trance had been removed, but the other had been forgotten. The spider, which still inhabited the tube, immediately began removing the cotton from the lower end, and cast some of it out. But guided, apparently by its sense of touch, to the knowledge that the soft fibers would be an excellent material with which to line ita tube, it speedily put in a cotton padding for about four inches downward from the opening. Dr. McCook pointed out the very manifest inference that the spider must, for the first time, have come in contact with such a material as cotton, and had immediately utilized its new experience by adding the soft fiber to the ordinary silken lining.
The Franklin Institute will open an International Exhibition of Electricity and Electrical Appliances in Philadelphia, on the 2d day of September next. By a special act of Congress, all articles "imported solely for exhibition" on this occasion will be admitted free of duty; but, if they are sold or withdrawn for consumption, the regular duties must be paid upon them.
Victor-Alexandre Puiseux, a French astronomer, died in September last. He was the author of numerous memoirs on astronomical subjects to the Academy of Sciences, and had been occupied very industriously with calculations based upon the transits of Venus of 1874 and 1882.
Dr. J. B. Sutton, of Middlesex Hospital, in a communication to the "Lancet," disproves the current opinion that monkeys die chiefly from tubercle. Having been permitted to attend the post-mortem examinations of animals dying in the Zoölogical Gardens, Regent's Park, he personally inspected the remains of ninety-three monkeys. Of this number, three were found to have died of tubercle, twenty-two of bronchitis, three of lobar pneumonia, seven of lobular pneumonia, one of septic pneumonia, twenty-three of other diseases, including three of scrofula and four of typhoid fever, while in thirty-four cases no lesion was met with sufficient to explain the deaths of the creatures.
Dr. Conrad Bursian, a distinguished German philologist, died on the 21st of September, having just a few days before finished his great work on the "History of Philology." He had been a professor successively in the Universities of Leipsic, Tübingen, Zurich, and Munich, and was a member of several learned societies.
M. Chevreul, the "dean" of the French Academy of Sciences, reached his ninety-eighth year on the last day of August, and was still physically vigorous and fresh of heart. The President of the Academy, in taking notice of the fact, remarked: "M. Chevreul has belonged to the Academy which he has so much honored by his labors for fifty-seven years; and he would, in fact, have counted it sixty-seven years, if by an extremely rare sentiment of generosity he had not allowed himself to be passed over in 1816, to give place to a chemist (M. Proust) whom he called his master."
Statisticians have pronounced the United States to be not only potentially but actually richer than the United Kingdom. Counting the houses, furniture, manufactures, railways, shipping, bullion, lands, cattle, crops, investments, and roads, it is estimated that there is a grand total in the United States of $49,770,000,000. Great Britain is credited with something less than $40,000,000,000, or nearly $10,000,000,000 less than the United States. The wealth per inhabitant in Great Britain is estimated at $1,160, and in the United States at $995. With regard to the remuneration of labor, assuming the produce of labor to be 100, in Great Britain 56 parts go to the laborer, 21 to capital, and 23 to government. In France 41 parts go to labor, 36 to capital, and 23 to government. In the United States 72 parts go to labor, 23 to capital, and five to government.—London Times.
M. Joseph-Antoine-Ferdinand Plateau, an eminent physicist and emeritus professor at the University of Ghent, died September 15th, in his eighty-second year.
M. A. Milne Edwards reports that he met with great success near Teneriffe on his deep-sea expedition in the steamer Talisman. The dredging apparatus is strong enough to bring up rocks weighing a hundred kilogrammes from the depth of a thousand metres. The collections promise to be immense, greater than it will be possible to bring home. Among the species gathered are crustaceans of forms resembling those of the Antilles, curious fishes with luminous organs, crinoids, asterias, strange holuthurians, numerous sponges, and mollusks, exhibiting a novel mingling of African with Mediterranean and Polar forms. On the Island of Branco, which had never been scientifically visited before, the expedition found large lizards, such as are not known to occur anywhere else, and which appear to have a good living of herbaceous food, although the island is nearly destitute of vegetation.
Dr. J. Lawrence Smith, of Louisville, Kentucky, died on the 12th of October last, in the sixty-fifth year of his age. He had dis-
