Early Submarine Telegraphy.—The actual date of the beginning of subaqueous telegraphy was admitted by Professor Ayrtoun, in a lecture delivered before the Imperial Institute in 1897, to be uncertain. Baron Schilling is said to have exploded mines under the Neva by means of the electric current as early as 1812; and this method was used by Colonel Pasley to blow up the wreck of the Royal George at Spithead in 1838; but our Morse has the credit of having first used a wire insulated with India rubber under water. In 1837, Wheatstone and Cooke were experimenting with land telegraphy, and were considering the possibility of laying an insulated wire under water. Morse's successful experiments date from 1842, when he personally laid a cable between Castle Garden and Governor's Island and sent messages over it; the next morning it was broken. With the introduction of gutta percha as an insulator in 1847, submarine telegraphy became practicable. The Central Oceanic Telegraph Company had been registered by Jacob Brett in 1845, and a cable was laid under the English Channel by Brett and his brother in 1850. Messages were sent through it, but, like Morse's earlier effort, it immediately became silent. Better success attended the cable of the next year, which was sheathed with iron; and the first public submarine message was sent over it November 13, 1851. Morse wrote of the possibility of establishing electro-magnetic communication across the ocean as early as 1844. A syndicate was formed for this purpose in 1855, Cyrus W. Field being the most conspicuous figure in it. An understanding was reached with the Brett company, and the Atlantic Telegraph Company was formed. The first effort to lay the cable was made in 1857 by the United States frigate Niagara and H.M.S. Agamemnon, but the wires broke in deep water when about a third of the work was done. A cable was successfully laid the next year, but it died out in a month. Finally, electric communication was permanently established across the Atlantic by the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company, which, capturing a cable that had been lost, soon had two. Transatlantic cables have now become so numerous and so regular in their working that the danger of even a temporary failure has become very remote.

The White Lady Mountain.—Iztaccihuatl (pronounced Is-tak-see-watl) is about ten miles, measuring to its principal peak, north of Popocatepetl. In shape it consists of a long, narrow ridge cut into three well-defined peaks about equally distant from one another, of which the central is the highest; and the snow-covered peak resembles the figure of a woman lying on her back; whence the name of the mountain, which means white woman. According to the Aztecs, Dr. O.C. Farrington, of the Field Columbian Museum, tells us, this woman was a goddess who for some crime had been struck dead and doomed to lie forever on this spot. Popocatepetl was her lover, and had stood by her. Tastes differ as to whether it or Popocatepetl presents a more striking view, but either is a beautiful enough object to look upon. The first authenticated record of an ascent to the summit of the mountain is that of Mr. H. Reniere Whitehouse, who reached the top November 9, 1889, and found there undoubted evidence that an ascent had been made five days previously by Mr. James de Salis. Prof. Angelo Heilprin and Mr. F. C. Baker attempted an ascent in the following April, but were turned back when about seventy-five yards below the summit, at a height of 16,730 feet, by two impassable crevasses. "The ascent of Iztaccihuatl seems, therefore, pretty generally to have foiled those who have attempted it. Dr. Farrington, who ascended to the Porfirio Diaz Glacier in February, 1896, describes the route as steeper than that which leads up to Popocatepetl." The brilliant and varied flora, picturesque barrenness, and beautiful cascades lend everywhere a charm to the scene which contrasts favorably with the somber monotony which characterizes the route by which Popocatepetl is ascended. The slopes of the mountain are cultivated to a considerable height—10,860 feet. The lower slopes are largely covered with soil, and the andesite rock, of gray and red colors, differs completely in character from that of Popocatepetl. The aiguillelike character of many of the spurs extending at right angles to the course of the mountain is a prominent feature. Many caves in the rock furnish shelter to cattle and persons attempting the ascent. Dr. Farrington examined the Porfirio Diaz Glacier, and concluded that it formerly had a much greater extent than now.

The Adulteration of Butter with Glucose.—The following is from an article by C.A. Crampton in the Journal of the American Chemical Society: In domestic practice the addition of sugar to butter for purposes of preservation is doubtless almost as old as the art of butter-making itself; salt, however, is the usually preferred preservative. Sugar appears in several of the various United States patents for so-called "improving" or renovating processes for butter, being added to it along with salt, saltpeter, and in some cases sodium carbonate. Within the past few years glucose has been used in butter specially prepared for export to tropical countries, as the West Indies or South America. It is usually put up in tins, and various means are resorted to for preventing the decomposition of their goods before they reach the consumer. Very large quantities of salt are used by the French exporters, as the following two analyses show:

Butter for Export.
To Brazil.To Antilles.
Water10.2910.19
Curd1.241.31
Ash10.2910.06
Fat78.1878.44
——————
100.00100.00

Chemical antiseptics, borax, salicylic acid, etc., are sometimes used, but the method found most efficacious by exporters in this country seems to be the use of glucose in conjunction with moderately heavy salting. The glucose used is a heavy, low-converted sirup, known as confectioners' glucose. The detection of glucose in butter presents no difficulty. The butter is thoroughly washed with hot water, which will readily take up whatever glucose is present. This solution is then tested by means of Fehling's solution. The following is an analysis of the so-called beurre rouge, or red butter, which is exported to Guadeloupe. It is a peculiar highly colored compound, containing large quantities of salt and glucose:

Water21.60
Curd0.81
Ash16.42
Fat51.15
Glucose10.02
———
100.00

Decorated Skulls and the Power ascribed to them.—A collection of sixteen skulls—eight of men, seven of women, and one of a child—from New Guinea, is described by George A. Dorsey in the publications of the Field Columbian Museum, Chicago. They were received from a native chief, who used them for the adornment of his house, and is said to have prized them as trophies of war. They are decorated in the frontal region by engraved designs, and the parts are attached to one another by very skillfully adjusted cords. The ornamentation and the bindings are the subject of a special comment by William H. Holmes. Importance is attached by natives of New Guinea to the preservation of the skulls of friends as mementoes and of foes as trophies, and of both categories on account of the virtue—the best qualities of the individuals whose skulls they are—which they are supposed to impart in some mysterious way to their possessor. Hence special care is taken to have them preserved in detail, and that no part be lost. In the present specimens the jaws were secured by fastenings at right and left and in front. The teeth were carefully tied in, and when lost were replaced by artificial teeth. A cord was fastened around the back molar on one side, and carried along, inclosing each tooth in turn, in a loop, so as to make a very effective fastening when the cord was tightly drawn and attached to the back molar on the other side. The lower jaw was very firmly fastened to the skull by closely wrapped cords tightened by binding the strands around the middle portion. In some cases these fastenings are very elaborate and neat; in others, imperfect and slovenly. All the skulls in the collection are decorated with designs engraved on the frontal bone, and in some cases the figures run back. The execution of the work is not of a very high order, but is rather irregular and scratchy. Nearly all embody easily distinguished animal forms, and the more formal or nearly geometric ones are probably animal derivatives or representations of land, water, or natural phenomena. They are possibly totemic or mythological.

Galax and its Affinities.—One of the most interesting plants of the Southern mountain region is the galax (Galax aphylla), which grows in the highlands more or less abundantly from Virginia southward. The slopes of Grandfather Mountain, North Carolina, are carpeted with it for many square miles of almost uninterrupted extent. Besides being an attractive plant at home, its thick, leathery, rounded cordate leaves, deep green or crimson or mixed, according to the season, make it much in demand for decoration, and tons of it in the aggregate are shipped, from places where it grows abundantly, for that purpose. Its affiliations with certain other Alpine and arctic plants are described in a carefully studied paper on the Order Diapensisceæ, published by Margaret Farsman Boynton in the Journal of the National Science Club, Washington. Linnæus found in Lapland a creeping evergreen herb, matting the surface with its stiff, spatulate leaves, and described it in 1737 as Diapensia lapponica. Then galax was discovered by Gronovius and given a place by Linnæus—because of its stamens rather than of its natural affinities—along with Diapensia. Michaux, in the last decade of the eighteenth century, found Pyxidanthera barbulata, resembling diapensia, in the pine barrens of New Jersey and North Carolina. More recently other species of diapensia and Berneuxia have been found among the Himalayas, and Schizocodon of several species in Japan. One of the most remarkable discoveries in the list was that by Michaux in the mountains of North Carolina of a plant which was afterward called Shortia galacifolia, from the resemblance of its leaves to those of galax. This plant in a living state was then lost, and when Gray and Torrey looked for it in 1831 in vain, only one preserved specimen of it was known to be extant and that in fruit; and it was not till 1877 that it was collected, rediscovered, in fact, in flower, as Gray has said, "by an herbalist almost absolutely ignorant of botany, who was only informed of his good fortune on sending to a botanist one of the two specimens collected by him." The Shortia, so far as is known, grows only in a very narrow district, and those who know the place are careful not to direct the public to it. Specimens have been collected by a few nurserymen, who cultivate it and have it for sale. The plants of this list are variously classified as among one another by botanists, but are regarded as belonging to a common group. "The real story of their development," says the author of the paper, "can be gathered only in hints from their present distribution, for unfortunately they have neither gallery of ancestral portraits nor recorded geological tree." But their ancestors are supposed to have been pushed down by the glaciers and left where the modern forms are found. Almost anywhere in the boreal flora Diapensia lapponica may be found, whether in northern Asia, or Europe, or America, or even on the mountains of Labrador and in the Pyrenees, the Scotch mountains, and our own White Mountains.

The Academy della Crusca.—"For three hundred years," says a correspondent of the London Athenæum, "the learned body, the Academy of la Crusca (the bran), Florence, has been scrupulously sifting the Italian tongue and producing successive editions of its monumental dictionary. Its present seat is in the monastery of St. Mark—Savonarola's cloister—where it occupies the hall behind the great library. When an associate is promoted to full membership, his official reception is still accompanied by the traditional rite. First, he is solemnly conducted to the Cruscan museum, and left to solitary meditation among shovel-backed chairs surmounted by the symbolical sieve and bookcases ingeniously fashioned in the likeness of corn sacks. The walls are covered with the names, crests, and mottoes of former members, who in past times usually assumed fantastic titles descriptive of the academy's labors." Some of these printed inscriptions and comical devices are more or less quaint. Thus, Dr. Giulio Maxi in 1590 took the name of Il Fiorito, or the flowery one, with the device of a basket of wheat in bloom and the motto from Petrarch (translation):

"I enjoy the present and hope for better."