white settlement. It is 8,000 ft. above the sea and Sharpe describes its climate as "a succession of English summer days." The herds of the natives are estimated at 2,500,000 cattle.

The Cape to Cairo Railway now extends south from Cairo to Sennar on the Blue Nile. Sir Charles Metcalfe, long connected with Cecil Rhodes as engineer of railway construction in South Africa, in a paper on "Railway Development of Africa" (Geogr. Jour., xlvii, 1916, 3-21) expresses the opinion that one result of the war will be the completion of an all-rail line between Cape Town and Cairo without using any of the proposed links of river navigation. He says that the through rail route may be attained by building a railway northeast from the station of Broken Hill, in northern Rhodesia, to Tabora in what is still known as German East Africa, thence nearly due north to Sennar, where the last rail on the Cape to Cairo route would be laid. If this idea be carried out, considerably more than one-half of the track has already been laid. Some years before the war the British intimated that, in their opinion, the best route for the railway would be across German territory but the idea was not favorably received by the German authorities.

not observed by explorers when war While disturbs friendly relations. Dr. Thurnwald was on this journey an Australian military expedition reached his base camp and departed with his motor boat and supplies, so that he had difficulty in returning down the river. This was his first intimation that a state of war existed. The Australians now occupy Kaiser Wilhelm Land, report healthful country inland in the mountain region back of the Hansemann Coast, and ask that a road be built from the coast to the Ramu River, which drains nearly the whole of southeastern Kaiser Wilhelm Land, with a view to opening up the interior.

The Southern Ocean.-There is a growing tendency among geographers to discontinue in their writings, maps and text-books the use of the name Antarctic Ocean as applied to the widespread waters to the south of the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans. Perhaps the late Prof. Otto Krümmel, one of the greatest of oceanographers, gave more impetus to this tendency than any other writer, when he discarded the name Antarctic Ocean in his Handbuch der Ozeanographie and divided these southern waters of the globe among the three oceans to the north. The present tendency, however, seems to favor the substitution of the name "Southern Ocean" for Antarctic Ocean and to extend its northern limits to lat. 40° S. The northern limit of the Antarctic Ocean is, of course, the Antarctic Circle. The reason given for this change of name is that the southern waters of the world have distinctive phenomena or features which differentiate them, to some extent, from the other oceans; and that the name Antarctic Ocean is not appropriate because it does not include the entire water area that is marked by these special features or some of them. The latest and one of the best English text-books does not mention the Antarctic Ocean but uses the name Southern Ocean. We see the name also used in one of the latest and most important American text-books, and some other texts now preparing will adopt the new name. It seems probable that, before very long, the designation Antarctic Ocean will no longer be used.

Pacific Islands.-The large region in northeastern New Guinea which the Germans appropriated in 1884 under the name of Kaiser Wilhelm Land is still little explored and that mainly along the coast, some of the interior ranges, and along the Kaiserin Augusta River. The impression that the larger river basins are so low in elevation as to present many obstacles to development has been modified by more recent work. When the war began the well-known German ethnologist, Dr. R. Thurnwald, was making studies in the upper basin of the Kaiserin Augusta River, one of the most important river systems of the great island, when he discovered an important extent of elevated country to the west-southwest of the Victor Emanuel Range. He found this plateau to be about 5,000 ft. above the sea and fairly well peopled, quite in contrast with the Kaiserin Augusta Valley further east, which stands low and is very sparsely settled. The amenities are

Vapor Pressure Determinations. The dissociation pressures of calomel for temperatures between 309° and 384° C. have been measured by A. Smith and R. P. Calvert, with the aid of the static isoteniscope heated in a bath of molten sodium and potassium nitrates. Using the static method of Smith and Menzies, I. H. Derby and V. Yngue have determined the dissociation pressures of the hydrated chlorides of magnesium, copper, cobalt and nickel, and also the vapor pressures of the saturated solutions of these compounds. The lowering effect upon the vapor pressure of water produced by dissolved potassium chloride has been studied by B. F. Lovelace, J. C. W. Frazer and E. Miller. It was found that for all concentrations investigated, the molecular lowering of vapor tension was the same. An electrically operated thermostat capable of holding the temperature constant to 0.001 for periods of 12 hours or more was employed in this work. C. Drucker, E. Jiméno and W. Kangro have determined the vapor pressures of a number of organic liquids for temperatures between the limits + 15° and 100° C.

weight, 206.08) from Norwegian cleveite was found to be even lower than that of the Australian radio-lead, while the atomic volume, as before, proved to be "essentially equal to that of ordinary lead." An experimental determination of the life of radium has been made by Ellen Gleditsch, who used the Boltwood method, obtaining values for the half-life period which in some cases agreed closely with the value (1,690 years) calculated by Rutherford from the number of alpha particles emitted per second per gram of pure radium.

Halogen Compounds.-The changes in volume that take place when the halogen salts of the alkali metals are dissolved in water have been measured by G. P. Baxter and C. C. Wallace over a wide range of concentration and of temperature. The observed effects are explained with the aid of Richards' hypothesis of compressible atoms and of the hydration hypothesis. L. Marino and R. Becarelli have studied the so-called sub-bromide and sub-chloride of bismuth, and conclude that when mixtures of bismuth bromide and bismuth, or of bismuth chloride and bismuth, are fused, no evidence of the formation of a well defined sub-bromide or sub-chloride is observed, but that in each case a series of mixed crystals is obtained. An investigation of chlorous acid and the chlorites has been conducted by G. Bruni and G. Levi. A number of chlorites were prepared, and the molecular conductivity of the solutions of certain chlorites was determined. It was found that the ionic mobility of the oxygen compounds of chlorine seems to increase with the amount of oxygen present, while that of the oxygen compounds of nitrogen decreases. Solutions of sodium chlorate activated by osmium have been used by K. A. Hofmann and O. Schneider in effect

methane or nitrogen and the catalysis of mixtures of oxygen and hydrogen.

The Periodic System.-A very interesting article on the periodic system and the properties of elements has been published by W. D. Harkins and R. E. Hall. The authors present a new

table, which may be shown either as a helix in space or as a spiral in one plane. In this table the elements are arranged in the exact order of their atomic weights, with no blanks for unknown elements that do not correspond with the Moseley atomic numbers, but with adequate provision for the zero and eighth groups, for the alpha and beta decompositions of the radioactive elements, and for the isotopic forms of an element. It is suggested by J. Waddell that the relationship between the atomic weights of the elements and the quantity in the earth's crust can scarcely be accidental. The fact that the "typical elements" sodium, magnesium, aluminium, silicon, phosphorus, and chlorine occur in much larger amounts than the remaining elements in the respective groups, leads the author to believe that oxygen, the most abundant of all elements, may be in reality the typical element of its group, and that the unknown element of atomic weight between hydrogen and helium may be the first member of the oxygen group, instead of being analogous to the halogens as previously suggested. In an article on the atom and the molecule, G. N. Lewis suggests the classification of compounds as polar and non-polar, rather than as inorganic and organic. In polar molecules certain electrons are held so weakly as to permit motion from their normal positions, with resultant separation of the molecule, in extreme cases, into positive and negative parts. In non-polar molecules the electrons belonging to the individual atom are held in such constraint that they do not move far from their normal positions. A new theory of atomic structure is proposed, in which the atoms of lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and fluorine, for example, are represented as cubes, carrying respectively from one to seven electrons on the corners.

A

stances were found to show polymorphism, while 94 substances did not undergo polymorphic transition. series of cryoscopic measurements at low temperatures has been made by H. S. Reid and D. McIntosh upon the solutions of a number of organic substances in liquid hydrogen bromide. Information was gained concerning the molecular complexity of certain solutes, the relationship between the amount of association and the molecular conductivity, and the formation, in certain cases, of oxonium compounds. The formation of supersaturated solutions of phenol, aniline, nitrobenzene and carbon bisulphide in water has been investigated by H. S. Davis, and a theory has been suggested to account for the observed phenomena. J. L. R. Morgan and G. Egloff have measured the surface tension of mixtures of phenol and water, and of triethylamine and water, both above and below the critical solution point, by the drop-weight method. The ternary system silver, gold, tellurium, or, more accurately, silver telluride, gold telluride, tellurium, has been investigated by G. Pellini. The system calcium oxide, aluminium oxide, magnesium oxide has been studied by G. A. Rankin and H. E. Merwin. No ternary compounds stable in contact with the melt were found. A series of concentration-temperature diagrams was constructed, in which are shown the relations subsisting between the components and the binary compounds 3CaO.Al2O3, 5Ca0.3A1,01, CaO.Al,O,, 3Ca0.5Al,O,, MgO.ALO,, and the relations in the ternary system.

ORGANIC CHEMISTRY

J. BISHOP TINGLE