one fortieth the weight of the body, from rabbits, guinea-pigs, and pigeons, Mr. Essipor affirms that the fluid acquired a marked bactericidal power, particularly against the microbe of cholera. The effect took place gradually, and attained its maximum in about twenty-four hours. At the same time the animal became refractory against inoculations.
Edward Germano recently conducted a series of experiments to determine the time which the typhoid bacillus could retain its vitality under various conditions. The results showed that in dry air the cultures were dead within twenty-four hours, but in moist warm air they retained their vitality for sixty days. He concludes that aerial transmission in the ordinary acceptation of the term—that is, being blown about as dust or as a miasm in the wind from infected districts—is highly improbable; but that in imperfectly disinfected and apparently dry blankets and woolen clothing the microbes may retain their vitality for some time and be conveyed long distances.
Some recent experiments by Professor Oliver and Dr. Bolam on the immediate cause of death by electric shocks seem to indicate that death is due to a sudden arrest of the heart's action and that simultaneous failure of the respiratory center and the heart, except with unusually high voltage, is very rare. It follows from this that resuscitation in apparent death from electric shock is made much more difficult than if the fatal result were brought about by respiratory failure.
The oldest oak tree in France, the St. Bernard oak at Cunfin, is more than eight hundred and twenty-five years old, having been planted in a. d. 1070, and is mentioned in the Annales ecclésiastiques du Diocèse de Langres. It measures twenty-two feet in circumference at the collar of the roots, and is forty-two and a half feet high to the first branches. The trunk is hollow, and the wood has nearly all disappeared, leaving little else than the bark, which, too, has been eaten away in spots; one of the holes is large enough to let a man inside. A niche was made in the upper part of the trunk by the curé of Cunfin in 1749, and the statue of the Virgin was placed in it. That was swept away during the Revolution, but the old tree still lives.
A bluff of clay marl capped with yellow gravel, fronting Raritan Bay, near Cliffwood, N. J., the extreme northeastern exposure of the cretaceous clay and marl outcrop of the State, is a source from which collections of the fauna have been made, and the only spot where the flora of the horizon has been observed. It has been explored geologically by Messrs. Arthur Hollick, Lester F. Ward, and N. L. Britton, who have collected considerable material from it. The specimens, as a whole, are not very satisfactory, consisting of poorly preserved mollusks, fragments of crustaceans, fruit, leaves and branches of trees, and masses of lignite, many of them occurring in ferruginous concretions which soon disintegrate on exposure to the air. Mr. Hollick, in his paper describing and figuring them, notices twenty-six species of plant remains, ten of which are apparently new.
The result of a careful study of four hundred alcoholics by Forel, of Zurich, again emphasizes the great importance of heredity. Forty-three per cent of the cases had one or both parents alcoholic. Fifteen per cent of the patients were wholesale or retail liquor dealers. All cases showed various physical, mental, and moral alterations. Fourteen per cent were epileptics.
A comparison of the fossil foraminifera of the marine clays of Maine is adduced by Mr. F. S. Morton, in a communication to the Portland Society of Natural History, as furnishing additional evidence that the climate when they were deposited was very much colder than now. Many of the forms are still found living in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, but the forms found still farther north more perfectly agree with them. Those found by the late H. B. Brady in the shallow water dredgings from the Novaya Zemlya Sea are almost identical with the Maine fossil forms.
Dr. Dawson Williams, who has been connected with the editorial staff of the British Medical Journal for seventeen years as assistant editor under Mr. Ernest Hart, has been appointed editor-in-chief to succeed the latter.
In the list of recent deaths of men associated with science are recorded the names of Arthur Kammermann, astronomer, at Geneva, Switzerland, December 15th, aged thirty-six years; Prof. Knud Styffe, director of the School of Technology at Stockholm, a great authority on iron and steel and author of a report on The Elasticity, Extensibility, and Tensile Strength of Iron, which has been translated into English, February 3d, in his seventy-fifth year; Jean Albert Gauthier Villars, printer to the French Academy of Sciences, and publisher of the works of Lagrange, Fermat, Fourier, Cauchy, and other scientific investigators, February 5th, at the age of sixty-nine years; Dr. Rudolf Leuckart, professor of zoölogy and zoötomy at Leipsic, February 7th, aged seventy-four years; and John Carrick Moore, an eminent geologist in the earlier part of the century, author of papers on Silurian strata, Tertiary fossils of Santo Domingo and Jamaica, Erosion of Lake Basins, and the Influence of the Obliquity of the Ecliptic on Climate; in London, February 10th, in his ninety-fifth year—a nephew of Sir John Moore.
