rage apparent luster has nothing to
do with greater or less remoteness--few will be disposed to admit.
But, in order to interpret truly, well ascertained if unexpected
relationships, we must remember that the sensibly moving stars used to
determine the solar translation are chosen from a multitude sensibly
fixed; and that the proportion of stationary to traveling stars rises
rapidly with descent down the scale of magnitude. Hence a mean struck
in disregard of the zeros is totally misleading; while the account is
no sooner made exhaustive than its anomalous character becomes largely
modified. Yet it does not wholly disappear. There is some warrant for
it in nature. And its warrant may perhaps consist in a preponderance,
among suns endowed with high _physical_ speed, of small or slightly
luminous over powerfully radiative bodies. Why this should be so, it
would be futile, even by conjecture, to attempt to explain.--_Nature._

* * * * *

ANIMAL ORIGIN OF PETROLEUM AND PARAFFIN.

R. Zaloziecki, in _Dingl. Polyt. Jour._, gives a lengthy physical and
chemical argument in favor of the modern view that petroleum and
paraffin owe their origin to animal sources; that they are formed from
animal remains in a manner strictly analogous to that of the formation
of ordinary coal from wood and other vegetable debris. For geological
as well as chemical reasons, the author holds that Mendeleeff's theory
of their igneous origin is untenable, pointing out that the
hydrocarbons could not have been formed by the action of water
percolating through clefts in the gradually solidifying crust until it
reached the molten metallic carbides, as these clefts could only occur
where complete solidification had taken place, and between this point
and the metallic stratum a considerable space would be taken up by
semi-solid, slag-like material which would be quite impervious to
water. Under the conditions, too, existing beneath the surface of the
earth, such polymerization as is necessary to account for the presence
of the different classes of hydrocarbons found in petroleum is
scarcely credible.

On the other hand it is to be specially noticed that, with a few
unimportant exceptions, all bituminous deposits are found in the
sedimentary rocks, and that just as these are constantly changing in
composition, so the organic matter present changes, there being a
definite relationship between the chemical constitutio