Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 29.djvu/738

720 caves are wilder and more dangerous than those at Gomanton.

use of gas cooking-stoves is increasing in Great Britain. Many of the Scottish gas companies now let out the stoves at a cheap rate. Dr. Stevenson Macadam, speaking of gas-cooking in its sanitary aspects, says: "The wholesomeness of the meat cooked in the gas-stoves must be regarded as beyond doubt. Gas-cooked meat will be found to be more juicy and palatable, and yet free from those alkaloidal bodies produced during the confined cooking of meat, which are more or less hurtful, and even poisonous." A joint cooked in a gas-oven weighs heavier than the same joint cooked in a coal-oven, because the juices are more perfectly preserved in it.

calls attention, in "Science Gossip," to the danger of the extermination of the sole—one of the best of food-fishes—by trawling. The vessels, which are numbered by the thousand, sweeping the sea-bottom with a track as broad as their own length, scour each an acre an hour. If they are steamers, the effect is vastly magnified. Forty years ago, when the "Silver Bank" was a fresh fishing-ground, soles were retailed in London at twopence a pound, and enormous specimens were abundant. Gradually the size diminished and the quantity declined till the harvest consisted chiefly of "slips." Now the Silver Bank is practically ruined, and the price of soles has risen about one thousand per cent.

a French writer on educational subjects, remarks, in his essay on the method of acquiring foreign languages, that when a person goes to a foreign country to learn the language he rarely succeeds; but, if he goes to pursue some particular profession or business, he learns the language rapidly and thoroughly—first the language of that business, then the language of ordinary intercourse, and so on step by step, in the order of nature. Thus it is the natural method that prevails.

"Lancet" makes a distinction between what it calls the use and the abuse of tobacco. The man who can say, "I always know when I have smoked enough—if I go beyond the just limit I lose my power of prompt decision," is one, it suggests, who had better not smoke at all; but "a moderate use of tobacco soothes the senses, and leaves the mental faculties free from irritation, and ready for calmly clear intellectual processes. When this is not the effect produced by smoking, the "weed" had better be eschewed.

having observed a rat, under circumstances in which it should have been badly frightened, manifest great savagery and voraciously devour its companion, persisting in biting it till the last moment of consciousness, has been led to inquire whether the case is one of peculiar ferocity, or of emotional insanity produced by extreme terror. He wishes to know how wild rats ordinarily behave when shut up in a cage together.

is definitely asserted by the engineer of the Suez Canal that the annual mean level of the Mediterranean at Port Said is the same as the annual mean level of the Red Sea at Suez; and that, according to the observations of the Panama Canal Company, there is no difference of moment between the levels of the Atlantic at Colon and of the Pacific at Panama.

of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, died in Hamburg, Germany, July 14th, in the fortieth year of his age. His death was caused by a disease of the lungs, from which he had been suffering more or less for four or five years. He was graduated from the Institute in 1869, in its second class, and was shortly afterward appointed Professor of General Chemistry in it. He was the author and compiler of several text-books on general and inorganic chemistry. He made a specialty of water analysis, in which he acquired a high reputation for accuracy and probity; he studied the ventilation of railroad-cars and the effect of the atmosphere of smoking-cars, and did much work for the Massachusetts State Board of Health.

died at Ramleh, near Alexandria, Egypt, January 3d, at the age of fifty years. He was the youngest son of the late Andrew Amos, Professor of Law at Cambridge, and was called to the bar in 1862. He was for several years Professor of Jurisprudence at University College, London, but spent many of the later years of his life abroad, in Australia and Egypt. He was for several years, and till his death, English Judge of the new Egyptian Court of Appeals. He was the author of several legal treatises.

Emeritus Professor of Geology, Mineralogy, and Natural History in Queen's College, Galway, Ireland, died June 23d, in his seventy-ninth year. He was elected to his professorship on the foundation of the Queen's Colleges in Ireland, in 1849, and filled it actively till 1883.