Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 58.djvu/568

560 the use of milk of tuberculous cows—a matter of more than usual interest in view of the attention which is being given to the general subject of tuberculosis and its transmission. Experiments in using the milk of tuberculous cows for feeding calves at the Storrs Station have been in progress for several years. During the first two years, when the cows had the disease only in its earliest stages, the young cattle which received their milk and ran with them constantly, exhibited no signs of the disease as far as could be detected by the tuberculin test or physical examination. But the result for the next year and a half was quite different. Five calves were fed the milk of these same cows, and all five responded to the tuberculin test and proved to be diseased. The physical condition of three of the cows indicated that during the last year the disease had progressed decidedly in them. While the results indicate that the danger from the spread of tuberculosis to other animals through the milk is not always as great as has been supposed, they suggest the exercise of greater precaution in excluding from use for supplying family milk all cows in which the disease is sufficiently advanced to be detected. Experiments at a number of places have shown that the milk of tuberculous cows may be pasteurized and safely used for raising calves, but precautions should be taken to insure confining its use to this purpose.

director of the Harvard College Observatory, has been awarded the gold medal of the Royal Astronomical Society.—The Helmholtz medal of the Prussian Academy of Sciences has been conferred on Sir George Gabriel Stokes, of Cambridge University, this medal having been previously conferred only on Professor Virchow and Lord Kelvin.—Sir Archibald Geikie has retired from the directorship of the Geological Survey of Great Britain and Ireland.—We note with regret the death of Elisha Gray, the American inventor; of M. Ch. Hermite, the French mathematician; of Professor Max vo« Pettenkofer, the bacteriologist; of Frederic W. H. Myers, secretary of the Society for Psychical Research; and of Miles Rock, the American geodesist.—The International Zoological Congress will hold its fifth session in Berlin, beginning on August 12.—The Astronomical and Astrophysical Society of America will hold its next meeting in December.—William H. Crocker, of San Francisco, has offered to defray the expenses of a solar eclipse expedition to be sent by the University of California from the Lick Observatory to Sumatra to observe the total eclipse of the sun on May 17.—A bill has been introduced in the House of Representatives directing the general Government, through the Secretary of the Interior, to secure title to the cliff dwellers' region of New Mexico for park and scientific purposes, and one in the Senate appropriating $5,000,000 for the purchase of land in the Appalachian Mountains for a national forest reserve.—Mr. Joseph White Sprague has left his estate, valued at $200,000, so that it will ultimately revert to the Smithsonian Institution.—Johns Hopkins University has received a conditional gift of land for a new site valued at $700,000.—The French and German generals have removed from the wall of Pekin the superb astronomical instruments erected two centuries ago by the Jesuit fathers, and propose to send them partly to Berlin and partly to Paris. The American general has protested against this as an act of vandalism.—Dr. Adams Paulsen, director of the Meteorological Institute of Copenhagen, has gone to North Finland to study the aurora. He undertook a similar expedition last winter to North Iceland.—Prof. Baldwin Spencer and Mr. Gillen have arranged for another expedition in continuation of their investigations into the habits and folk-lore of the natives of Central Australia and the Northern Territory.