Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/732

 New Chemical Elements.—We are indebted to Professor H. Carrington Bolton for the following interesting table of new elements announced since 1877:

Forest Devastation in Japan.—We are permitted to publish the following extract from a private letter from Dr. Heinrich Mayr, who is now in Japan, in the course of a journey round the world: "The disappointment in regard to forests in Japan which I experienced was keen. The Japanese have sent out many students to Europe to study forestry, and have, therefore, the reputation of possessing forests; but nothing of that: the mountains are bare, and the forests burned down, just as they are in the eastern part of the Rocky Mountains.

Americans might take a fearful warning in regard to the future prospect of their great West; only the landscape will be still more desolate there, because the land is so divided into small holdings that no forest will be raised. Volcanic eruptions in Japan have buried, a hundred or more years ago, whole forests of "Sooghec," as the Japanese call their species of Sequoia. They are again dug up, and people wonder at their size, and the fine grain of the wood that has become gray, for which enormous sums are paid for cabinet-work; but they are not