phenomena, and discovered beyond it the reality of chemical processes." Some of the contemporaries of Lavoisier may have been more skilled experimenters in some directions, and no doubt he left much for his followers to do. "Nevertheless, his Traité Élimentaire de Chimie is unquestionably the first rational exposition of the science of chemistry, entirely resting on experimental evidence, largely his own, and admitting to the entities of matter nothing that was not actually produced; and since that day chemistry is the science of the real elements."
In the present course of thought and life Prof. George E. Howard sees a crisis which is determining the character of the modern university. Thus there is a growing tendency to abandon the traditional assumption that there is an essential difference in the scholastic value of studies. A new test of scholastic fitness has arisen—the test of life. All things are in process of development; whole departments of knowledge, hitherto unheard of in the schools, have received recognition. Old subjects which were thought dead have turned out to be but sleeping. Thus philosophy and the classics, subjected to the comparative method, are being made more productive than ever before for social good.
A report on the climatology of the city of Mexico, based upon hourly observations continued through sixteen years (1877 to 1892), is published by Señor Barcena, of the meteorological observatory there. The mean annual temperature is 15·4° C. The mean monthly temperature ranges from 12° C. in December to 18·1° C. in May. The highest temperatures in the shade range from 23° C. in December to 31·6° C. in April; while the limit of lowest temperature runs from -2·2° C. in December to 8·2° C. in August and September. The most rainy months are those from June to September.
A "Bird day" has been established in some of the schools of Oil City, Pa., the object of which is to promote "preservation of American birds from the women who wear them and from the small boy." The literary exercises are similar to those customary on Arbor day.
Frogs are credited by Dr. Romanes, in his Animal Intelligence, with having definite ideas of locality. A Japanese correspondent of Nature says that the same fact has been noticed of old by the Japanese and Chinese. Rejoan Terashima, in his illustrated Cyclopædia of the Three Systems of Japan and China (completed in 1713), says that "when frogs are removed far, they always long after the original locality; hence the Chinese name Hia nia." For similar reasons the Japanese call them "Kaeru," meaning return. This author is confirmed by the lexicographer Shisei Tagawa.
Experiments made upon certain fresh-water crustaceans, says the International Journal of Microscopy, show that they are sensitive to sounds corresponding to more than forty thousand vibrations per second (sounds that we can not hear), and to ultraviolet rays that we can not perceive. Now, all the rays that we can perceive appear to us with definite colors, and it should be the same with these animals; so that it is probable that they see colors that are unknown to us, and that are as different from those that we are familiar with as red is different from yellow or green from violet. It follows from this that natural light, which seems white to us, would appear colored to them, and that the aspect of Nature would be entirely different to them from what it is to us. It is possible, therefore, that to certain animals Nature is full of sounds, colors, and sensations that we have no idea of.
An English committee of sportsmen and naturalists is taking in hand the protection of South African mammals—the giraffe, zebra, eland, gnu, koodoo, and other antelopes—against their threatened extinction. A suggested method of accomplishing this is to secure an inclosed park of about a hundred thousand acres.
In a new process for coloring leather by electrical action, the hide is stretched upon a metallic table and covered, except at the edges, with the coloring liquid. A difference of potential is established between the liquid and the metallic table. The effect of the electric current is to cause the pores of the skin to open, whereby the coloring is enabled to penetrate deeply into its tissue.
A bust of Charles Waterton, the naturalist and South American traveler, executed by the late W. Hawkins in 1865—the year in which Waterton died—has been presented to the Linnæan Society of London by the trustees of the late Mrs. Pitt Byrne. The only accessible portrait of Waterton is from an original oil painting made by C. W. Peale in Philadelphia in 1824. An engraving of it forms the frontispiece of the third volume of the Essays on Natural History. The bust and the portrait correspond well when allowance is made for the forty years' difference in the age of the subject.
Dr. Franz Stuhlman, who accompanied Emin Pasha into the heart of Africa, saw much of the people called Pygmies. He looks upon them as the remnant of a primeval race which at one time occupied the
