Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 46.djvu/882

862 at places where inflammable mixtures of air and fire damp may be present. The variable results following upon the detonation of high explosives appear to be due in some measure to defective admixture of the in gredients or variation in the properties of them. It is also certain that these explosives alter in character with age. The same precautions should be observed when they are used as with blasting powder; and it should always be recollected that the risk of explosion is only lessened and not abolished by their use. All the high explosives upon detonation produce evident flame.

Science Endowments in the United States.—Of the endowments for post-graduate scientific study in our colleges, Mr. Addison Brown, in his address before the Scientific Alliance of New York, shows that Columbia College has two fellowships—the Tyndall, of $648 a year, and the Barnard, of about $300 a year—expressly restricted to science. Besides these, twenty-four general university fellowships of $500 for post-graduate study have been established, of which eighteen are in present operation; and, in addition, the Schermerhorn fellowship in architecture of $1,300, and the two McKim fellowships, to support study in foreign travel, and five prizes for proficiency in the medical department. The University of Pennsylvania has the Tyndall fellowship and the Lea Hygienic Laboratory with a fellowship of $10,000 endowed by Thomas A. Scott, and at present applied to original research in bacteriology. At Harvard, besides the three Bullard fellowships of $5,000 each, established in 1891 to promote original research in the medical school, there are two post-graduate fellowships devoted to science exclusively, the Tyndall fellowship of about $500, and the income of the recently established Joseph Lovering fund, the principal of which is now about $8,000. There are also eleven other general fellowships—the Parker, the Kirkland, and the Morgan—available for promising graduate students in any branch, of which about five have usually been assigned to science. These fellowships give an income of from $450 to $700 a year. Harvard has also forty-six scholarships available for graduate students, varying in income from $150 to $300 each, of which about seventeen are assigned to science. Princeton has a hundred undergraduate scholarships, and only one post-graduate fellowship for science. Yale has the Silliman and the Sloane fellowships in science. In all these colleges there are only about twenty-six adequately endowed post-graduate fellowships in science. As these should be continued for at least three years, there is provision altogether for only about nine per year—not one fourth the number required to supply the annual loss of trained teachers in the colleges of the country, to say nothing of the increasing demand through the growth and improvements in the colleges themselves. As it is from such specially trained students that the great professors of the future must be drawn, the need of much greater endowments for new recruits is apparent.

Animals in Sleep.—Delicate distinctions are made by a writer in the London Spectator on the Sleep of Animals between those animals which sleep soundly, those which sleep fitfully and always on the alert, as if "with one eye open," and real nocturnal animals which sleep in the daytime a dead sleep. Rabbits, deer, and other timid animals, sleeping largely in the daytime, when wakened, instantaneously ]>ass into the action that is required—usually flight and escape—with full possession of their faculties. "A sleeping fox will rise, gallop off, and dodge the hounds with as much coolness and knowledge of the ground as if it had been surprised on the prowl with all its wits awake. . . . Hares seem never to sleep; however closely they may lie in their forms, the eye is ever alert and vigilant. . . . Deer stalkers have discovered by experiment that the sleeping senses of the stag (hearing and scent) are sensitive up to a distance of at least two hundred yards on the windward side." There are reasons for believing that the broken and timid form of animal sleep in the greater number of species is not such as they would naturally choose, but is the result of habits acquired and transmitted in centuries of danger and avoidance of their enemies; and that the same causes that have modified the hours of sleep—changing them from the night time to the daytime—have also modified its character. They are not daytime and alert sleepers by