and some columns are left blank to show that they are still desirable." The pentads or decades to be used in such a table as this should always be those introduced by Dove, the limiting dates of which are as given in this table; the twelfth pentad of the ordinary year has five days, but that of the leap year has six days, so that the limiting dates are always as here given, viz, from February 25 to March 1, inclusive. The data given by Descroix in the Annuaire for 1890 consist of the mean values for the respective pentads. From these I have constructed the sum totals from January 1 to date, which are needed in agriculture, and which are still more easily obtained when we have the original tables of observations at hand, by simply taking the sums in a continuous series and avoiding the labor of computing the means. From such a table of sum totals we obtain the sum between any two dates by subtracting the sum for the earlier from that for the later date. a The omitted columns are: (1) Sunshine; actual duration. (2) Actinometric degrees; actual daily average. (3) Ratio of actual actinometric degrees to the maximum possible daily average. (4) Soil temperature at the surface. (5) Soil moisture. (6) Percentage of saturation. THE RESULTS OF RECENT STUDIES BY ANGOT. In 1880 the Central Meteorological Bureau of France, under the minister of public instruction, organized a system of phenological observations; the resulting data have been studied by Angot in a series of memoirs. In his first paper (1882) Angot grouped the dates of the wheat harvest as observed during 1880 and 1881 at several hundred stations in France in groups of four or five stations and plotted these upon maps showing the elevations of the stations. By a careful comparison of neighboring stations he shows that the date of the harvest is everywhere quite uniformly retarded with increase of elevation, and at the rate of four days in time for every hundred meters of ascent. Apparently this retardation is the general result of a complex system of influences in which rainfall, drainage, soil, sunshine, temperature, and other local peculiarities combine. It is evident that the special influence of any local climate on the crop can not be successfully studied until the observations have been corrected for the general influence of elevation. He therefore reduces all the dates of harvest to sea level by applying the preceding correction. A similar calculation showed him that the phenomena of flowering are also retarded at precisely the same rate of four days per 100 meters of elevation and these dates also are thus reducible to sea level. Angot's charts, showing the dates of flowering and harvesting thus reduced to sea level, show great regularity and the isanthesic lines show the perfect regularity with which the reduced epoch of flowering begins in southern France on the 11th of May and advances northward until it reaches the northern boundary of France on the 25th of June; in a similar way the harvesting of winter wheat begins in southern France on the 10th of June (reduced epoch) and in northern France on the 9th of August. The variations of these isanthesic lines from year to year may be compared with the ordinary charts of temperature reduced to sea level or with other meteorological data in a very simple manner. Angot has modified and apparently improved the methods of determining the influence of temperature on the date of flowering and harvesting. He says that since 1837 Boussingault's idea that the ripening demands a certain sum total of heat, which is constant for each species of plant, has been generally adopted. At first this sum total was calculated by adding together all mean daily temperatures from the germination of the seed or the beginning of vegetation after rejecting such means as were below freezing point. Then, as C. H. Martins, De Gasparin, and A. de Candolle had shown |