Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 51.djvu/590

576 is possible, and described a new form of cable with which the author proposed to connect England and Germany. With such a cable across the Atlantic, he claimed, treble or quadruple the number of words per hour now practicable might be transmitted with the same weight of material.

, her Majesty's Inspector of Mines, while visiting the Snaefell lead mine, Isle of Man, after a recent disastrous explosion there, was, by a series of accidents, exposed to poisoning by carbonic-oxide gas for about two hours, until he was taken out on the verge of death. There were several of the party who had to be taken up one at a time, and he was the last to go. For an hour and a half he recorded notes of his feelings while sinking under the influence of the poison, the last entry giving the time he reached the top. Happily, he recovered. "The world," says Nature, "could ill spare a man with such sterling qualities, and science would grieve to lose an investigator who devoted what seemed to be his last moments to extending knowledge for the 'benefit of others.'" Such heroism would have won immortal fame for a military man.

, in the American Naturalist, criticises some recent botanical publications for employing English units of measurements, and urges botanical writers to insist upon the use of metric measures throughout. This would all be very well, but that there are some clear-headed people who insist that our system should not be superseded by any but the best, and who still believe that the metric system has not yet proved itself to be that. If it is really the best, it will work its way without special urging.

, of the Iron and Steel Institute, observed at its annual spring meeting, 1897, that American steel makers excel enormously those of Great Britain in the output they obtain from their appliances. They have thus, in spite of the high wages that prevail in America, by working in this wholesale manner brought the cost of production to a very low ebb, so that it is now a question not how much steel British producers should send to America, but how far they can meet American competition within their own boundaries.

, President of the English Society of Antiquaries, who died in May, in his seventy-second year, early developed a taste for mediæval archæology, on which he was a leading authority; became an assistant in the British Museum in 1851, and afterward Keeper of the Department of British and Mediæval Antiquities and of Ethnography, and was subsequently till his death a member of the Standing Committee. His principal discovery in archæology was to distinguish the period of "late Celtic" antiquities. Among his archæological works are Ornamental Glazing Quarries, Medallic Illustrations of British History, and an edition of Kemble's Horæ Ferales, which his additions converted, Nature says, into a standard work.

, Superintendent of the London Zoölogical Gardens, whose death has recently been announced, was originally a hairdresser, and incidentally a bird fancier, specially knowing in canary birds. He obtained a position in connection with the animals at the Crystal Palace, and afterward at Regent's Park. He acquired a remarkable acquaintance with animal life, its habits and diet, and was a skillful appraiser of the value of specimens. With all these accomplishments in zoölogy he was not a writer.

, for the past twenty years Director of the Radcliffe Observatory, died in Oxford, England, May 9th, aged sixty-six years. Previous to assuming charge of Radcliffe Observatory he had been her Majesty's Astronomer at the Cape of Good Hope. His special field was the "astronomy of position," and his reputation was mainly won by devotion to meridian observations. He studied the constants of nutation and refraction, the proper motions of the stars, the systematic differences between stellar catalogues, the motion of the solar system in space, and the sun's parallax; and contributed much to the organization of the various astronomical expeditions to the southern hemisphere. He had been President of the Royal Astronomical Society, and held other relations to several learned bodies.

death is announced at Gothenburg, Sweden, of Baron Oscar Dickson, the wealthy merchant who helped equip Nordenskiöld's first (1868) and bore the entire expense of his second arctic expedition (1872–‘73). Baron Dickson was also a large contributor to the expeditions of 1875, 1876, and 1877.

, who died in Philadelphia on March 15th, devoted himself especially to the study of the chemistry of photography, and particularly to the action of light, etc., on the salts of silver, and published in 1887 a paper on the Identity of the Photo-salts of Silver with the Material of the Latent Photographic Image. He discovered and described three allotropic states of silver. He was a frequent contributor on this and related subjects to the American Journal of Science, had published fifty-four "more important" papers when elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1892, and issued in 1868 a Manual of Photography, which reached a second edition in 1871.

deaths are announced abroad of Julius von Sachs, the distinguished botanical author, and of the veteran chemist, Fresenius.