Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 19.djvu/297

Rh larger, fibulæ, precisely like those of the of Italy, but to which nothing similar has been found between the two places, and Etruscan potteries. These articles are probably of the sixth century and relics of Italian colonists. A splendidly ornamented bronze hatchet, from the same region, also deserves mention. Filimonof has concluded, from the researches he has made, that the transition from bronze to iron took place in the Caucasus about five hundred years before Christ. Bronze buckles from near Kertch, like those of the Merovingian period in France, were probably Roman. Craniology was fully represented by more than five hundred Kurgan skulls, and by a host of skulls representing about twenty races of Europe and Asia. Among the numerous skeletons were two of Ainos. A skull of the stone age from the government of Vladimir and pieces of other skulls and skeletons found with it are the oldest remains of man yet found in Russia, and the first of the stone age. Professor Inostranzof, of St. Petersburg, has recently found other human remains of that age. The ethnographic department was not so fully represented as the others, but included collections illustrating the various modes of caring for infants, embroideries, articles of household manufacture, models of houses and farm-buildings, musical instruments, hunting, fishing, and farming implements, and rare articles representing the diversified populations of Siberia, the last being contributed by the Imperial Russian Geographical Society of St. Petersburg. This department is richly illustrated in the collection of the Rumyanzof Museum, of Moscow.

The Phæodaria.—Professor Ernst Haeckel, at a recent meeting of the Natural History Society of Jena, read a note on the phæodaria, a new group of marine siliceous rhizopods, rich in specific forms and remarkable in many respects, which have hitherto been included in the typical radiolaria, from which, however, they present considerable points of difference. A new light has been thrown upon these beings by the Challenger Expedition, which, besides discovering forms of typical radiolaria corresponding to two thousand species, brought to light a number of deep-sea phæodaria, hitherto entirely unknown. John Murray, in 18*76, described some of the forms of these new species, drawing attention to the extremely delicate and finely fenestrated structure of the large siliceous shells, and to the constant appearance of masses of black-brown pigment which are scattered through the sarcode, outside the central capsule. These animals are usually considerably larger than the other radiolaria, and many of them are visible to the naked eye. They bear a peculiar mass of dark pigment-granules, called pheodium, outside the central capsule, and have, with few exceptions, a well-developed, always extra-capsular, siliceous skeleton, which forms very varied and delicate structures, usually radiating outward in hollow siliceous tubes.

Industrial Accidents, etc.—Mr. T. A. Brocklebank suggests that the amount of sickness and death incurred in industrial operations in England, as a direct result of the conditions under which they are carried on, is a subject that demands investigation. In ISTY he compiled tables for use before the House of Lords, which gave returns of deaths and injuries by boilers in mines, on railways, and at factories, with totals for 1873, 1874, 1875, and 1876, of 107,000 men, women, and children; and he estimates, on the basis of the facts contained in these tables, that 500,000 workmen will be killed during the ten years, 1877 to 1886, as follows: in mines, 300,000; on railways, 70,000; in factories, 180,000. Sir Edward Watkin also has made a statement in the House of Commons to the effect that 100,000 persons are killed annually in industrial occupations in England. Facts are cited to show that the accidents that are reported compose only a part of those which take place, and to make it appear probable that Mr. Brocklebank's estimate is a very moderate one.

Sewage-Farming.—The Royal Agricultural Society has recently awarded two prizes of one hundred pounds sterling each for the best managed sewage-farm, the one utilizing the sewage of not more, the other that of more than twenty thousand people. Nine farmers competed for the two prizes. The judges stated in their report that there was a very considerable difference, both in the