Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/300

  Pamban-arivy, or Snake Fall, of Trevancore, India, is a double fall, descending in the first plunge from the cliff edge twelve hundred feet, and can be seen from a distance of forty miles.

 

Director of the Meteorological Observatory in Dorpat, Russia, has recently died, at the age of fifty years.

death was announced, early in the year, of M. ClevaudClavaud [sic], Professor of Botany at Bordeaux, and author of the Flora de Gironde, a work of which two parts have appeared, and which "is characterized by its beautiful plates, and by the attempts to place on a scientific basis the genetic relationship of the various species with one another."

, of the University of Stockholm, who died February 10th, was a woman of rare mathematical gifts. Besides an autobiographical sketch, which is described as "one of the finest productions of modern Russian literature," and a fragment of a longer novel, she wrote several able papers in the higher mathematics. She has recorded in her Reminiscences a curious experience of her childhood. In repairing her father's house in the country (Russia), the wall-paper for the nursery was overlooked in ordering from St. Petersburg. For want of anything else, the room was papered with a set of Ostrogradski's lithographed course on higher mathematical analysis. The ten-years-old girl acquired the habit of reading the learned dissertations, and became so familiar with their language that when she began, at sixteen, the study of the differential calculus, her teacher was astonished at the rapidity with which she understood him—"just as if it was a reminiscence of something that you knew before," he said.

Author:George Wareing Ormerod, of Teignmouth, England, a student of local geology, and author of papers on the salt-beds of Cheshire and the granite of Dartmoor, died in January, eighty years old. He had been a member of the Geological Society of London for fifty-eight years, and continued the compilation of the classified index to its publications, which he began early, till he had reached an advanced age.

, an Italian geologist, died January 1st, at Milan. He conducted a scientific periodical, Il Rosmini, which was in sympathy with the teachings of the philosopher of that name. Of his books, one called Il Bel Paese, or The Beautiful Country, has been published in several editions.

, who died in August last, in his sixtieth year, was an early and successful student of folk lore and comparative mythology. He was a native of Silesia, and spent the greater part of his working life as a professor in the University of Liége. He translated Basile's Pentamerone from the Italian, published a version of the romance of Barlaam and Josaphat, brought out an annotated edition of Gervase of Tilbury's treatise—a sort of encyclopædia of mediæval folk lore—and in 1876 published, under the title of Zur Volkskunde, a selection of his contributions on his special subject to periodical literature.

, the famous Russian botanist, one of the most distinguished systematic botanists of our time, and the great authority on the plants of Eastern Asia, died in St. Petersburg, February 16th. His scientific career began with a journey in Manchuria, the botanical results of which were published in 1859. He next made large collections in Japan and distributed them among the herbaria of the world. From time to time since 1866 he published critical notes of Manchurian and Japanese plants, and was the author of monographs of the Rhododendrons, the Hydrangeas, and the Buckthorns of Eastern Asia.

, of the Belgian Engineers, who died in January last, was well known in the scientific circles of his country. He was attached to the observatory as astronomical aid, and, after the death of Houzeau, as a member of the Directorial Committee. He was a distinguished mathematician.

death of Mr. John Marshall, President of the British General Medical Council, at the age of seventy-two years, on New Year's day, was followed by that of Mr. Edward Bellamy, Lecturer on Artistic Anatomy at the South Kensington School, January 4th.

, Fellow of the Royal University of Ireland, an eminent mathematician, died January 3d, in the seventy-first year of his age.

deaths have been reported of Dr. Karl Weihrauch, Director of the Meteorological Observatory of Dorpat, January 19th, in the fiftieth year of his age; M. Émile Reynier, electrician, January 20th, at the age of thirty-nine years; and Mr. Cosmo Innes Burton, Professor of Chemistry at the English Technical Institute at Shanghai, in the twenty-eighth year of his age.

, Professor of Physics at the Munich Royal Military College, and editor of the Repertory of Physical Technics and the Journal of Electro-technics, died January 24th. 