Gabriel Gustav Valentin, till 1881 Professor of Physiology in the University of Berne, died May 24th. He was an excellent teacher and a profound physiologist, and was the author of several scientific works on physiological subjects, among them two in Latin. His "Text-Book of Physiology" was translated into English by the late Dr. Brinton.
Madame de Colbert has intrusted the French Academy with some valuable manuscripts of her grandfather, Laplace, which she has recently discovered, on condition that they shall not be opened till 1930.
Mr. H. W. Eaton, of Louisville, Kentucky, has described, in "Science," a female negro child which was born in that city in March, having what appeared to be a rudimentary tail. The tail was visible as a "fleshy peduncular protuberance," about two and a quarter inches long, and measuring an inch and a quarter around at the base, closely resembling a pig's tail in shape, but showing no sign of bone or cartilage, situated about an inch above the lower end of the spinal column. It had grown about a quarter of an inch in eight weeks.
Professor James Hall has been elected a corresponding member of the French Academy of Sciences, mineralogical section, in place of the late Professor J. Lawrence Smith.
Among the important enterprises undertaken by the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey are the measurement of the arc of the thirty-ninth parallel, which is nearly 50° long, and of the meridian of the ninety-ninth degree of longitude, which stretches nearly 23° through the United States, and may be extended north and south to a length of 50°. This will furnish two lines of the highest value in solving the great problem of the figure of the earth.
Grape-seeds contain about eighteen per cent, by weight, of oil, which is largely extracted at Modena and other places in Italy, and used for purposes of illumination.
Ferdinand von Hochstetter, the German mineralogist and geologist, is dead, in the fifty-fifth year of his age. His earlier scientific work was done in New Zealand, when, having left the Novara expedition, he began geological investigations about 1857. He was afterward Professor of Mineralogy and Geology in the Polytechnic Institute of Vienna, and President of the Vienna Geographical Society. Besides works relating to the topography, geology, and palæontology, and the boiling springs of New Zealand, he was the author of books on the geology of Eastern Turkey and the Ural, and of various popular publications.
The July death-list contains the names of three of the scientific men of Sweden: the geometrician, August Pasch, who was fifty-one years old; the botanist, Dr. Lar Magnus Larsson, of the high-school at Carlstad, sixty-two years old; and the chemist, Professor Sten Stenberg, who died in the sixtieth year of his age.
The death is announced of the Abbé François Napoleon Marie Moigno, at Saint-Denis, France, at the age of eighty years. The abbé was of Breton birth, and was educated for the Church. Displaying a taste for science, the Jesuits made him a teacher of mathematics in one of their seminaries. In 1861 the superior of the order directed him to suspend the publication of a work on the calculus which he was preparing, and assigned him a chair of Hebrew and History. He preferred scientific studies, and left the order rather than give them up. He became a scientific contributor to the journals, and founded the "Cosmos," which eventually gave place to the journal "Les Mondes." He was author of books on electric telegraphy, the stereoscope and the saccharimeter, modern optics, a course in popular science, analytical mechanics, several volumes of "Scientific Actualities," and "The Splendors of Faith."
Dr. Erasmus Wilson, a well-known English medical writer, died August 9th, in the seventy-sixth year of his age. His specialty was diseases of the skin, and he founded chairs of Dermatology at the College of Surgeons and at Aberdeen, as well as the Museum of Dermatology at the former institution.
Professor Karl Richard Lepsius, the oldest Egyptologist in Europe, died in Berlin in July last. He was born in 1810; having studied philology at the German universities, he gave his attention to the examination of the Semitic and other alphabets, and of the hieroglyphic alphabet; published studies of various important Egyptian tablets and inscriptions, and of the "Book of the Dead"; and went upon his scientific expedition to Egypt in the fall of 1842. He published his "Einleitung," or "Introduction to Egyptian Chronology," in 1849; his great "Denkmaler," or portfolios of all the Egyptian monuments, between 1849 and 1860; his "Königsbuch," or lists of kings, in 1858; and his "Standard Alphabets," in 1860. He began the publication of a periodical devoted to Egyptology and archaeological research in 1864; and he was the discoverer and the translator of the celebrated trilingual "Decree of Canopus."
