Abstract
American journal of Science, January.—The Muir glacier, by G. Frederick Wright. The paper contains an exhaustive study of this interesting glacier, which lies in the Alpine region of Alaska at the head of Muir Inlet, Glacier Bay, in 58° 50′ N. lat., 136°40′ W. long. It forms a frozen stream some 5000 feet wide by 700 deep, entering the inlet at a mean rate of 40 feet, or 140,000,000 cubic feet, per day, during the month of August. The vertical front at the water's edge is from 250 to 300 feet, and from this front icebergs are continually breaking away, some many hundred feet long, with a volume of 40,000,000 cubic feet. The glacier appears to be rapidly retreating, there being indications that even since the beginning of this century it has receded several miles up the inlet, and fallen 1000 or 1500 feet below its former level.—On the age of the coal found in the region traversed by the Rio Grande del Norte, by C. A. White. The carboniferous beds occurring at various points in this region vary greatly in quality, but none of them appear to be earlier than late Cretaceous age.—The viscosity of steel and its relations to temper (continued), by C. Barus and V. Strouhal. Among the chief results of the authors' further experiments, as here described and tabulated, is the light thrown on the crucial importance of the physical changes which steel undergoes during annealing at high temperatures between 500° and 1000°C. Within these limits occur several nearly coincident phenomena: such as Gore's sudden volume expansion; Tait's sinuously broken thermoelectric resistance; Gore-Baur's sudden disappearance of magnetic quality; the passage of carbon from uncombined to combined; Jean's critical cementation temperature; and the authors' own unique maximum of viscosity.—On the nature and origin of lithophysæ, and the lamination of acid lavas, by Joseph P. Iddings. The data upon which the conclusions here stated are based were obtained from a study of the various forms of structure and crystallisation assumed by acid lavas in cooling, as observed while prosecuting the work of the United States Geological Survey in the Yellowstone National Park under Mr. Arnold Hague. The lithophysæ, composed of prismatic quartz, tridymite, soda-orthoclase, fayalite, and magnetite, appear to be of aqueo-igneous origin, having been produced by the action of the absorbed gases upon the molten glass from which they were liberated during the crystallisation consequent upon cooling. It also seems highly probable that the differences in consistency and in the phases of crystallisation producing the lamination of this rock were directly due to the amount of vapours absorbed in the various layers of the lava and to their mineralising influence.—The latest volcanic eruption in Northern California, and its peculiar lava, by J. S. Diller. The volcanic district here described is that of the so-called “Cinder Cone,” near Snag Lake, North California, where the recent character of the eruptive phenomena is most striking as compared with other outbursts in the same region. The lava field, some three square miles in extent, is of basaltic type, but remarkably anomalous in containing numerous grains of quartz, and very high percentages of silica and magnesia with correspondingly low quantities ot the oxides of iron.—On the texture of massive rocks, by George F. Becker. From his researches the author infers that porphyries may form at any depth and no matter how slowly the temperature of the magma may sink, while granular rocks can scarcely ever have been thoroughly fluid or homogeneous, but have often consolidated at pressures extremely moderate compared with those at which it is certain that porphyries would form.—A fifth mass of meteoric iron from Augusta County, Virginia, by George F. Kunz. This specimen, which comes from the same place where was found the largest of the three masses first described by Prof. Mallet, yielded, on analysis: iron 90.293; nickel, 8.848; cobalt, 0.486; phosphorus, 0.243; carbon, 0.177; with traces of copper, tin, sulphur, silica, manganese, chromium, and chlorine.—Note on the origin of comets, by Daniel Kirkwood. It is argued that, although most comets are of interstellar origin, some of short period may have had their rise within the solar system.—The bichromate of soda cell, by Selwyn Lewis Harding. The experiments here described tend to show that this is a most efficient cell, whose effectiveness, as far as its constancy is concerned, might be materially increased by interchanging the positions of the electrodes with their surrounding liquids, after the fashion of the Fuller cell.
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Scientific Serials . Nature 35, 380–381 (1887). https://doi.org/10.1038/035380b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/035380b0