Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 37.djvu/872

852 in the Proceedings of the National Museum, Washington.

The Bulletin from the Laboratories of Natural History of the State University of Iowa, Nos. 3 and 4, contains six papers—viz., Some New Species of Palæozoic Fossils, by S. Calvin; The Saprophytic Fungi of Eastern Iowa, and Common Species of Edible Fungi, by T. H. McBride; The Loess and its Fossils, and A New Species of Fresh-Water Mollusk, by B. Shimer; and the Pselaphidæ of North America, by Dr. E. Brendel and H. F. Wickham. Published by authority of the Regents, at Iowa City.

Among the latest papers left by Prof. Leo Lesquereux is one On Some Fossil Remains considered as Peculiar Kinds of Plants, which appears as one of the publications of the United States National Museum. It relates to some fossils, one of which, from the Upper Helderberg limestone, Sandusky, Ohio, is like a long, flexuous, tubular stem imbedded in a large piece of compact gray limestone. The others, from the Erie shale near Cleveland, are cylindrical fragments traced in relief upon gray, hard, yellowish, sandy shale, or else short, oval, utricular bodies, rounded at one end, bilobate at the other, found on large flattened pebbles or lenticular masses of argillaceous iron ore, locally distributed in the shale. The author named the fossils Halymenites Herzeri, Cylindrites striatus, and Physophycus bilobatus—all new species.

Prof. A. H. Mackay publishes, as a reprint from the Transactions of the Royal Society of Canada, a paper on the FreshWater Sponges of Canada and Newfoundland. It is intended to be only a synopsis, just sufficient to indicate the extent to which the Spongillidse of the Dominion have been observed, and to facilitate further investigation. After the introductory general observations on the Spongillidæ, ten species are described, of which Heteromegenia pictovensis, of different lakes in Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, is declared to be the firmest and most beautiful of all the fresh-water sponges in Canada.

The Catalogue of Minerals for Sale by George L. English & Co., Philadelphia (William Niven, New York), fifteenth edition, June, 1890, is a hand-book and bulletin in mineralogy as well as a dealers' list. Besides the ordinary catalogue matter, it contains forty pages of accounts, with illustrated descriptions, of new minerals. The catalogue matter itself is of scientific value, for it includes a complete classified list of all the species described in Dana's System and in the appendixes and the more recent accounts in the American Journal of Science. The pleasant information is given that the present elaborate catalogue is the result of a very great increase in the demand for mineral specimens.

A new theory of The Origin of Polar Motion is put forward by M. Myerovitch, who attempts to prove that the motion arises from the repulsive power of molecules. The author has published the introduction of his contemplated book on the subject in advance of the book itself, for the information of critics. Rosenberg Brothers, 266 West Twelfth Street, Chicago, 111.

Zoe, a monthly Biological Journal (Zoe Publishing Company, San Francisco), is filled with contributions of natural-history notes incident and pertinent to the West and the Pacific slope. In a recent number, Mr. Behr's paper on the Economy of Nature as Exemplified by Parasites gives illustrations of the danger of reckless interference with the natural order of affairs. President Jordan accounts for some apparent anomalies in the Distribution of Fishes in the Yellowstone Park. Mr. T. S: Brandegee has some observations on the alternate defoliation and new leafing of Fouquieria several times in the season, according to changes in the moisture conditions—a fact that is not unknown with some species on the Atlantic slope. Mr. H. R. Taylor describes some curious incidents of individuality in the nesting habits of the golden eagle.

Among the eight papers in the fifth and sixth numbers of Studies in the Biological Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University, Vol. IV, H. Newell Martin and W. K. Brooks, editors, we notice as of more obvious general interest those of Prof. Martin and Julius Friedenwald on the Effect of Light on the Production of Carbon Dioxide by Frogs; of J. C. Hemmeter on-the Effects of Certain Members of the Ethylic Alcohol Series on the Isolated Mammalian Heart; of Prof. Martin and E. C. Applegarth on the