never allow one to be shot. We have many pairs, but they never seem to increase much. As to their propensities, I have had ocular demonstration that they eat fish, and that greedily. Twice I have seen a dipper with a fish in his bill—one was a trout or salmon fry, the other was a small flounder. This was in the seaport of the river Aray below my house. The flounder was, of course, a small one, but it was as broad as the white waistcoat of its devourer. I had a good glass, and saw the dipper emerge with the little flounder in his bill. He then took it to a large boulder stone near the bank, and began beating it to death against the stone. Twice it slipped off into the stream, and each time it was firmly pursued and brought back to the block! All aquatic piscivorous birds seem to have a way of doubling and folding up the flat fishes they catch so as to get them down, but I did not see the feat performed in the present case."
The following good story is told in another part of the same letter: "I bought two 'civette' (small owls) in Rome, and took them in a cage with me home. We travelled with Gladstone. He was immensely captivated by the brilliant yellow eyes of the birds. They fastened them on Gladstone's brown eyes with a fixed stare, and he took it into his head to try if he could stare them out of countenence. He continued to joke all the way from Rome to near Perugia, and at last the owls gave it up and looked away. He seemed as delighted as if he had won a great Parliamentary triumph." This is dated 1896. His first letter on birds, so far as the biography shows, was written in 1837—and the interest did not flag in the long interval.
SCIENTIFIC ITEMS
We record with regret the deaths of Professor Alfred Newton, F.R.S., who held the chair of zoology and comparative anatomy at Cambridge: of Dr. Edward John Routh. F.R.S. . the mathematician, of the University of Cambridge; of Dr. Maxwell Tylden Masters. F.R.S., the English botanist and horticulturist; of Dr. Alexander Stewart Herschel. F.R.S., honorary professor of physics at the Durham College of Science; of Sir Dietrich Brandis, F.R.S., inspector general of the forests of India; of Professor Kuno Fischer, professor of philosophy at Heidelberg; of Henry G. Hanks, at one time state geologist of California, and of Mrs. Elizabeth Cabot Cary Agassiz. who in 1850 married Louis Agassiz, with whose work she was intimately associated, and whose life she wrote.
The council of the British Association for the Advancement of Science has nominated Mr. Francis Darwin, F.R.S. . foreign secretary to the Royal Society, author of important papers on physiological botany and of the 'Life and Letters of Charles Darwin,' to be president of the meeting next year, when, for the fourth time, the association will assemble in Dublin.—M. de Lapparent, professor of mineralogy and geology at Paris, has been elected permanent secretary of the Paris Academy of Sciences in succession to the late M. Berthelot.—On the occasion of the celebration of the bicentenary of the birth of Linnæus, the Linnean gold medal of the Royal Swedish Academy was awarded to Sir Joseph Hooker.—A portrait of President Eliot by Mr. John P. Sargent has been unveiled in the Harvard Union.
Dr. E. H. Sellards, for three years geologist and zoologist to the Florida University, has been appointed state geologist of Florida by Governor Brow-
