Government of Japan to the city of Chicago, and are to be kept filled with interesting collections, which will be changed from time to time. To visit these various exhibits of Japan is to gain an insight into most delightful features of Japanese art, life, and character.
Although results of great importance to anthropology in America must result from all this display of material, it is believed that other permanent results must come from the congress and the library. In August an International Congress of Anthropology is planned. To it are invited the world's workers in the science, and before it are to be read important papers. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Folk-lore Society, and the American Psychical Society unite in seeking the interests of this congress, and from it should come decided impulse to our anthropological work. As to the library, Prof. Putnam has issued an appeal to anthropologists asking contributions of all they have written in the science as a donation to a permanent library of that subject, to be located in Chicago, in connection with the Memorial Museum. The collection is to be catalogued and the catalogue published. Should this plan be carried out, the catalogue would be the best reference list to anthropological literature ever prepared.
It must be plain that in the Chicago Exposition we have a great object lesson in anthropology: a museum of somatology, archaeology, and ethnology; a picture of ethnography; a laboratory of unusual completeness; a great meeting of workers; and the publication of new material.
A note presented in the French Academy of Sciences from Dom D. Démondin relates to the manifestation of sudden variations of temperature at fixed times in the latter half of January, as observed during more than six hundred years past. The author has examined with regard to this subject meteorological notes recorded between 1582 and 1879, or during about three hundred years; and for the preceding three centuries he has consulted various public documents, particularly the Annales des Dominicains de Colmar. from 1211 to 1305. He has thus verified, as for the centuries included, alternations of temperature marked by a depression about the 18th and an elevation toward the 23d and 29th of January, the temperature continuing low during the intervening days.
It has been suggested by Colonel H. W. Feilden that the musk ox might with great advantage be introduced into Great Britain; and the author sees no reason why it should not thrive on the mountains of the Highlands in Scotland. It is covered in the winter season, besides its coat of hair, with a long-stapled fine wool, of a light yellow color, and as fine as silk. Sir John Richardson says that stockings made from this wool are handsomer than those from silk. Young musk oxen are easily reared and tamed, and could probably be procured from the arctic regions without great difficulty.