pervading all the phenomena in question of a second self, to which the name subliminal (under the threshold) has been given, that acts and perceives in manners entirely unknown to our ordinary everyday consciousness.
The French colony of New Caledonia is troubled by the depredations of deer, which multiply with marvelous rapidity and invade the plantations, where they do great mischief, even climbing up into the granaries. A curious feature of the trouble is that the deer are not native, but are the offspring of a present made to the colony by the Queen of England. The Revue Scientifique draws from this fact a lesson that it is well to be cautious concerning the gifts of animals we may bestow upon other countries, and not make them without advice from experts concerning the conditions and contingencies. Rabbits in Australia, the mongoose in Jamaica, and the New Caledonian deer afford instances in which such gifts, made with the best intentions, have resulted disastrously. It is said that the farmers of the State of Maine have also suffered from the incursions of deer since restrictions were placed upon the hunting of them.
Women are gradually working their way into the German universities, where a few have been admitted, not as of right, but as of favor. Five ladies have up to this time taken the doctor's degree at Heidelberg. One of them, an American, made so brilliant a success that she was at once offered an appointment at the German zoölogical station near Naples.
The curious fact is noted by Mr. C. C. Vermeule, in his forest studies of New Jersey, that less disposition to destroy and waste the forests is shown by the native population than by the immigrants from countries where the control and management of the forests are, on the whole, superior to our modern methods.
The gypsies—those of Hungary, at least—are not all wanderers. Of 274,940 representatives of that race enumerated in 1893, 243,432 were described as sedentary, 20,406 as semi-sedentary, and only 8,938 as nomads, while 2,164 were soldiers or prisoners. All of them profess one of the various forms of Christianity of the people among whom they dwell, and only 82,405 are still able to talk gypsy dialects. Seventeen thousand of them are musicians.
Prof. Emil Du Bois-Reymond, of the University of Berlin, one of the most famous and many sided German men of science, died, December 26th, aged seventy-eight, having been professor at Berlin since 1865. He had been suffering for several months from general debility, but his death, when it came, was sudden, though not unexpected. He was one of the earliest and most vigorous champions of the doctrine that biological phenomena are governed by physical and chemical laws, and ranked alongside of Tyndall and Huxley as a lecturer and popularizer of the natural sciences. Several of his ablest addresses have been published in the Monthly, including the Seven World Problems and The Limits of Our Knowledge of Nature—perhaps the two most famous of all. A sketch of his life and work to that time was published, with a portrait, in the Popular Science Monthly (vol. xiii) for July, 1878.
We have learned of the death of the Hon. Horatio Hale, of Clinton, Ontario, one of our most distinguished anthropologists, particularly in the study of aboriginal languages, but have received no details of the event. He was the author of several valuable articles in the Monthly.
Dr. Henry Tremen, formerly Director of the Botanic Garden at Peradenyia, Ceylon, who died October 10th, in his fifty-third year, was author of the Flora of the County of Middlesex, England, and, in conjunction with Prof. Bentley, of a standard work on Medical Botany; and had prepared a complete Flora of Ceylon, of which three parts have appeared.
August Trécul, who recently died in his seventy-sixth year, a distinguished plant anatomist and author of important technical studies in his specialty, spent three years in Texas, collecting material for the Paris Museum, and studying the textile plants used by the Indians.
Captain John Gregory Bourke, of the United States Cavalry, who died June 8th, besides being a gallant soldier, was an ethnologist of much repute. He had done much work in connection with the Bureau of Ethnology, and spent five years from 1886 in Washington compiling the ethnographic notes he had collected during his service in the West, and pursuing collateral studies. His most famous work was on the Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona, which attracted great attention all over the world and brought into prominence a branch of anthropology which had been relatively little studied. He was also author of works on the Medicine-men of the Apaches, and Scatalogic Rites of All Nations.
Hugo Gylden, Astronomer of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and Director of the Observatory of Stockholm, who died November 9th, ranked with M. Tisserand as one of the most illustrious mathematical astronomers on the European continent. He was the son of Prof. Gylden, of the University of Helsingfors, where he was born in 1841. He was best known by the work which he had carried on since the death of Leverrier on the general theory of perturbations, and by his great treatise on the absolute orbits of the eight principal planets.
