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420
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

tem, Jenness Miller and her Work, Color and Calisthenics, Prohibition, etc. The price is $2 a year.

Prof. Robert T. Hill contributes to the First Annual Report of the Geological Survey of Texas A Brief Description of the Cretaceous Rocks of Texas, and their Economic Value. The areas covered by these rocks comprise the tracts known as the Black Prairie, the Grand Prairie, the two Cross Timbers, and certain smaller regions. These form a broad belt of fertile country across the heart of the State, in which lie the principal inland cities of Texas. Prof. Hill's paper describes and locates the several deposits of chalky sands, chalky clays, and chalky limestones which make up the surface formations of this territory. The author gives also a table in which the arrangement of the rock sheets is summarized, and describes the main disturbances of the strata, illustrating them with a diagram. The several economic features of the Cretaceous system are touched upon by themselves, and the investigations in regard to them which the geologists of the survey hope to make are alluded to.

We have received an address by Colonel George E. Waring, Jr., on The Sewerage of Columbus, Ohio, which, although largely local in application, contains also the latest views of this well-known sanitary engineer on the general subject of sewerage. An interesting discussion that followed the delivery of the address is printed with it, and brings out a number of points more fully and clearly than is usually done in continuous treatises.

The Wagner Free Institute of Science of Philadelphia devotes the third volume of its Transactions to Contributions to the Tertiary Fauna of Florida, by William H. Dall. Part I of Mr. Dall's contributions—on Pulmonate, Opisthobranchiate, and Orthodont Gastropods—occupies the whole of the volume. The text is accompanied by twelve fine plates, each containing from ten to twenty figures.

The New England Meteorological Society has issued a volume of Investigations for the Year 1889, prepared under the supervision of its new director, Prof. W. M. Davis. In addition to the tabulated reports of observers, and the review of the year's weather, which the society publishes yearly, this volume contains several papers on special topics. The most extended of these is an Investigation of the Sea-breeze, conducted by W. M. Davis, L. G. Schultz, and R. De C. Ward, with the aid of observers at over one hundred stations. There is also a short paper on Characteristics of New England Climate, by Prof. Winslow Upton.

Among the reprints which have come to us is an essay on Tornadoes, by A. McAdie, which won the second prize in a recent competition, and was published in The American Meteorological Journal. It is a technical discussion of the nature of tornadoes and the practicability of predicting them. The author believes that a careful study of the secondary whirlings in the atmosphere would reveal the causes of the seeming irregularities of the primary whirlings, and make possible not only the prediction of tornadoes, but also greater success in foretelling general weather conditions.

William L. Green issues from Honolulu a pamphlet under the title Notice of Prof. James B. Dana's "Characteristics of Volcanoes," in which he criticises certain statements in Prof. Dana's work that differ from his own views and observations, as published in his Vestiges of the Molten Globe.

The president's address at the thirteenth annual meeting of the American Bar Association, delivered by Henry Hitchcock; LL. D., has been printed from the Proceedings of the Association, with the title A Year's legislation. As prescribed it reviews "the most noteworthy changes in the statute law on points of general interest made in the several States and by Congress during the preceding year." The national legislation includes the Administrative Customs bill, the Dependent Pensions act, the Silver bill, and acts in relation to the World's Fair, the admission of six new States into the Union, desertions from the army, an inland quarantine, trusts, the original-package decision, and bridging the Hudson at New York. Mr. Hitchcock expresses regret that no bill had yet been passed for the relief of the Supreme and other courts of the United States. Statutes had been passed by the Legislatures of twenty-one States and Territories during the year which he covers,