matter of history in the case of the star itself. The star has been for years (for ages?) in the enjoyment of the new conditions which this fiery catastrophe has originated.

An important question remains, Is the star really new? The Astronomer Royal informs the writer that meridian observations of this star at Greenwich show that its position agrees precisely with a star observed by Argelander of the 9 5 magnitude. Sir John Herschel has informed the writer, that on June 9th, 1842, he saw a star of the 6th magnitude in a position in Corona nearly the same as that of this new star. As the place of the star was laid down merely by naked eye allineations, the object seen by Sir John Herschel may possibly have been the same star during a former similar outburst of light.

CHRONICLES OF SCIENCE.

I. AGRICULTURE.

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THE gradual decline of the cattle plague during the past quarter has amply justified those measures of repression and restriction which had been enacted at the date of our last publication, and to which we then alluded. The latest report of the Commissioners appointed to investigate the subject points out that, up to the date of the Act which authorized the compulsory slaughter of infected cattle, the fatality of the disease was constantly increasing; but that, after that date, it at once commenced a continual decline which has since been almost regularly maintained. This diminution has not only been coincident with the action of the new restrictive measures, but runs a course closely parallel to the operation of the most important of those measures compulsory slaughter. "Rigid and systematic means of disinfection," sparing strictness and unremitting watchfulness," will alone, in the opinion of the Commissioners, be sufficient to extirpate the disease, and when these measures have been successful, there will still remain the duty of guarding against its re-introduction. A few cases have been reported in the north of Ireland; but the rigid isolation of the infected spot appears hitherto to have prevented its extension there. The liability to its re-importation is, however, strikingly illustrated by the Irish experience, and this will, we fear, necessitate a constant and increasingly careful inspection at all those points of debarkation at which we now receive our supplies of foreign cattle. This, combined with either quarantine or immediate slaughter, will be necessary; for the complete investigation of the subject, which a quarter of a million of cases has forced upon us, only deepens the conviction that no remedy exists for the malady when once the poison has been received. The Commissioners inform us that all forms of medicinal treatment have been equally successful, and all have been equally unsuccessful. The regulation of diet has, however, been serviceable-"judicious feeding with soft mashes of digestible food has tended to increase the proportion of recoveries. And it is a noteworthy circumstance, that the proportion of recoveries is larger in the case of small herds than in that of large flocks, thus pointing out how much may be done by careful nursing and individual attention." "Among cottagers' cattle, generally fed on mashed food, the recoveries were 73 per cent.; in large stocks, where dry food has been given

during convalescence, the recoveries were 57 per cent.; with mixed food of mashes and hay, they were 22 per cent.; while, among cattle fed entirely with dry food, and treated medicinally with drugs, the recoveries were but 13 per cent." These results were gathered out of the history of 503 cases, of which 191, or nearly 38 per cent. on the whole, recovered. We add that the returns published on June 1st intimate that 244,455 cases, in all, had occurred up till that date, of which 1,207 were reported during the previous week; the weekly numbers having been sinking very rapidly indeed since the month of March, when the number of attacks amounted in one week to as many as 18,000.

The number of animals hitherto reported as having died or been slaughtered does not much exceed 200,000 of all ages, or barely 5 per cent. of the number which recently published statistics declare to be the present cattle population of Great Britain; but the losses have no doubt been greater on the whole than the Government returns declare; and there is this especial aggravation of their severity, that they have not been evenly spread over the country, but have fallen with destructive effect on particular counties. In Cheshire, for example, which is almost exclusively a dairy county, no fewer than 4,800 places have been visited by the plague. In these places there were 90,434 cattle, of which 60,574 have been attacked, and upwards of 50,000 of them are dead. The quiet arithmetical view of the subject as a national loss, which a mere statist may be disposed to take, thus altogether ignores the almost absolute ruin which has befallen individual localities and even counties. Our immunity for the future depends a good deal upon the efficiency of the disinfectants which have been employed in those localities where the disease has occurred, and where, if the poison which is left by it has not been thoroughly destroyed, it will be almost certain to occur again. It appears to us that some risk arises here out of the insufficient distinction made in the popular estimate of them between true disinfectants and mere deodorizing antiseptics. The latter do, in effect, merely lock up the poison which they deal with; and the harmless condition to which, for the time, it is reduced by their agency, may be only a temporary result of their employment. Lapse of time may set it free again; and, plainly, it is only those agencies which decompose and break up the organic matters implicated, redistributing their elements in new forms of combination, that are unquestionably and ultimately trustworthy. For these reasons, we should greatly prefer, after a thorough washing of the infected premises with some alkaline ley, the use of sulphurous acid or chlorine gas-the one obtained by burning sulphur and the other by adding hydrochloric acid to the peroxide of manganese-in the cow-house where the plague has been, to the use of carbolic and other tar

acids. And we believe that the agricultural public are greatly indebted to Dr. Voelcker, the chemist of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, and to Mr. Walter Crum, F.R.S., for that distinction urged by them between disinfectants and antiseptics, which does not appear to have received due attention in the recommendations of the Cattle Plague Commissioners.

Reference was made last quarter to the then impending attempt to collect statistics of our live stock. The returns have since been published, and we learn that on the 5th of March (when, however, neither the calving nor the lambing season was over) we had the following quantity of live stock in the country:

This amounts, as regards Great Britain, to about 10 cattle of all ages, 40 sheep, and 6 pigs, to every 100 acres of England; and to 5 cattle, 28 sheep, and 1 pig, to every hundred acres of Scotland, of which, of course, so much larger a proportion is waste and moorland. Another table in the Government returns on this subject indicates the corresponding live-stock population of other countries. Comparing it, however, not with the acreage, but with the human population of the several countries, the extent of their dairy husbandry is very strikingly illustrated by this table, which shows, that while there is only one cow for every nine persons in Great Britain and Ireland, there is one for every two in Denmark, one for every three in Holstein, one for every three-and-a-half in Sweden, Holland, Prussia and Saxony; one for every six in Austria, and one for every six-and-a-half in France. The universality of the cattle plague in Cheshire is shown in these returns by the number of cattle in that county, 93,844, as compared with 90,439, which is the number on those farms where the disease had appeared.

The meat supply of the country has received ample discussion during the past quarter at the hands of both local and central societies. The increase of fertility by both deeper tillage and more liberal manuring, the adoption of special rotations of crop, and, in particular, the cultivation of green crops in succession to one another; the use of potatoes, and of home-grown grain, as cattle food; the selection of fitting breeds and animals and their

management during the growing and the feeding periods, which are now understood to be coincident from beginning to the end of each, was fully discussed by Mr. Robert Smith before the London Farmers' Club, and by Messrs. Hope, Wilson, and McCombie, before the Edinburgh Chamber of Agriculture. The special details of cultivation and field management necessary to a large production of food for live stock on the farm have been carefully described by Professor Wrightson, of the Royal Agricultural College, before the Cirencester Farmers' Club, and by Mr. Alderman Mechi, before the Wenlock Farmers' Club: and capital papers on the general management of live stock, and on that particular treatment of this department of farm management which the cattle plague has called forth, have been delivered before English, Scottish, and Irish Farmers' Clubs. The society which has probably done least for any serviceable mitigation of the calamity which has befallen us is the Royal Agricultural Society of England, whose council were, at the late general meeting of the society, taken vigorously to task by Mr. Arkell, a Wiltshire farmer, for the inaction they had displayed.

We must except from the charge of that usually deficient and imperfect discussion of agricultural subjects which they receive at the occasional meetings of the English Agricultural Society, one very instructive lecture recently delivered in its rooms by Dr. Voelcker, on the proper conditions of field-experiments. following were the points to which he referred :

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1. Such experiments need not be on a large scale. Onetwentieth part of an acre of root crop, one quarter of an acre of corn or grass, will answer fairly any simple question that is put to it by the application of a manure. A larger extent sometimes involves a fatal difference of treatment in the several parts of it, and unless the plots be small enough to be treated virtually together, the results will not be capable of comparison.

2. These experiments ought to be conducted on soil of what may be called an indifferent character-level, fairly drained, uniform as to depth, and without any marked character as to composition or texture. It should be neither stiff nor light; nor should it be too rich, for as the distinctive effect of different foods cannot appear in the case of a man already fully fed, so manures cannot produce their characteristic effect, or indeed any effect at all, on soil already full of all that plants require.

3. The result of the experiment depends on the time and mode in which it is conducted. As to time:-Experimental manurings on grass lands on which it is proposed to try the effect of slowly dissolving fertilizers should be done in autumn. Even ammoniacal salts may be applied in autumn, if on land possessing any retentive character. Nitrates, on the other hand, which the soil allows to