Dr. D. W. Prentiss, of Washington, D. C, has described a remarkable change in the color of the hair which followed the use of pilocarpine in the case of a young woman treated by him. The hair, which was at first light blonde, with a yellow tinge, became chestnut brown in the course of a month and almost a pure black in six months, and acquired a more vigorous and thicker growth. A microscopic examination showed that the change in color was due to an increase of the normal pigment, and not to a dye. The eyes also became darker. The hair of an infant, treated for croup, showed a distinct change to a darker color after ten days' use of pilocarpine.
The death is announced of M. Bussy, the eminent French chemist. He was the first person that succeeded in obtaining metallic magnesium.
Mr. M. E. Wadsworth has called attention to a confusion in which the term Laurentian as the name of a geological formation has become involved by its having been appropriated to two different sets of rocks. Mr. Edward Desor first used the name in 1850, and applied it to some marine deposits in Maine, on the St. Lawrence River, and on Lakes Champlain and Ontario. He employed it afterward in several papers published in scientific journals and transactions, and it seems to have passed into current use among geologists between 1850 and 1857. Sir William Logan in 1854 applied the same name to the Canadian rocks, which he had heretofore called the "metamorphic series," and which are the equivalents of the Azoic rocks of Foster and Whitney. Mr. Wadsworth maintains that the later appropriation should give way to the earlier application.
Professor E. D. Cope describes the remains of a large mosasauroid reptile, to which he gives the name of Clidastes conodon, of which a part of a skeleton has been discovered by Professor Samuel Lockwood near Freehold, New Jersey. The parts found include numerous vertebræ; the greater part of the lower jaw, with some teeth; a humerus and ulna nearly perfect; a nearly entire coracoid, and parts of both scapulas; and indicate an animal larger than any Clidastes hitherto known.
Hermann von Schlagintweit, the eldest of the three brothers who became distinguished by their explorations of the highlands and mountain-regions of India, died in Munich on the 19th of January. He was born in 182(5, published works on the physical geography of the Alps in 1850 and 1851, and in the three years following 1844 traveled with his brothers Adolph and Robert through the East Himalaya region and Assam, Cashmere, Ladakh, and Balti, and over the Karakorum and Kuen-Lun Mountains to Chinese Turkistan. The results of their explorations have been embodied in two works of high scientific value, which, unfortunately, are not yet completed.
The crayon-pencils now much used by children have been found to be colored with poisonous dyes. The Dublin "Journal of Medicine" has an account of a child who was taken with all the symptoms of poisoning, for which he was treated with emetics and purgatives. The vomited matter was marked by particles of a green substance containing copper, and the discharges from the bowels bright-green fragments. The child was sick for a month. It was found, on examination, that he had eaten a part of a green crayon, colored with arsenite of copper.
The deaths of Dr. Karl Peters, Professor of Mineralogy and Geology at Grätz University, and author of numerous papers, and of Dr. Karl Fortlage, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Jena, are announced. Dr. Peters was fifty-seven and Dr. Fortlage seventy-five years of age.
A report has been published by the Legislative Assembly of New South Wales on museums for technology, science, and art, and upon scientific, professional, and technical instruction in the colony, which is full of information in connection with the extension of scientific instruction in its relations to technology.
Dr. Pellegrino Manteucci, who died in London on the 8th of August last, in the thirty-first year of his age, had just accomplished the hitherto unachieved task of crossing Africa from the Red Sea to the Gulf of Guinea. He left Suakim on the Red Sea, with two companions, in March, 1880, with the intention of crossing the continent. Prince Borghese left him at Darfoor, and he and Lieutenant Massari went on alone. Reaching the Niger, they embarked on that river and arrived at Egga, where they found the agent of a European company on the 8th of June, and set sail for Europe on the 1st of July. The two travelers entered the Mersey on the 5th of August, only three days before Manteucci's death.
The first discovery of fossil human remains in the caverns of Brazil has been made by Dr. Lund near Agua Santa, province of Minas Geraes, where an osseous breccia has been found, containing human débris, closely associated with the remains of extinct species.
Dr. Javal has recently declared, in a communication to the Société de Médecine Publique el d'Hygiène Professionelle, that the electric light, in the degree of division to which it has been brought, is absolutely harmless, and without danger to the sight.
