standing of the factors which enter into the process, cannot fail to be of much practical importance. A study of the thermal death point of tubercle bacilli in milk confirmed the results of the previous year, showing that by using a closed pasteurizer tubercle bacilli can be destroyed by heating milk for twenty minutes at 140° F., instead of at 150-155°, as formerly. This lowering of the necessary temperature removes the objection formerly made that cream does not rise readily on pasteurized milk and that the consistency or body of pasteurized cream is much lessened.
The soil investigations of the Wisconsin Experiment Station have come to be regarded as one of its most prominent features. In addition to investigations on the soluble salts of cultivated soils, the influence of potash salts on the black marsh soils of the State, which have been exceedingly difficult to manage, Professor King reports studies of the influence of the right amount and the right distribution of water in crop production—a subject upon which information is quite meager and which points directly to the application of irrigation, even in humid climates, to correct insufficient or inadvantageously distributed rainfall. In the horticultural line. Professor Goff has for several years been studying the injury to the buds and roots of fruit trees from cold, and in the present report he gives an illustrated account of his investigations on the time of formation and the development of the flower buds, and also on the resumption of root growth of fruit trees in the spring; and his assistant gives the results of systematic observations on the duration of the growth period in fruit trees. These subjects are closely connected with the management of fruit orchards and will furnish a rational basis for practice. In addition to these lines of investigation, the report also contains accounts of feeding experiments with pigs, sheep and dairy cows, to answer more immediately practical questions; studies of various factors influencing the Babcock milk test, a rapid method for the estimation of salt in butter, a trial of a new kind of churn, operated by forcing a steady stream of air into the cream, for which great claims have been made; studies of the effect of the continued use of immature seeds; studies relating to tannery refuse and hides as causes of the disease in animals known as anthrax; experience with sugar beet culture in Wisconsin, and several other lines.
Altogether, the report is one of surpassing interest, and the results of quite a part of the experiments and investigation will not be confined in their application within the borders of the State. If any indication is needed of the importance of the work being done by the agricultural experiment stations of this country and the wisdom of Congress in continuing liberal appropriations for their work, this report should go a long way in the direction of furnishing such indication.
SCIENTIFIC NEWS.
Science in America could have suffered no more severe loss than the death of Henry Augustus Rowland, professor of physics in the Johns Hopkins University. Dying at the age of fifty-two years, he was one of the world's most eminent men of genius and one of the two great physicists that America has produced. An account of Rowland's life and work, with a portrait, was published in the Popular Science Monthly for May, 1896, and we reproduce in the current number an address given by him some years ago before the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
We note with regret a number of other recent deaths among men of science, including: Thomas Conrad Porter, the botanist, for the past thirty-four years professor at Lafayette College; John Thomas Duffield, for more than forty years professor of mathematics at Princeton University: Richard T. Roth well, editor of the 'Engineer-
