The New York State College of Forestry, in connection with Cornell University, was presented by Professor Fernow, at the Boston meeting of the American Association, as a logical sequence to the policy to which the State of New York was committed in 1885 by the purchase of more than a million acres of forest land in the Adirondack Mountains, to be gradually increased to three million acres. A demonstration area of thirty thousand acres in the Adirondacks has since been provided for it. The courses leading to the degree of Bachelor in Forestry occupy four years, of which the first two are devoted to the studies in which mathematics, physics, chemistry, geology, botany, entomology, political economy, etc., figure as fundamental and supplementary sciences, in addition to the professional courses; besides which two courses of a more or less popular character are contemplated. The discovery is announced in a preliminary communication by Dr. Issutschenko, of Russia, of a microbe pathogenic to rats. An epidemic having broken out among the rats kept for experimental purposes in the Government Agricultural Laboratory, a bacillus was isolated from the liver and spleen of affected animals that proved excessively fatal to rats and mice. Experiments in making the organism useful as a living rat poison have not yet, however, had an encouraging success. New Zealand has just definitely adopted a scheme of old-age pensions. In future the New Zealand workingman of sixty-five years of age, who has lived a life of honest toil, will be assured an income of one pound a week. The Wilde prize of the French Academy of Sciences has been awarded by that body to Charles A. Schott, chief of the Computation Division of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, for his work on Terrestrial Magnetism. * * * * * Transcriber's Notes: Obvious typographical errors were repaired. Archaic spellings retained. Illustrations were relocated to correspond to their references in the text. Latin-1 file: P.211, "Marianne Chernyak"; original placed a macron over the "a" in Chernyak. Latin-1 file: Under General Notices, "The Parallaxes of 61^1 and 61^2 Cygni"; "^" indicates a superscript of the number following.