Produced by Greg Bergquist, Charlie Howard, and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)









Transcriber’s note: Table of Contents added by Transcriber.




CONTENTS


  Rhythms and Geologic Time                                          339
  The Photography of Sound Waves                                     354
  The Psychology of Red                                              365
  Chapters on the Stars                                              376
  Colonies and the Mother Country (III)                              390
  Causes of Degeneration in Blind Fishes                             397
  The Evolution and Present Status of the Automobile                 406
  Scientific Results of the Norwegian Polar Expedition, 1893-1896    420
  Discussion and Correspondence                                      436
  Scientific Literature                                              439
  The Progress of Science                                            442




  THE
  POPULAR SCIENCE
  MONTHLY

  EDITED BY
  J. MCKEEN CATTELL

  VOL. LVII
  MAY TO OCTOBER, 1900


  NEW YORK AND LONDON
  MCCLURE, PHILLIPS AND COMPANY
  1900




  COPYRIGHT, 1900,
  BY MCCLURE, PHILLIPS AND COMPANY.




[Illustration: PROFESSOR R. S. WOODWARD,

PRESIDENT OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE.]




THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

AUGUST, 1900.




RHYTHMS AND GEOLOGIC TIME.[A]

BY G. K. GILBERT,

UNITED STATES GEOLOGICAL SURVEY.

    [A] Read to the American Association for the Advancement of
        Science, at New York, June 26, 1900, as the address of the
        retiring President.


Custom dictates that in complying with the rule of the association I
shall address you on some subject of a scientific character. But before
doing so I may be permitted to pay my personal tribute to the honored
and cherished leader of whose loss we are so keenly sensible on this
occasion. His kindly personality, the charm which his earnestness and
sincerity gave to his conversation, the range of his accomplishment,
are inviting themes; but it is perhaps more fitting that I touch
this evening on his character as a representative president of this
body. The association holds a peculiar position among our scientific
organizations of national or continental extent. Instead of narrowing
its meetings by limitations of subject matter or membership, it
cultivates the entire field of research and invites the interest and
coöperation of all. It is thus not only the integrating body for
professional investigators, but the bond of union between these and the
great group of cultured men and women--the group from whose ranks the
professional guild is recruited, through whom the scientific spirit
is chiefly propagated, and through whose interest scientific research
receives its financial support. Its aims and form of organization
recognize, what pure science does not always itself recognize, that
pure science is fundamentally the creature and servant of the material
needs of mankind, and it thus stands for what might be called the
human side of science. Edward Orton, throughout his career as teacher
and investigator, was conspicuous for his attention to the human side
of science. His most abstract work was consciously for the benefit
of the community, and he ever sought opportunity to make its results
directly available. In promoting the interests of the people of his
adopted State he incidentally accomplished much for a larger community
by helping it to an appreciation of the essential beneficence of the
scientific study of nature and man. As an individual he was a diligent
and successful laborer in the field which the association cultivates,
and when the association selected him as its standard-bearer it made
choice of one who was peculiarly its representative.

The subject to which I shall invite your attention this evening is by
no means novel, but might better be called perennial or recurrent; for
the problem of our earth’s age seems to bear repeated solution without
loss of vigor or prestige. It has been a marked favorite, moreover,
with presidents and vice-presidents, retiring or otherwise, when called
upon to address assemblies whose fields of scientific interest are
somewhat diverse--for the reason, I imagine, that while the specialist
claims the problem as his peculiar theme of study, he feels that other
denizens of the planet in question may not lack interest in the early
lore of their estate.

The difficulty of the problem inheres in the fact that it not only
transcends direct observation, but demands the extrapolation or
extension of familiar physical laws and processes far beyond the
ordinary range of qualifying conditions. From whatever side it is
approached, the way must be paved by postulates, and the resulting
views are so discrepant that impartial onlookers have come to be
suspicious of these convenient and inviting stepping stones.

That vain expectation may not be aroused, I admit at the outset that
I have not solved the problem and shall submit to you no estimates.
My immediate interest is in the preliminary question of the available
methods of approach, and it leads to the consideration of the ways,
or the classes of ways, in which the measurement of time has been
accomplished or attempted.

Of the artificial devices employed in practical horology there are two
so venerable that their origins are lost in the obscurity of legendary
myth. These are the clepsydra and the taper. In the clepsydra advantage
is taken of the approximately uniform rate at which water escapes
through a small orifice, and time is measured by gaging the loss of
water from a discharging vessel or the gain in a receiving vessel.
The hour-glass is one of its latest forms, in which sand takes the
place of water. The taper depends for its value as a timepiece on the
approximate uniformity of combustion when the area of fuel exposed to
the air is definitely regulated. It survives chiefly in the prayer
stick and safety fuse, but the graduated candle is perhaps still used
to regulate monastic vigils.

The pendulum, a comparatively modern invention, excelling the clepsydra
and taper in precision, has altogether supplanted them as the servant
of civilization. Its accuracy results from the remarkable property
that the period in which it completes an oscillation is almost exactly
the same, whatever the arc through which it swings. It regulates the
movements not only of our clocks, watches and chronometers, but of
barographs, thermographs and a great variety of other machines for
recording events and changes in their proper order and relation in
respect to time.

I must mention also a special apparatus invented by astronomers and
called a chronograph. It consists ordinarily of a revolving drum about
which a paper is wrapped and against which rests a pen. As the drum
turns the pen draws a line on the paper. Through an electric circuit
the pen is brought under the influence of a pendulum in such a way
that at the middle of each swing of the pendulum the pen is deflected,
making a mark at right angles to the straight line. The series of
marks thus drawn constitutes a time scale. The electric arrangements
are so made that the pen will also be disturbed in consequence of
some independent event, such as the firing of a gun or the transit of
a star; and the mark caused by such disturbance, being automatically
platted on the time scale, records the time of the event.

No attempt has been made to characterize these various timepieces with
fullness, because they are already well known to most of those present,
and, in fact, the chief motive for giving them separate mention is that
they may serve as the basis of a classification. In the use of the
clepsydra and taper, time is measured in terms of a continuous movement
or process; in the use of the pendulum time is measured in terms of a
movement which is periodically reversed. The classification embodies
the fundamental distinction between continuous motion and rhythmic
motion.

Passing now from the artificial to the natural measures of time, we
find that they are all rhythmic. It is true that the spinning of the
earth on its axis is in itself a continuous motion, but it would
yield no time measure if the earth were alone in space, and so soon
as the motion is considered in relation to some other celestial body
it becomes rhythmic. As viewed from, or compared with, a fixed star,
the period of its rhythm is the sidereal day; compared with the sun,
it is the solar day, nearly four minutes longer; and compared with
the moon, it is the lunar day, still longer by 49 minutes. As the
sun supplies the energy for most of the physical and all the vital
processes of the earth’s surface, the rhythm of the solar day is
impressed in multitudinous ways on man and his environment, and he
makes it his primary or standard unit of time. He has arbitrarily
divided it into hours, minutes and seconds, and in terms of these units
he says that the length of the sidereal day is a little more than 23
hours, 56 minutes and 4 seconds, and the average length of the lunar
day is a little less than 24 hours and 49 minutes. The lunar day finds
expression in the tides and is of moment to maritime folk, but the
sidereal is known only to astronomers.

Next in the series of our natural time units is the month, or the
rhythmic period of the moon regarded as a luminary. By our savage
ancestors, who credited the moon with powers of great importance
to themselves, much use was made of this unit, but as progress in
knowledge has shown that the influence of the satellite had been vastly
overrated, less and less attention has been paid to the returning
crescent, and it is only in ecclesiastic calendars that the chronology
of civilization now recognizes the natural month. Its shadow survives,
without the substance, in the calendar month; and the week possibly
represents an early attempt to subdivide it.

In passing to our third natural unit, the year, we again encounter
solar influence, and find the rhythm of the earth’s orbit echoed and
reechoed in innumerable physical and vital vibrations. As the attitude
of the earth’s axis inclines one hemisphere toward the sun for part
of the year and the other hemisphere for the remainder, the whole
complex drama of climate is annually enacted, and the sequence of man’s
activities is made to assume an annual rhythm. The year is second only
to the day as a terrestrial unit of duration; and as the day is man’s
standard for the minute division of time, so the year is his standard
for larger divisions, and the decade, the century and the millenium are
its multiples.

But the rhythms of day and night, of summer and winter, are not
the only tides in the affairs of men. At birth we are small, weak
and dependent, we grow larger and stronger, we become mature and
independent, and then by reproducing our kind we complete the cycle,
which begins again with our children. The cycle of human life is the
_generation_, a time unit of somewhat indefinite length and varying
in phase from family to family, but holding a place, nevertheless, in
human chronology.

Still less definite is the rhythm of hereditary rulership, progressing
from vigor through luxury to degeneracy, and closing its cycle in
usurpation; yet it makes an epoch in the life of a nation or empire,
and so the _dynasty_ is one of the units of the historian.

The generation and the dynasty are of waning importance in human
chronology, and they can claim no connection with the problem of
geologic time; but here again I have turned aside for a moment in order
to illustrate a principle of classification. The daily rhythm of waking
and sleeping, of activity and rest, does not originate with man, but is
imposed on him by the rhythm of light and darkness, and that in turn
springs from the turning of the earth in relation to the shining sun.
The yearly rhythm of sowing and harvesting, of the fan and the furnace,
does not originate with man, but is imposed on him by the rhythm of the
seasons, and that in turn springs from certain motions of the earth in
relation to the glowing sun. But the rhythm of the generation and the
rhythm of the dynasty have origin in the nature of man himself. The
rhythms of human chronology may thus be grouped according to source in
two classes, the _imposed_ and the _original_; and the same distinction
holds for other rhythms. The lunar day is an original rhythm of the
earth as seen from the moon; the ground swell is an original rhythm
of the ocean; but the tide is an imposed rhythm of the ocean, being
derived from the lunar day. The swing of the pendulum is an original
rhythm, but the regular excursion of the chronograph pen, being caused
by the swing of the pendulum, is an imposed rhythm.

In giving brief consideration to each of the more important ways by
which the problem of the earth’s age has been approached, I shall
mention first those which follow the action of some continuous process,
and afterward those which depend on the recognition of rhythms.

The earliest computations of geologic time, as well as the majority of
all such computations, have followed the line of the most familiar and
fundamental of geologic processes. All through the ages the rains, the
rivers and the waves have been eating away the land, and the product
of their gnawing has been received by the sea and spread out in layers
of sediment. These layers have been hardened into rocky strata, and
from time to time portions have been upraised and made part of the
land. The record they contain makes the chief part of geologic history,
and the groups into which they are divided correspond to the ages and
periods of that history. In order to make use of these old sediments
as measures of time it is necessary to know either their thickness
or their volume, and also the rate at which they were laid down. As
the actual process of sedimentation is concealed from view, advantage
is taken of the fact that the whole quantity deposited in a year is
exactly equalled by the whole quantity washed from the land in the same
time, and measurements and estimates are made of the amounts brought to
the sea by rivers and torn from the cliffs of the shore by waves. After
an estimate has been obtained of the total annual sedimentation at the
present time, it is necessary to assume either that the average rate in
past ages has been the same or that it has differed in some definite
way.

At this point the course of procedure divides. The computer may
consider the aggregate amount of the sedimentary rocks, irrespective
of their subdivisions, or he may consider the thicknesses of the
various groups as exhibited in different localities. If he views the
rocks collectively, as a total to be divided by the annual increment,
his estimate of the total is founded primarily on direct measurements
made at many places on the continents, but to the result of such
measurements he must add a postulated amount for the rocks concealed
by the ocean, and another postulated amount for the material which has
been eroded from the land and deposited in the sea more than once.

If, on the other hand, he views each group of rocks by itself, and
takes account of its thickness at some locality where it is well
displayed, he must acquire in some way definite conceptions of the
rates at which its component layers of sand, clay and limy mud were
accumulated, or else he must postulate that its average rate of
accretion bore some definite ratio to the present average rate of
sedimentation for the whole ocean. This course is, on the whole, more
difficult than the other, but it has yielded certain preliminary
factors in which considerable confidence is felt. Whatever may have
been the absolute rate of rock building in each locality, it is
believed that a group of strata which exhibits great thickness in many
places must represent more time than a group of similar strata which is
everywhere thin, and that clays and marls, settling in quiet waters,
are likely to represent, foot for foot, greater amounts of time than
the coarser sediments gathered by strong currents; and studying the
formations with regard to both thickness and texture, geologists have
made out what are called _time ratios_--series of numbers expressing
the relative lengths of the different ages, periods and epochs. Such
estimates of ratios, when made by different persons, are found to vary
much less than do the estimates of absolute time, and they will serve
an excellent purpose whenever a satisfactory determination shall have
been made of the duration of any one period.

Reade has varied the sedimentary method by restricting attention to the
limestones, which have the peculiarity that their material is carried
from the land in solution; and it is a point in favor of this procedure
that the dissolved burdens of rivers are more easily measured than
their burdens of clay and sand.

An independent system of time ratios has been founded on the principle
of the evolution of life. Not all formations are equally supplied with
fossils, but some of them contain voluminous records of contemporary
life; and when account is taken of the amount of change from each full
record to the next, the steps of the series are found to be of unequal
magnitude. Though there is no method of precisely measuring the steps,
even in a comparative way, it has yet been found possible to make
approximate estimates, and these in the main lend support to the time
ratios founded on sedimentation. They bring aid also at a point where
the sedimentary data are weak, for the earliest formations are hard to
classify and measure. It is true that these same formations are almost
barren of fossils, but biologic inference does not therefore stop. The
oldest known fauna, the Eocambrian, does not represent the beginnings
of life, but a well-advanced stage, characterized by development along
many divergent lines; and by comparing Eocambrian life with existing
life the paleontologist is able to make an estimate of the relative
progress in evolution before and after the Eocambrian epoch. The only
absolute blank left by the time ratios pertains to an azoic age which
may have intervened between the development of a habitable earth crust
and the actual beginning of life.

Erosion and deposition have been used also, in a variety of ways,
to compute the length of very recent geologic epochs. Thus, from
the accumulation of sand in beaches Andrews estimated the age of
Lake Michigan, and Upham the age of the glacial lake Agassiz; and
from the erosion of the Niagara gorge the age of the river flowing
through it has been estimated. But while these discussions have
yielded conceptions of the nature of geologic time, and have served to
illustrate the extreme complexity of the conditions which affect its
measurement, they have accomplished little toward the determination
of the length of a geologic period; for they have pertained only to a
small fraction of what geologists call a period, and that fraction was
of a somewhat abnormal character.

Wholly independent avenues of approach are opened by the study of
processes pertaining to the earth as a planet, and with these the name
of Kelvin is prominently associated.

As the rotation of the earth causes the tides, and as the tides expend
energy, the tides must act as a brake, checking the speed of rotation.
Therefore the earth has in the past spun faster than now, and its rate
of spinning at any remote point of time may be computed. Assuming that
the whole globe is solid and rigid, and that the geologic record could
not begin until that condition had been attained, there could not have
been great checking of rotation since consolidation. For if there had
been, it would have resulted in the gathering of the oceans about the
poles and the baring of the land near the equator, a condition very
different from what actually obtains. This line of reasoning yields an
obscure outer limit to the age of the earth.

On the assumption that the globe lacks something of perfect rigidity,
G. H. Darwin has traced back the history of the earth and the moon to
an epoch when the two bodies were united, their separation having been
followed by the gradual enlargement of the moon’s orbit and the gradual
retardation of the earth’s rotation; and this line of inquiry has also
yielded an obscure outer limit to the antiquity of the earth as a
habitable globe.

One of the most elaborate of all the computations starts with the
assumption that at an initial epoch, when the outer part of the earth
was consolidated from a liquid condition, the whole body of the planet
had approximately the same temperature; and that as the surface
afterward cooled by outward radiation there was a flow of heat to the
surface by conduction from below. The rate of this flow has diminished
from that epoch to the present time according to a definite law, and
the present rate, being known from observation, affords a measure of
the age of the crust. The strength of this computation lies in its
definiteness and the simplicity of its data; its weakness in the fact
that it postulates a knowledge of certain properties of rock--namely,
its fusibility, conductivity and viscosity--when subjected to pressures
and temperatures far greater than have ever been investigated
experimentally.

A parallel line of discussion pertains to the sun. Great as is the
quantity of heat which that incandescent globe yields to the earth, it
is but a minute fraction of the whole amount with which it continually
parts, for its radiation is equal in all directions, and the earth is
but a speck in the solar sky. On the assumption that this immense loss
of heat is accompanied by a corresponding loss of volume, the sun is
shrinking at a definite rate, and a computation based on this rate has
told how many millions of years ago the sun’s diameter should have been
equal to the present diameter of the earth’s orbit. Manifestly the
earth can not have been ready for habitation before the passage of that
epoch, and so the computation yields a superior limit to the extent of
geologic time.

Before passing to the next division of the subject--the computations
based on rhythms--a few words may be given to the results which have
been obtained from the study of continuous processes. Realizing that
your patience may have been strained by the kaleidoscopic character of
the rapid review which has seemed unavoidable, I shall spare you the
recitation of numerical details and merely state in general terms that
the geologists, or those who have reasoned from the rocks and fossils,
have deduced values for the earth’s age very much larger than have
been obtained by the physicists, or those who have reasoned from earth
cooling, sun cooling and tidal friction. In order to express their
results in millions of years the geologists must employ from three
to five digits, while the physicists need but one or two. When these
enormous discrepancies were first realized it was seen that serious
errors must exist in some of the observational data or else in some of
the theories employed; and geologists undertook with zeal the revision
of their computations, making as earnest an effort for reconciliation
as had been made a generation earlier to adjust the elements of the
Hebrew cosmogony to the facts of geology. But after rediscussing the
measurements and readjusting the assumptions so as to reduce the time
estimates in every reasonable way--and perhaps in some that were not so
reasonable--they were still unable to compress the chapters of geologic
history between the narrow covers of physical limitation; and there
the matter rests for the present.

The rocks which were formed as sediments show many traces of rhythm.
Some are composed of layers, thin as paper, which alternate in color,
so that when broken across they exhibit delicate banding. In the time
of their making there was a periodic change in the character of the mud
that settled from the water. Others are banded on a larger scale; and
there are also bandings of texture where the color is uniform. Many
formations are divided into separate strata, as though the process of
accretion had been periodically interrupted. Series of hard strata are
often separated by films or thin layers of softer material. Strata of
two kinds are sometimes seen to alternate through many repetitions.
Borings in the delta of the Mississippi show soils and remains of trees
at many levels, alternating with river silts. The rock series in which
coal occurs are monotonous repetitions of shale and sandstone. Belgian
geologists have been so impressed by the recurrence of short sequences
of strata that they have based an elaborate system of rock notation
upon it.

Passing to still greater units, the large aggregates of strata
sometimes called systems show in many cases a regular sequence, which
Newberry called a “circle of deposition.” When complete, it comprises
a sandstone or conglomerate, at base, then shale, limestone, shale and
sandstone. This sequence is explained as the result of the gradual
encroachment, or transgression, as it is called, of the sea over the
land and its subsequent recession.

In certain bogs of Scandinavia deep accumulations of peat are traversed
horizontally by layers including tree stumps in such way as to indicate
that the ground has been alternately covered by forest and boggy
moss. The broad glaciers of the Ice age grew alternately smaller
and larger--or else were repeatedly dissipated and reformed--and
their final waning was characterized by a series of halts or partial
readvances, recorded in concentric belts of ice-brought drift. Of these
belts, called moraines of recession, Taylor enumerates seventeen in a
single system.

In explanation of these and other repetitive series incorporated in the
structure of the earth’s crust, a variety of rhythmic causes have been
adduced; and mention will be made of the more important, beginning with
those which have the character of original rhythms.

A river flowing through its delta clogs its channel with sediment,
and from time to time shifts its course to a new line, reaching the
sea by a new mouth. Such changes interrupt and vary sedimentation in
neighboring parts of the sea. Storms of rain make floods, and each
flood may cause a separate stratum of sediment. Storms of wind give
destructive force to the waves that beat the shore, and each storm
may cause the deposit of an individual layer of sediment. Varying
winds may drive currents this way and that, causing alternations in
sedimentation.

To explain the forest beds buried in the Mississippi silts it has
been suggested that the soft deposits of the delta from time to time
settled and spread out under their own weight. Various alternations of
strata, and especially those of the coal measures, have been ascribed
to successive local subsidences of the earth’s crust, caused by the
addition of loads of deposit. It has been suggested also that land
undergoing erosion may rise up from time to time because relieved
of load, and the character of sediment might be changed by such
rising. Subterranean forces, of whatever origin, seemingly slumber
while strains are accumulating, and then become suddenly manifest in
dislocations and eruptions, and such catastrophes affect sedimentation.

A more general rhythm has been ascribed to the tidal retardation of
rotation and the resulting change of the earth’s form. If the body
of the earth has a rather high rigidity, we should expect that it
would for a time resist the tendency to become more nearly spherical,
while the water of the ocean would accommodate itself to the changing
conditions of equilibrium by seeking the higher latitudes. Eventually,
however, the solid earth would yield to the strain and its figure
become adjusted to the slower rotation, and then the mobile water
would return. Thus would be caused periodic transgressions by the sea,
occurring alternately in high and low latitudes.

Another general rhythm has been recently suggested by Chamberlin in
connection with the hypothesis that secular variations of climate are
chiefly due to variations of the quantity of carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere.[B] The system of interdependent factors he works out is too
complex for presentation at this time, and I must content myself with
saying that his explanation of the moraines of recession involves the
interaction of a peculiar atmospheric condition with a condition of
glaciation, each condition tending to aggravate the other, until the
cumulative results brought about a reaction and the climatic pendulum
swung in the opposite direction. With each successive oscillation the
momentum was less, and an equilibrium was finally reached.

    [B] An attempt to frame a working hypothesis of the cause of
        glacial periods on an atmospheric basis. _Journ. Geol._,
        Vol. VII., 1899.

Few of these original rhythms have been used in computations of
geologic time, and it is not believed that they have any positive
value for that purpose. Nevertheless, account must be taken of them,
because they compete with imposed rhythms for the explanation of
many phenomena, and the imposed rhythms, wherever established, yield
estimates of time.

The tidal period, or the half of the lunar day, is the shortest
imposed rhythm appealed to in the explanation of the features of
sedimentation. It is quite conceivable that the bottom of a quiet
bay may receive at each tide a thin deposit of mud which could be
distinguished in the resulting rock as a papery layer or lamina. If one
could in some way identify a rock thus formed, he might learn how many
half-days its making required by counting its laminæ, just as the years
of a tree’s age are learned by counting its rings of growth.

The next imposed rhythm of geologic importance is the year. There are
rivers, like the Nile, having but one notable flood in each year,
and so depositing annual layers of sediment on their alluvial plains
and on the sea beds near their mouths. Where oceanic currents are
annually reversed by monsoons, sedimentation may be regularly varied,
or interrupted, once a year. Streams from a glacier cease to run in
winter, and this annual interruption may give a definite structure to
resulting deposits. It is therefore probable that some of the laminæ
or strata of rocks represent years, but the circumstances are rarely
such that the investigator can bar out the possibility that part of
the markings or separations were caused by original rhythms of unknown
period.

The number of rhythms existing in the solar system is very large, but
there are only two, in addition to the two just mentioned, which seem
competent to write themselves in a legible way in the geologic record.
These are the rhythms of precession and eccentricity.

Because the earth’s orbit is not quite circular and the sun’s position
is a little out of the center, or eccentric, the two hemispheres into
which the earth is divided by the equator do not receive their heat
in the same way. The northern summer, or the period during which
the northern hemisphere is inclined toward the sun, occurs when the
earth is farthest from the sun, and the northern winter occurs when
the earth is nearest to the sun, or in that part of the orbit called
perihelion. These relations are exactly reversed for the southern
hemisphere. The general effect of this is that the southern summer is
hotter than the northern, and the southern winter is colder than the
northern. In the southern part of the planet there is more contrast
between summer and winter than in the northern. The sun sends to each
half the same total quantity of heat in the course of a year, but the
difference in distribution makes the climates different. The physics of
the atmosphere is so intricate a subject that meteorologists are not
fully agreed as to the theoretic consequences of these differences of
solar heating, but it is generally believed that they are important,
involving differences in the force of the winds, in the velocity and
course of ocean currents, in vegetation, and in the extent of glaciers.

Now, the point of interest in the present connection is that the
astronomic relations which occasion these peculiarities are not
constant, but undergo a slow periodic change. The relation of the
seasons to the orbit is gradually shifting, so that each season in
turn coincides with the perihelion; and the climatic peculiarities
of the two hemispheres, so far as they depend on planetary motions,
are periodically reversed. The time in which the cycle of change is
completed, or the period of the rhythm, is not always the same, but
averages 21,000 years. It is commonly called the precessional period.[C]

    [C] Strictly speaking, 21,000 years is the period of the
        precession of the equinoxes as referred to perihelion; but
        the perihelion is itself in motion. As referred to a fixed
        star the precession of the equinoxes has an average period
        of about 25,700 years.

Assuming that the climates of many parts of the earth are subject
to a secular cycle, with contrasted phases every 10,500 years, we
should expect to find records of the cycle in the sediments. A moist
climate would tend to leach the calcareous matter from the rock,
leaving an earthy soil behind, and in a succeeding drier climate the
soil would be carried away; and thus the adjacent ocean would receive
first calcareous and then earthy sediments. The increase of glaciers
in one hemisphere would not only modify adjacent sediments directly,
but, by adding matter on that side, would make a small difference in
the position of the earth’s center of gravity. The ocean would move
somewhat toward the weighted hemisphere, encroaching on some coasts
and drawing down on others; and even a small change of that sort would
modify the conditions of erosion and deposition to an appreciable
extent in many localities.

Blytt ascribed to this astronomic cause the alternations of bog and
forest in Scandinavia, as well as other sedimentary rhythms observed
in Europe; and it has seemed to me competent to account for certain
alternations of strata in the Cretaceous formations of Colorado. Croll
used it to explain interglacial epochs, and Taylor has recently applied
it to the moraines of recession.

The remaining astronomic rhythm of geologic import is the variation of
eccentricity. At the present time our greatest distance from the sun
exceeds our least distance by its thirtieth part, but the difference
is not usually so small as this. It may increase to the seventh part
of the whole distance, and it may fall to zero. Between these limits
it fluctuates in a somewhat irregular way, in which the property of
periodicity is not conspicuous. The effect of its fluctuation is
inseparable from the precessional effect, and is related to it as a
modifying condition. When the eccentricity is large the precessional
rhythm is emphasized; when it is small the precessional effect is weak.

The variation of eccentricity is connected with the most celebrated
of all attempts to determine a limited portion of geologic time. In
the elaboration of the theory of the Ice age which bears his name,
Croll correlated two important epochs of glaciation with epochs of
high eccentricity computed to have occurred about 100,000 and 210,000
years ago. As the analysis of the glacial history progresses, these
correlations will eventually be established or disproved, and should
they be established it is possible that similar correlations may be
made between events far more remote.

The studies of these several rhythms, while they have led to the
computation of various epochs and stages of geologic time, have not yet
furnished an estimate either of the entire age of the earth or of any
large part of it. Nevertheless, I believe that they may profitably be
followed with that end in view.

The system of rock layers, great and small, constituting the record
of sedimentation, may be compared to the scroll of a chronograph. The
geologic scroll bears many separate lines, one for each district where
rocks are well displayed, but these are not independent, for they are
labeled by fossils, and by means of these labels can be arranged in
proper relation. In each time line are little jogs--changes in kind
of rock or breaks in continuity--and these jogs record contemporary
events. A new mountain was uplifted, perhaps, on the neighboring
continent, or an old uplift received a new impulse. Through what Davis
calls stream piracy a river gained or lost the drainage of a tract of
country. Escaping lava threw a dam across the course of a stream, or
some Krakatoa strewed ashes over the land and gave the rivers a new
material to work on. The jogs may be faint or strong, many or few, and
for long distances the lines may run smooth and straight; but so long
as the jogs are irregular they give no clue to time. Here and there,
however, the even line will betray a regularly recurring indentation or
undulation, reflecting a rhythm and possibly significant of a remote
pendulum whose rate of vibration is known. If it can be traced to such
a pendulum there will result a determination of the rate at which the
chronograph scroll moved when that part of the record was made; and
a moderate number of such determinations, if well distributed, will
convert the whole scroll into a definite time scale.

In other words, if a sufficient number of the rhythms embodied in
strata can be identified with particular imposed rhythms, the rates
of sedimentation under different circumstances and at different times
will become known, and eventually so many parts of geologic time will
have become subject to direct calculation that the intervals can be
rationally bridged over by the aid of time ratios.

For this purpose there is only one of the imposed rhythms of practical
value, namely, the precessional; but that one is, in my judgment, of
high value. The tidal rhythm can not be expected to characterize any
thick formation. The annual is liable to confusion with a variety of
original rhythms, especially those connected with storms. The rhythm
of eccentricity, being theoretically expressed only as an accentuation
of the precessional, can not ordinarily be distinguished from it. But
none of these qualifications apply to the precessional. It is not
liable to confusion with the tidal and annual because its period is
so much longer, being more than 2,000 times that of the annual. It has
an eminently practical and convenient magnitude, in that its physical
manifestation is well above the microscopic plane, and yet not so large
as to prevent the frequent bringing of several examples into a single
view. It is also practically regular in period, rarely deviating from
the average length by more than the tenth part.

From the greater number of original rhythms it is distinguished, just
as from the annual and tidal, by magnitude. The practical geologist
would never confuse the deposit occasioned by a single storm, for
example, with the sediments accumulated during an astronomic cycle
of 20,000 years. But there are other original rhythms, known or
surmised, which might have magnitudes of the same general order, and
to discriminate the precessional from these it is necessary to employ
other characters. Such characters are found in its regularity or
evenness of period, and in its practical perpetuity. The diversion of
the mouth of a great river such as the Hoang Ho or the Mississippi
might recur only after long intervals; but from what we know of the
behavior of smaller streams we may be sure that such events would be
very irregular in time as well as in other ways. The intervals between
volcanic eruptions at a particular vent or in a particular district
may at times amount to thousands of years, but their irregularity is
a characteristic feature. The same is true of the recurrent uplifts
by which mountains grow, so far as we may judge them by the related
phenomena of earthquakes; and the same category would seem to hold also
the theoretically recurrent collapse of the globe under the strains
arising from the slowing of rotation. The carbon-dioxide rhythm,
known as yet only in the field of hypothesis, is hypothetically a
running-down oscillation, like the lessening sway of the cradle when
the push is no longer given.

But the precessional motion pulses steadily on through the ages, like
the swing of a frictionless pendulum. Its throb may or may not be
caught by the geologic process which obtains in a particular province
and in a particular era, but whenever the conditions are favorable and
the connection is made, the record should reflect the persistence and
the regularity of the inciting rhythm.

The search of the rocks for records of the ticks of the precessional
clock is an out-of-door work. Pursued as a closet study it could have
no satisfactory outcome, because the printed descriptions of rock
sequences are not sufficiently complete for the purpose; and the closet
study of geology is peculiarly exposed to the perils of hobby-riding.
A student of the time problem cannot be sure of a persistent, equable
sedimentary rhythm without direct observation of the characters of
the repeated layers. He needs to avail himself of every opportunity
to study the series in its horizontal extent, and he should view the
local problem of original _versus_ imposed rhythm with the aid of
all the light which the field evidence can cast on the conditions of
sedimentation.

Neither do I think of rhythm seeking as a pursuit to absorb the
whole time and energy of an individual and be followed steadily to a
conclusion; but hope rather that it may receive the incidental and
occasional attention of many of my colleagues of the hammer, as other
errands lead them among cliffs of bedded rocks. If my suggestion
should succeed in adding a working hypothesis or point of view to the
equipment of field geologists, I should feel that the search had been
begun in the most promising and advantageous manner. For not only
would the subject of rhythms and their interpretations be advanced by
reactions from multifarious individual experiences, but the stimulus of
another hypothesis would lead to the discovery of unexpected meanings
in stratigraphic detail.

It is one of the fortunate qualities of scientific research that its
incidental and unanticipated results are not infrequently of equal or
even greater value than those directly sought. Indeed, if it were not
so, there would be no utilitarian harvest from the cultivation of the
field of pure science.

In advocating the adoption of a new point of view from which to peer
into the mysterious past, I would not be understood to advise the
abandonment of old stand-points, but rather to emulate the surveyor,
who makes measurement to inaccessible points by means of bearings from
different sides. Every independent bearing on the earth’s beginning is
a check on other bearings, and it is through the study of discrepancies
that we are to discover the refractions by which our lines of sight are
warped and twisted. The three principal lines we have now projected
into the abyss of time miss one another altogether, so that there is no
point of intersection. If any one of them is straight, both the others
are hopelessly crooked. If we would succeed we should not only take new
bearings from each discovered point of vantage, but strive in every
way to discover the sources of error in the bearings we have already
attempted.




THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF SOUND WAVES.

BY PROFESSOR R. W. WOOD,

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN.


Any one who has stood near a large naval gun during its discharge,
will, I think, be prepared to admit that the sound of the explosion
affects not only the ears, but the whole body as well, which
experiences something not unlike a sudden blow. This blow, or
concussion, as it is generally termed, is merely the impact of the wave
of compressed air, spreading out in all directions around the gun. In
the case of ordinary sounds, the compression of the air in the wave is
so slight that only the delicate auditory nerves respond to the impact,
hence we naturally conclude that sounds are perceived only by the ear.
When dealing with sounds of very great intensity, this notion must be
somewhat modified, for they certainly can be felt as well as heard. In
some extreme cases, in fact, the sensation of feeling may be stronger
than that of hearing, as in the case of which I shall speak presently.
Is it also possible that we can perceive sound through the medium of
any other sense organ, say the eye? ‘To see a noise’ certainly sounds
like an absurdity; yet under certain conditions, sound waves in air
can be made as distinctly visible as the ripples on a pond surrounding
the splash of a stone. That they are not seen under ordinary
conditions does not justify us in assuming them to be invisible. We
all know that the currents of hot air rising from a stove, while not
usually conspicuous, can be made visible by properly regulating the
illumination, as by looking along the surface of the stove towards a
window. The hot air is visible because in its optical properties it is
different from the cold air surrounding it. The rays of light, passing
through the unequally heated portions of the air, are bent in different
directions, causing a distortion of objects seen through the heated
currents. What we see, strictly speaking, is not the hot air itself,
but a wavering and swimming of the objects seen through it. Yet I think
we are justified in saying that the eye perceives the hot air.

Now sound waves in air, which are merely regions where the air is
somewhat compressed, differ in their optical properties from the
uncompressed portions, just as the hot air differs from the cold.
As the pictures illustrating this article testify, they may be seen
and photographed under proper conditions of illumination as readily
as solid objects. We must remember, in the first place, that a sound
wave travels with a velocity something greater than a thousand feet a
second, rather less than the speed of a modern rifle ball, yet ten
times faster than the fastest express train. The wave, even if it were
stationary, could be seen only by adjusting the illumination with far
greater care than was necessary in the case of the hot air, and we
consequently can easily understand why we never see the waves under
ordinary conditions.

While it is true that laboratory appliances are generally required to
render them visible, I should like at the outset to cite an example to
show that in the case of very loud sounds occurring in the open air
the wave can be perceived by the eye, without the aid of any apparatus
whatever. I will quote from an article by Prof. C. V. Boys, which
appeared in ‘Nature,’ June 24, 1897. Mr. Boys first cites the following
letter from Mr. E. J. Ryves: “On Tuesday, April 6th, I had occasion,
while carrying out some experiments with explosives, to detonate one
hundred pounds of a nitro-compound. The explosive was placed on the
ground in the center of a slight depression, and in order to view the
effect, I stationed myself, at a distance of about three hundred yards,
on the side of a neighboring-hill. The detonation was complete, and a
hole was made in the ground five feet deep and seven feet in diameter.
A most interesting observation was made during the experiment. The sun
was shining brightly, and at the moment of detonation the shadow of the
sound wave was most distinctly seen leaving the area of disturbance.
I heard the explosion as the shadow passed me, and I could follow it
distinctly in its course down the valley for at least half a mile; it
was so plainly visible that I believe it would photograph well with a
suitable shutter.”

Professor Boys at once made preparations for photographing the
phenomenon at the first opportunity. On May 19th the experiment was
made. One hundred and twenty pounds of a nitro-compound were exploded,
and an attempt made to photograph the sound shadow, both with the
camera and the kinematograph, the latter instrument designed and
operated by Mr. Paul. Writing of the experiment, Professor Boys says:
“On the day on which I was present, about one hundred and twenty pounds
of a nitro-compound were detonated, and ten pounds of black powder
were added to make sufficient smoke to show on the plate. As the
growth of the smoke cloud is far less rapid than the expansion of the
sound shadow, no confusion could result from this. At the time of the
explosion my whole attention was concentrated upon the camera, and for
the moment I had forgotten to look for the ‘Ryves ring,’ as I think
it might be called; but it was so conspicuous that it forced itself
upon my attention. I _felt_, rather than _heard_, the explosion at
the moment that it passed. We stationed ourselves as near as prudence
would allow, at a distance of one hundred and twenty yards, so that
only about one third of a second elapsed between the detonation and the
passage of the shadow. The actual appearance of the ring was that of
a strong, black, circular line, opening out with terrific speed from
the point of explosion as a center. It was impossible to judge of the
thickness of the shadow; it may have been three feet, or it may have
been more at first, and have gradually become less in thickness, or
possibly in depth of shade.”

Unfortunately, Professor Boys’s apparatus did not work satisfactorily,
but a most interesting series of pictures was secured by the
kinematograph. This instrument had been constructed especially for
taking pictures at a very high rate of speed, viz., eighty exposures
a second, or four times the usual number. The sound wave appears in
the first dozen pictures as a hazy ring of light, opening out from
the center of explosion. The ring, though not very conspicuous when
the pictures are viewed singly, becomes a striking object when they
are projected in rapid succession on the screen. We see the rush of
smoke along the ground to the box in which the explosion is confined
(the smoke of the quick fuse); then comes the burst of the explosion
with such startling reality that we involuntarily jump. The image of
the sound wave flies out in the form of a white ring, and is gone in
a moment; and there remain only the rolling clouds of smoke. It is
interesting to observe the development of the explosion by running the
machine quite slowly, and by thus magnifying time to follow the changes
which ordinarily occur in such rapid succession that the eye is unable
to perceive them.

Of this series of pictures, Professor Boys says: “The kinematograph
fails to show any _black_ ring; and this is not surprising, as with the
exposure of about one one hundredth of a second the shadow would have
to be at least eleven feet thick in order that some part should remain
obscured during the whole exposure. As a fact, there is clearly seen a
circular light shading, which does--so far as one can judge from the
supposed rate of working and the known distances--expand at about the
same rate as the observed shadow, but it is lighter than the ground and
shaded, instead of being dark and sharp, as seen by the eye.”

[Illustration: KINETOSCOPE FILM OF EXPLOSION.]

So much for the visibility of sound under ordinary conditions. In
the laboratory, by means of an optical contrivance due to the German
physicist Toepler, we can secure a means of illumination so sensitive
that the warm air rising from a person’s hand appears like dense
black smoke. Moreover, since we are working on a small scale, we can
use the electric spark as the source of light, and dispense with the
photographic shutter. This is a great advantage, for the time of the
exposure is, under these conditions, only about one fifty-thousandth of
a second, during which time the sound wave will move scarcely a quarter
of an inch. During the past year I have made a very complete series
of photographs of sound waves, which illustrate in a most beautiful
manner the fundamental principles of wave motion. It is not practicable
to give here a full description of the apparatus used, but a brief
outline may make the method intelligible. The sound photographed in
each case is the crack of an electric spark, which is illuminated and
photographed by the light of a second spark, occurring a brief instant
later. In front of a large lens (a telescope objective, for example)
two brass balls are mounted, between which the ‘sound spark,’ as I
shall call it, passes. The instant the spark jumps across the gap, a
spherical wave of condensed air starts out, which, when it reaches
our ear, gives the sensation of a snap. The object is to photograph
this wave before it gets beyond the limits of the lens. The camera is
mounted in front of the lens and focussed on the brass balls, which
appear in line in the picture, so that the sound spark is always hidden
by the front one. The spark, on jumping between the balls, charges a
Leyden jar, which instantly discharges itself between two wires placed
behind the lens, producing the illuminating spark. This second spark
can be made to lag behind the first just long enough to catch the sound
wave when it is but a few inches in diameter, notwithstanding the fact
that the spherical wave is expanding at the rate of eleven hundred feet
a second. The photographs show in every case the circle of the lens
filled up with the light of the illuminating spark, the brass balls
(in line) and the rods that support them, and the sound wave, which
appears in the simplest case as a circle of light and shade surrounding
the balls. By placing an obstacle in the way of the wave we get the
reflected wave or echo, and we shall see that the form of this echo may
be very complicated.

[Illustration: FIG. 1. SOUND WAVE REFLECTED FROM A PLANE SURFACE.]

It will be well at the outset to remind the reader of the close analogy
between sound and light. A burning candle gives out spherical light
waves, just as the snapping sparks give out sound waves. The form of
the reflected light wave will be identical with that of a sound wave
reflected under similar conditions. As we can not see the light waves
themselves, we can only determine their form by calculation, and
it is interesting to see that the forms photographed are identical
in every case with the calculated ones. The object in view was to
secure acoustical illustrations of as many of the phenomena connected
with light as possible. We will begin with the very simplest case of
all: the reflection of a spherical sound wave from a flat surface,
corresponding to the reflection of light from a plane mirror. It can be
shown by geometry that the reflected wave or echo will be a portion of
a sphere, the center of which lies as far below the reflecting surface
as the point at which the sound originates is above it. In the case of
light, this point constitutes the image in the mirror. Referring to the
photograph, we see the reflected wave in three successive positions,
the interval between the sound spark and the illuminating spark having
been progressively increased. The brass balls are shown at A, and
beneath them the flat plate B, which acts as a reflector. In the first
picture the sound wave C appears as a circle of light and shade, and
has just intersected the plate. The echo appears at D. In the next
two pictures the original wave has passed out of the field, and there
remains only the echo.

It may, perhaps, be not out of place to remind the reader of the
relation between rays of light and the wave surface. What we term light
rays have no real existence, the ray being merely the path traversed by
a small portion of consecutive wave surfaces. Since the wave surface
always moves in a direction perpendicular to itself, the rays are
always normal to it. For instance, in the above case of a spherical
wave diverging from a point, the rays radiate in all directions
from the point; the same is true in the case of the echo, the rays
radiating from the image point below the reflecting surface. In all
subsequent cases the reader can, if interested in tracing the analogy
between sound and light, draw lines perpendicular to the reflected wave
surfaces representing the system of reflected waves.

We will now consider a second case of reflection. We know that if a
lamp is placed in the focus of a concave mirror, the rays, instead of
diverging in all directions, issue from the mirror in a narrow beam.
The headlight of a locomotive and the naval searchlight are examples of
the practical use made of this property. If the curvature of the mirror
is parabolical, the rays leaving it are parallel; consequently mirrors
of this form are employed rather than spherical ones. But what has
the mirror done to the wave surface which is obviously spherical when
it leaves the lamp, and what is its form after reflection? The wave
surface, I have said, is always perpendicular to the rays; consequently
in cases where we have parallel rays we should expect the wave to be
flat or plane.

[Illustration: FIG. 2. SPHERICAL SOUND WAVE.]

Examine the second photograph, which shows a spherical, sound wave
starting at the focus of a parabolic mirror. The echo appears as a
_straight line_, instead of a circle as in the previous case, which
shows us that the wave surface is flat.

If now our mirror is a portion of a sphere instead of a paraboloid,
our reflected wave is not flat, and the reflected rays are not all
parallel, the departure from parallelism increasing as we consider
rays reflected from points farther and farther away from the center
of the mirror. A photograph illustrating the reflection of sound
under these conditions is next shown, the echo wave being shaped like
a flat-bottomed saucer. As the saucer moves upward the curved sides
converge to a focus at the edge of the flat bottom, disappearing for
the moment (as is shown in the fourth picture of the series), and then
reappearing on the under side after passing through the focus, the
saucer turning inside out.

If, instead of having a hemisphere, as in the last case, we have a
complete spherical mirror, shutting the wave up inside a hollow ball,
we get exceedingly curious forms; for the wave can not get out, and
is bounced back and forth, becoming more and more complicated at each
reflection. This is illustrated in our next photograph, the mirror
being a broad strip of metal bent into a circle.[D] Intricate as
these wave surfaces are, they have all been verified by geometrical
constructions, as I shall presently show.

    [D] Cylindrical mirrors have been used instead of spherical,
        for obvious reasons. A sectional view of the reflected wave
        is the same in this case as when produced by a spherical
        surface.

Another very interesting case of reflection is that occurring inside
an elliptical mirror. When light diverges from one of the two foci of
such a mirror, all the rays are brought accurately to the other focus.
If rays of light come to a focus from all directions, it is evident
that the wave surface must be a sphere, which, instead of expanding,
is collapsing. This is very beautifully shown in the photographs. The
sound wave starts in one focus and the reflected wave, of spherical
form also, shrinks to a point at the other focus. (See fig. 5.)

[Illustration: FIG. 3. A WAVE REFLECTED FROM A PORTION OF A SPHERE.]

[Illustration: FIG. 4. A WAVE FROM A CYLINDRICAL MIRROR.]

In the next series the wave starts outside of the field of the lens,
and enters a hemispherical mirror. We know that a concave mirror has
the power of bringing light to a focus at a point situated half-way
between the surface of the mirror and its center of curvature. If the
light comes from a very distant point, and the mirror is parabolic in
form, the rays are brought _accurately_ to a focus; which means that
the reflected wave is a converging sphere,--a condition the opposite of
that in which spherical waves start in the focus of such a mirror. If,
however, the mirror is spherical, only a portion of the light comes to
a focus. On examining the pictures we see that the reflected wave has
a form resembling a volcanic cone with a bowl-shaped crater. See the
third and fourth pictures of the series. The bowl of the crater shrinks
to a point half-way between the surface of the mirror and its center
of curvature, and represents that portion of the light which comes to
a focus, while the sides of the cone run in under the collapsing bowl,
and eventually cross. (No. 6 of the series.) From now on the portion
which has come to a focus diverges, uniting with the sides of the cone,
the whole passing out of the mirror in the form of a horseshoe.

[Illustration: FIG. 5. A WAVE FROM AN ELLIPTICAL MIRROR.]

[Illustration: FIG. 6. A WAVE STARTING OUTSIDE THE FIELD OF THE LENS.]

[Illustration: FIG. 7. A CASE OF REFRACTION.]

We will now consider a case of refraction, and show the slower velocity
of the sound wave in carbonic acid. A narrow glass tank, covered with
an exceedingly thin film of collodion, was filled with the heavy gas
and placed under the brass balls. When the sound wave strikes the
collodion surface, it breaks up into two components, one reflected
back into the air, the other transmitted down through the carbonic
acid. An examination of the series shows that the reflected wave in air
has moved farther from the collodion film than the transmitted wave,
which, as a matter of fact, has been flattened out into a hyperboloid.
Exactly the same thing happens when light strikes a block of glass. We
have rays reflected from the surface, and rays transmitted through the
block, the waves which give rise to the latter moving slower than the
ones in air.

A complete discussion of all of the cases that have been studied in
this way would probably prove wearisome to the general reader. Prisms
and lenses of collodion filled with carbonic acid and hydrogen gas
have been made, and their action on the wave surface photographed.
Diffraction, or the bending of the waves around obstacles, and the
very complicated effects when the waves are reflected from corrugated
surfaces, are also well shown. I shall, however, omit further mention
of them and speak of but one other case, possibly the most beautiful of
all.

[Illustration: FIG. 8. A MUSICAL TONE.]

In all the cases that we have considered, it must be remembered that
we have been dealing with a single wave--a pulse, as it is called.
Musical tones are caused by trains of waves, the pitch of the note
corresponding to the distance between the waves, or to the rate
at which the separate pulses beat upon the drum of the ear. For
studying the changes produced by reflection, wave trains would have
been useless, owing to the confusion which would have resulted from
the superposition of the different waves. Moreover, it is doubtful
whether an ordinary musical tone could be photographed in this way;
for the distance between the waves, even in the shrillest tones, is
four or five inches, and the abrupt change in density, necessary for
the perception of the wave, is not present. It is possible, however,
to create a wave train or musical tone which can be photographed.
The reader may perhaps have noticed that on a very still night, when
walking beside a picket fence or in front of a high flight of steps,
the sounds of his footsteps are echoed from the palings as metallic
squeaks. Each picket, as the single wave caused by the footfall sweeps
along the fence, reflects a little wave; consequently a train of waves
falls on the ear, the distance between the waves corresponding to the
distance between the pickets. The closer together the pickets, the
shriller the squeak. In point of fact, the distance between the waves
in such a train is twice the distance between the palings, since they
are not struck simultaneously by the footstep wave, but in succession.

This phenomenon, of the creation of a musical tone by the reflection
of a noise, was reproduced by reflecting the crack of the spark from
a little flight of steps. In the first picture the wave is seen half
way between its origin and the reflecting surface. In the second it
has struck the top stair, which is giving off its echo, the first wave
of our artificially constructed musical tone. In the third we find the
original wave at the sixth step, with a well-developed train of five
waves rising from the flight. The following three pictures show the
further development of the wave train. The height of each step was
about a quarter of an inch; consequently the distance between the waves
was half an inch. This would correspond to a note about three octaves
above the highest ever used in music.

[Illustration: FIG 9. THE REFLECTION INSIDE THE HOLLOW SPHERE.]

While experimenting with the complete circular mirror, which, it will
be remembered, gave the most complicated forms, it occurred to me that
a very vivid idea of how these curious wave surfaces are produced
could be obtained by preparing a complete series in proper order on
a kinetoscope film, and then projecting them in succession on the
screen. The experimental difficulties were, however, too great to make
it seem worth while to attempt to obtain a series of pictures of the
actual waves, it being very difficult to accurately regulate the time
interval between the two sparks. The easier method of making a large
number of geometrical constructions, and then photographing them in
succession on the film, was accordingly adopted. Three complete sets
of drawings, to the number of about one hundred each, were prepared for
three separate cases of reflection;--viz.: the entrance of a plane wave
into a hemispherical mirror, the passage of a spherical wave out from
the focus of a hemispherical mirror, and the multiple reflection of a
spherical wave inside of a complete spherical mirror. Special methods
were devised for simplifying the constructions, and much less labor was
required in the preparation of the diagrams than one would suppose. The
results fully justified the labor, the evolutions of the waves being
shown in a most striking manner. These films I exhibited before the
Royal Society in February last, and a more complete description of the
manner of preparing them may be found in the Proceedings of the Society.

A portion of one of these series is reproduced, about one in four or
five of the separate diagrams being given. The series runs from left to
right in horizontal rows. When projected on the screen, the spherical
wave is seen gradually to expand from the focus point, like a swelling
soap bubble; it strikes the surface, and the bowl-shaped echo bounces
off and follows the unreflected portion across the field; these two
portions are then reflected in turn, and the curiously looped wave
flies back and forth across the mirror, changing continuously all the
time, and becoming more complicated at each reflection. These diagrams
should be compared with the photographs shown in the fourth series.

One must not suppose that these beautiful forms exist only in the
laboratory. Every time we speak, spherical waves bounce off the floor,
ceiling and walls of the room, while in any ordinary bowl or basin
the curious crater-shaped echoes are formed. Glance once more at the
wave surfaces produced within a hollow sphere, and try to imagine the
complexity of the aerial vibrations caused by a fly buzzing around in
an empty water-caraffe! The photographs enable us to realize what is
going on around us all the time--this our perceptions are fortunately
too dull to perceive. Life would be a nightmare if we were obliged to
see the myriads of flying sound waves bounding and rebounding about
us in every direction, and combining into grotesque and ever-changing
forms. It is just as well, on the whole, that the light of the electric
spark and the delicate optical device of Toepler are necessary to bring
them into view.




THE PSYCHOLOGY OF RED.

BY HAVELOCK ELLIS.


Among all colors, the most poignantly emotional tone undoubtedly
belongs to red. The ancient observation concerning the resemblance
of scarlet to the notes of a trumpet has often been repeated, though
it was probably unknown to the young Japanese lady who, on hearing a
boy sing in a fine contralto voice, exclaimed: “That boy’s voice is
red.” On the one hand, red is the color that idiots most easily learn
to recognize; on the other hand, Kirchhoff, the chemist, called it
the most aristocratic of colors; Pouchet, the zoölogist, was inclined
to think that it was a color apart, not to be paralleled with any
other chromatic sensation, and recalled that the retinal pigment is
red; Laycock, the physician, confessed that he preferred the gorgeous
red tints of an autumn sunset to either musical sounds or gustatory
flavors. Artists more cautious than men of science in expressing such
a preference--knowing that a color possesses its special virtue in
relation to other colors, and that all are of infinite variety--yet
easily reveal, one may often note, a predilection for red by
introducing it into scenes where it is not naturally obvious, whether
we turn to a great landscape painter like Constable or to a great
figure painter like Rubens, who, with the development of his genius,
displayed even greater daring in the introduction of red pigments into
his work.

In all parts of the world red is symbolical of joyous emotion. Often,
either alone or in association with yellow, occasionally with green,
it is the fortunate or sacred color. In lands so far apart as France
and Madagascar scarlet garments were at one time the exclusive
privilege of the royal family. A great many different colors are
symbolical of mourning in various parts of the world; white, gray,
yellow, brown, blue, violet, black can be so used, but, so far as I
am aware, red never. Everywhere we find, again, that red pigments and
dyes, and especially red ochre, are apparently the first to be used
at the beginning of civilization, and that they usually continue to
be preferred even after other colors are introduced. There is indeed
one quarter of the globe where the allied color of yellow, which often
elsewhere is the favorite after red, may be said to come first. In a
region of which the Malay peninsula is the center and which includes a
large part of China, Burmah and the lower coast of India, yellow is the
sacred and preferred color, but this is the only large district which
presents us with any exception to the general rule, among either higher
or lower races, and since yellow falls into the same group as red, and
belongs to a neighboring part of the spectrum, even this phenomenon can
scarcely be said to clash seriously with the general uniformity.[E]

    [E] A further partial exception is furnished by the tendency to
        prefer green which may be found in certain countries, now
        or formerly Mahommedan, such as North Africa and to a large
        extent Spain, which have an arid and more or less desert
        climate.

If we turn to Australia, whither the anthropologist often turns
in order to explore some of the most primitive and undisturbed
data of early human culture still available for study, we find the
preference for red very well marked. In times of rejoicing the tribes
at Port Mackay, Curr remarked, paint themselves red; in times of
mourning, white. In describing the paintings and rock carvings of the
Australians, Mathews states that red, white, black and occasionally
yellow pigments were used, precisely the four pigments which Karl von
den Steinen found in use in Central Brazil. Prof. Baldwin Spencer and
Mr. Gillen, in their valuable work on the natives of Central Australia,
have pointed out the significance and importance of red ochre. One of
the most striking and characteristic features, they say, of Central
Australians’ implements and weapons is the coating of red ochre with
which the native covers everything except his spear and spear-thrower.
The hair is greased and red-ochred, and red ochre is the most striking
feature in decoration generally. For ages past the Australian native
has been accustomed to rub this substance regularly over his most
sacred objects, and then over ordinary objects.

There is, however, no need to go so far afield in order to illustrate
the primitive use of red ochre. Our own European ancestors followed
exactly the same methods, and the German woman of early ages used red
and yellow ochre to adorn her face and body, while the finds of the
ice age at Schussenquelle, described by Fraas, included a brilliant
red paste (oxide of iron with reindeer fat) evidently intended for
purposes of adornment. Moreover, the early artists of classic times had
precisely the same predilections in color as the aboriginal Australian
artists. Red, white, black and yellow are the dominant colors in the
_Iliad_, and Pliny mentions that the most ancient pictures were painted
in various reds, while at a later date red and yellow predominated. He
also mentions that yellow was the favorite color of women for garments,
and was specially used at marriages, while red being a sacred color
and apt to provoke joy, was used at popular festivals, in the form of
minium and cinnabar, to smear the statues of Jupiter.

This well-nigh universal recognition of the peculiarly intense
emotional tone of red is reflected in language. The color words
of civilized and uncivilized peoples have been investigated with
interesting and on the whole remarkably harmonious results. It is only
necessary here to refer to them briefly in so far as they are related
to our present subject. It seems that in every country the words for
the colors at the red end of the spectrum are of earlier appearance,
more definite and more numerous, than for those at the violet end. On
the Niger it appears that there are only three color words, red, white
and black, and everything that is not white or black is called red. The
careful investigation of the natives of Torres Straits and New Guinea
by Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition,
has shown that at Murray Island, Mabuiag and Kiwai there were definite
names for red, less definite for yellow, still less so for green, while
any definite name for blue could not be found. In this way as we pass
from the colors of long wave-length towards those of short wave-length
we find the color nomenclature becoming regularly less definite. In
Kiwai and Murray Island the same word was applied to blue and black,
and at Mabuiag there was a word (for sea-color) which could be applied
either to blue or green, while Australian natives from Fitzroy River
seemed limited to words for red, white and black. In a neighboring
region of Northern Queensland Dr. Walter Roth has reached almost
identical results, the tribes having distinct names for red and yellow,
as applied to ochre, while blue is confounded in nomenclature with
black. In Brazil, again, while all tribes use separate words for red,
yellow, white and black, only one had a word for blue and green. Even
so æsthetic a people as the Japanese have no general words for either
blue or green, and apply the same color word to a green tree and the
unclouded sky.

Here again we may trace similar phenomena in Europe; the same greater
primitiveness, precision and copiousness of the color vocabulary
at the long wave end of the spectrum are found among Europeans as
well as among the lowest savages. The vagueness of the Greek color
vocabulary, especially at the violet end of the spectrum, has led to
much controversy. Latin was especially rich in synonyms for red and
yellow, very poor in synonyms for green and blue. The Latin tongue
had even to borrow a word for blue from Teutonic speech; _caeruleus_
originally meant dark. Even in the second century A. D. Aulus Gellius,
who knew seven synonyms for red and yellow, scarcely mentions green and
blue. Magnus has pointed out that a preference for the colors at the
violet end of the spectrum coincided with the spread of Christianity,
to which we owe it, he believes, that yellow ceased to be popular and
was treated with opprobrium.[F] Modern English bears witness that our
ancestors, like the Homeric poets, resembled the Australian aborigines
in identifying the color of the short wave end of the spectrum
with entire absence of color, for ‘blue’ and ‘black’ appear to be
etymologically the same word.

    [F] In this connection I may mention that the preference
        for green, which, as I have shown elsewhere (“The Color
        Sense in Literature,” _Contemporary Review_, May, 1896),
        developed in English literature with the rise of Puritanism
        in the seventeenth century.

At this point we come across an interesting and once warmly debated
question. It was maintained some twenty years ago by writers who had
been impressed by the defectiveness of the color vocabulary at the
short wave-length end of the spectrum, that primitive man generally,
and early Hellenic man in particular, were insensitive to the colors
at that end of the spectrum, and unable to distinguish them. On
investigation of individuals belonging to savage races it appeared,
however, that no marked inferiority in color discrimination could
be demonstrated. Hence it became clear that the vague and defective
vocabulary for blue and green must be due to some other cause than
vague and defective perception, and that sensation and nomenclature
were not sufficiently parallel to enable us to argue from one to the
other.

That, in the main, is a conclusion which still holds good. In all parts
of the world it has been found that color discrimination, even amongst
the lowest savages, is far more accurate than color nomenclature. Thus
of an African Bantu tribe, the Mang’anja, Miss Werner states that
they can discriminate all varieties of blue in beads, but call them
all black. The sky is black; so is any green, brown or grey article,
though a very bright grey counts as white. Violet or purple is black.
Yellow is either red or white. A word supposed sometimes to mean green
really means raw, unripe or even wet. Thus the Mang’anja only have
three colors--black, white and red. In quite a different region, the
Zulus, more advanced in color nomenclature, have not only black, white
and red, but a word which may mean either green or blue, and another
which means yellow, buff or grey, or some shade of brown. At the same
time it now appears that the earlier scientific writers on this subject
were not entirely wrong in stating that among savages there is some
actual failure of perception at the short wave end of the spectrum,
although they were wrong in arguing that it was necessarily involved
in the defects of color vocabulary, and in imagining that it could
be as extensive as that hypothesis demanded. It now appears that the
conclusions reached by Hugo Magnus of Breslau, as expressed in 1883
in his study ‘Ueber Ethnologische Untersuchungen des Farbensinnes,’
fairly answer to the facts. In large measure relying on the examination
of 300 Chukchis made by Almquist during the Nordenskiold Expedition,
Magnus concluded that although the color vision of the uncivilized has
the same range from red to violet as that of the civilized and all the
colors can usually be separately distinguished, there is sometimes a
certain dullness, a diminished energy of sensation, as regards green
and blue, the shorter and more refrangible waves of the spectrum, while
the colors at the other end are perceived with much greater vividness.
Stephenson, more recently, among over one thousand Chinese, examined at
various places, found only one case of color blindness, but a frequent
tendency to confuse green and blue and also blue and purple, while
Dr. Adele Fielde, of Swatow, China, among 1,200 Chinese of both sexes
examined by Thomson’s wool test, found that more than half mixed up
green and blue, and many even seemed to be quite blind to violet.
Ernest Krause also has argued that primitive man was most sensitive to
the red end of the spectrum, hence setting about to obtain red pigments
and acquiring definite names for them, an explanation which is accepted
by Karl von den Steinen to account for the phenomena among the Central
Brazilians. The recent investigations of Rivers at Torres Straits have
confirmed the conclusions of Magnus. He found that, corresponding
to the defect of color terminology, though to a much less degree,
there appeared to be an actual defect of vision for colors of short
wave-length; in testing with colored wools no mistake was ever made
with reds, but blues and greens were constantly confused, as were blue
and violet.

It may even be argued that the same defect exists to a minor degree
not only among the peoples of Eastern Asia whose æsthetic sense is
highly developed, but among civilized Europeans when any kind of
color blindness is altogether excluded. This was noted long since by
Holmgren, who remarked that some persons, though able to distinguish
between blue and green wools when placed together, were liable to call
the blue wool green, and the green blue, when they saw them separately.
Magnus also showed that such an inability is apt to appear at a very
early stage in some persons when the illumination is diminished,
although the perception of red and yellow remains perfectly distinct.
He further showed that blue and green at certain distances are often
much more difficult to recognize than red. Most people probably are
conscious of difficulty in distinguishing blue and green pigments
with diminished light and find that blue easily passes into black.
Violet also appears for many people to be merely a variety of blue;
the word itself, we may note, is recent in our language, and plays
a very small part in our poetic literature, and in fact the color
itself, if we rigidly exclude purple, is extremely rare in nature. It
is a noteworthy fact in this connection that in normal persons the
color sense may be easily educated; this is not merely a fact of daily
observation, but has been exactly demonstrated by Féré, who by means of
his chromoptoscopic boxes, containing very dilute colored solutions,
found that with practice it was possible to recognize solutions which
had previously seemed uncolored. It is also noteworthy that in the
achromatopsia of the hysterical, as Charcot showed and as Parimand has
since confirmed, the order in which the colors usually disappear is
violet, green, blue, red; sometimes the paradoxical fact is found that
red will give a luminous sensation in a contracted visual field when
even white gives no luminous sensation. This persistence of red vision
in the hysterical is only one instance of a predilection for red which
has often been noted as very marked among the hysterical. Red also
exerted a great fascination over the victims of the mediæval hysterical
epidemics of tarantism in Italy, while the victims of the German
mediæval epidemic of St. Vitus’s dance imagined that they were immersed
in a stream of blood which compelled them to leap up.

It may be noted that red and perhaps yellow have been stated to
be the only colors visible in dreams; this is possibly due to the
blood-vessels. Such an explanation is probable with regard to the
various subjective visual sensations which constitute an aura in
epilepsy, among which, as Gowers notes, red and reddish yellow are most
frequently found. Féré has further noted that in various emotional
states somewhat resembling epilepsy, and even in mystic exaltation,
red may be subjectively seen. Simroth has gone so far as to argue
that not only is red fundamental in human color psychology, but that
in living organisms generally, even as a pigment, red is the most
primitive of colors, that since the algæ at the greatest sea-depths
are red it is possible that protoplasm at first only responded to rays
of long wave-length, and that with increased metabolism colors became
differentiated, following the order in the spectrum.

If it is really the case that in the evolution of the race familiarity
with the red end of the spectrum has been earlier and more perfectly
acquired than with the violet end, and that red and yellow made a more
profound impression on primitive man than green and blue, we should
expect to find this evolution reflected in the development of the
individual, and that the child would earlier acquire a sensitiveness
for red and orange and yellow than for green and blue and violet. This
seems actually to be the case. The study of the color sense in children
is, indeed, even more difficult than in savages; and many investigators
have probably succumbed to the fallacies involved in this study.
Doubtless we may thus account for some discrepancies in the attempts
to ascertain the facts of color perception and color preference in
children, while doubtless also there are individual differences which
discount the value of experiments made on only a single child. A few
careful and elaborate investigations, however, especially that of
Garbini on 600 North Italian children of various ages, have thrown much
light on the matter. There is fairly general agreement that red is the
first color that attracts young children and which they recognize. That
is the result recorded by Uffelmann in Germany, while Preyer found
yellow and red at the head; Binet in France concluded that red comes
first; Wolfe in America reached the same result, and Luckey noted that
his own children seemed to enjoy red, orange and yellow very much
earlier than they could perceive blue, which seemed to come last.
Baldwin, indeed, found in the case of his own child that blue seemed
more attractive than red; his methods have, however, been criticised,
and his experiments failed to include yellow. Mrs. Moore found that
her baby, between the sixteenth and forty-fifth weeks, nearly always
preferred a yellow ball to a red ball; this was doubtless not a
matter of color, but of brightness, for there is no reason to suppose
chromatic perception at so early an age. Red, orange and yellow, it may
be added, are perceived by a slightly lower illumination than green,
blue and violet, the last being the most difficult of all to perceive,
so that it is not surprising that the colors at the violet end should
be inconspicuous to young infants. Garbini, whose experiments are worth
noting in more detail, found that the order of perception is red,
green, yellow, orange, blue and violet, and as he experimented with a
large number of children and used methods which so competent a judge as
Binet regards as approaching perfection, his results may be considered
a fair approach to the truth. He found that for the first few days
after birth the infant shuns the light; then, about the fourteenth
day, he ceases to be photophobic and begins to enjoy the light, as is
shown by his being quieted when brought into a bright light and crying
when taken from it; this may sometimes begin even about the fifth
day. Between the fifth week and the eighteenth month children show
signs of distinguishing white, black and grey objects. It is not until
after the eighteenth month that their chromatic perception begins,
any preference for red and yellow objects at an earlier age being due
merely to their greater luminosity. Garbini considers that it is the
center of the retina, or the portion most sensitive to red and yellow,
which is most exercised in young infants. Between the second and third
years children, both boys and girls, were found to be most successful
in the recognition of red, then of green, but they very often confused
orange with red, and mixed up yellow, blue, violet and green; he thinks
they tend to confuse a color with the preceding color in spectral
order. Under the age of three children may be said to be color-blind,
and they are liable to confuse rosy tints with green. Between the ages
of three and five they are able to distinguish red in any gradation,
green nearly always, with an occasional confusion with red, while
yellow is sometimes confused with orange, orange sometimes replaced
by rose, blue often not recognized in its gradations, and violet
often selected in place of blue. At this age, also (as in hysterical
anæsthesia of the retina), blue seems dark or black. In the fifth and
sixth years red, green and yellow are always correctly chosen; orange
gradations are not always recognized, and blue and violet come last,
being sometimes confused. In the sixth year children are perfecting
their knowledge of orange, blue and violet and completing their
knowledge of color designations. Garbini has reached the important
result that color perceptions and verbal expression of the perceptions
follow exactly parallel paths, so that in studying verbal expression
we are really studying perception, with the important distinction
that the expression comes much later than the perception.[G] These
investigations of Garbini are very significant, and there can be little
doubt that the evolution of the child’s color sense repeats that of the
race.

    [G] Garbini, “Evoluzione del senso cromatico nella infanzia,”
        _Archivio per l’Antropologia_, 1894. I.

In dealing with the color perceptions of savages and children we are,
of course, to some extent dealing more or less unconsciously with their
color preferences. There is some interest from our present point of
view in considering the conscious color preferences of young and adult
civilized persons. Red, as we have seen, is the color that fascinates
our attention earliest, that we see and recognize most vividly; it
remains the color that attracts our attention most readily and that
gives us the greatest emotional shock. It by no means necessarily
follows that it is the most pleasurable color. As a matter of fact,
such evidence as is available shows that very often it is not. There
seems reason to think that after the first early perception of red,
and early pleasure in it, yellow or orange is frequently the favorite
color, the preference often lasting during several years of childhood;
Preyer’s child liked and discriminated yellow best, and Miss Shinn was
inclined to think that it was the favorite color of her niece, who in
the twenty-eighth month showed a special fondness for daffodils and
for a yellow dress. Barnes found that in children the love of yellow
diminishes with age. Binet’s child was specially preoccupied with
orange. Aars in an elaborate and frequently varied investigation into
the color preferences of eight children (four of each sex), between
four and seven years of age, found that with the boys the order of
preference was blue and yellow (both equal), then red, lastly green;
while with the girls the order was green, blue, red and yellow; in
combinations of two colors it was found that combinations of blue come
first, then of yellow, then green, lastly red. It was found (as J. Cohn
has found among adults and cultivated people) that the deepest and most
saturated color was most pleasing; and also that the love of novelty
and of variety was an important factor. It will be observed that at
this age green was the girls’ favorite color and that least liked by
the boys, whose favorite color, in combination, was blue; the number
of individuals was, however, small. This was in Germany. In America,
among 1,000 children, probably somewhat older on the average (though I
have not details of the inquiry), Mr. Earl Barnes found, like Dr. Aars,
that more boys than girls selected blue, while the girls preferred red
more frequently than the boys; Barnes considers that with growing years
there is a growing tendency to select red; as is well known, girls are
more precocious than boys. Among 100 students at Columbia University,
the order of preference was found to be blue (34 per cent), red (22.7
per cent), and then at a more considerable distance violet, yellow,
green. It is noteworthy that among 100 women students at Wellesley
College the order of preference was not very different, being blue
(38 per cent), red (18 per cent), yellow, green, violet; in a later
investigation the order remained the same, there being only some
increase in the preference for red; it was considered that association
accounted for the preference for blue, while more conscious as well as
more emotional elements entered into the preference for red.

By far the most extensive investigation of color preference was that
carried on at Chicago by Professor Jastrow on 4,500 persons, mostly
adults, of both sexes and various nationalities.[H] Blue was found
to be the favorite color, less than half as many persons preferring
red; of every thirty men ten voted for blue and three for red, while
of every thirty women five voted for red and four for blue. The men
also liked violet and on the whole confined their choice to but few
colors, the women also liked pink, green (very seldom chosen by men)
and yellow, and showed a tendency to choose light and dainty shades.
There was on the whole a decided preference for dark shades; the least
favorite colors were yellow and orange. It is evident that, as we
should expect, within the elementary field of popular æsthetics, women
show a more trained feeling for color than men.

    [H] J. Jastrow, “The Popular Æsthetics of Color,” _Popular
        Science Monthly_, 1897.

It is not quite easy to coördinate the various phenomena of color
predilection. Careful and extended observations are still required. It
seems to me, however, that the facts, as at present ascertained, do
suggest a certain order and harmony in the phenomena. It is difficult
not to believe that there really is, both among many uncivilized
peoples and also many children at an early age, even to a slight extent
among civilized adults, a relative inability, by no means usually
absolute, to recognize and distinguish the tones of color at the more
refrangible end of the spectrum. The earliest writers on the subject
were wrong when they supposed that color nomenclature at all accurately
corresponded to color perception, and it is well recognized that there
are no peoples who are wholly unable to distinguish between green
and blue and black. But as Garbini has clearly shown, there really
is a parallelism between color nomenclature and color recognition,
and Garbini’s wide investigation has confirmed the experiments of
Preyer on a single child by showing that there is a certain hesitancy
and uncertainty in recognizing the colors at the more refrangible
end of the spectrum, long after children are familiar with the less
refrangible end. In the same way the important investigations of
Rivers have confirmed the earlier observations of Magnus and Almquist
in showing that savages in many cases exhibit a certain difficulty
in recognizing and distinguishing blue and green, such as they never
experience with red and yellow. The vagueness of color nomenclature
as regards blue and green thus indicates, though grossly exaggerating,
a real psychological fact, and in this way we have an explanation of
the curious fact that in widely separated parts of the world (at Torres
Straits, among the Esthonians at Rome, etc.) as civilization progressed
it was found necessary to borrow a word for blue from other languages.

There is almost complete harmony among a number of observers, now very
considerable, in many countries, showing that the colors children first
take notice of and recognize are red and yellow, most observers putting
red first. There is no true predilection for these colors at this early
age because the other colors do not yet seem to have been perceived.
At first, doubtless, all colors appear to the infant as light or dark,
white or black. That this is so is indicated by the experience of Dr.
George Harley, who at one period of his life, in order to cure an
injury to the retina caused by overwork at the microscope, resolutely
spent nine months in absolutely total and uninterrupted darkness. When
he emerged he found that, like an infant, he was unable to appreciate
distance by the eye, while he had also lost the power of recognizing
colors; for the first month all light colors appeared to him perfectly
white and all dark colors perfectly black. He fails to state the order
in which the colors reappeared to him. It is well recognized, however,
that eyes long unexposed to light become color-blind for all colors
except red. Preyer’s child in the fourth year was surprised that in the
twilight her bright blue stockings looked grey, while for some time
longer she always called dark green black. By the sixth year all colors
are seen and known with fair correctness. Among young children at this
age, so far as the evidence yet goes, red is rarely the preferred
color, this being more often yellow, green or blue. There is doubtless
room here for a great amount of individual difference, but on the whole
it appears that children prefer those colors which they have most
recently learnt to recognize, the colors which have all the charm of
novelty and newly-won possession. It is probable, too, that (as Groos
has also suggested) the stimulation of red is too painfully strong
in this stage of the development of the color sense to be altogether
pleasurable, in the same way that orchestral music is often only a
disturbing noise to children.

One may note in this connection that hyperæsthesia to color is nearly
always an undue sensibility to red and very rarely to any other color.
The case has been recorded of a highly neurotic officer who, for more
than thirty years, was intolerant of red-colored objects. The dazzling
produced by scarlet uniforms, especially in bright sunshine, seriously
interfered with the performance of his duties, and in private life red
parasols, shawls, etc., produced similar effects; he was often overcome
in the streets by giddiness, sometimes almost before he realized that
he was looking at a red object. Many years ago Laycock referred to the
case of a lady who could not bear to look at anything red, and Elliston
also had a lady patient to whom red was very obnoxious, and who, when
put into a room with red curtains, drank seven quarts of fluid a day.
I am not aware that any such hyperæsthesia exists in the case of other
colors. It is also noteworthy that the morbid affection in which color
is seen when it does not exist is most usually a condition in which
red is seen (erythropsia), yellow being the color most frequently seen
after red (a condition called xanthopsia); the other colors are very
rarely seen, and Hilbert, in his monograph on the pathology of the
color sense, considers that this is due to the fact that red and yellow
make the most intense effect on the sensorium, which thus becomes
liable not only to direct but to reflected irritation, in the absence
of any external color stimulus. There are other facts which show that
of all colors red is that which acts as the most powerful stimulus on
the organism. Münsterberg, in some interesting experiments which he
made to illustrate the motor power of visual impressions as measured
by their arresting action on the eye-muscles, found that red and
yellow have considerably more motor power in stimulating the eye than
the other colors. It may be added also that, as Quantz has found, we
overestimate the magnitude of colors of the less refrangible part of
the spectrum and underestimate the others.

After puberty blue seems still to maintain its position, but red has
now come more to the front, while yellow has definitely receded;
although so favorite a color in classic antiquity, it is rarely the
preferred color among ourselves. J. Cohn in Germany found that among a
dozen students it was never in any degree of saturation the preferred
color, while at Cornell Major found that all the subjects investigated
considered yellow and orange either unpleasant or among the least
pleasant colors.

While blue seems to be the color most usually preferred by men, red
is more commonly preferred by women, who also show a more marked
predilection for its complementary green. Whether the feminine love
of red shows a fine judgment we could better decide if we knew among
what classes of the population red lovers and blue lovers respectively
predominate; it may be noted, however, that the necessities of dress
give the most ordinary woman an acquaintance with the elementary
æsthetics of color which the average man has no occasion to acquire. In
any case it might have been anticipated that, even though the typically
‘cold’ color should appeal most strongly to men, the most emotional of
colors should appeal most strongly to women.




CHAPTERS ON THE STARS.

BY PROFESSOR SIMON NEWCOMB, U. S. N.


CONSTELLATIONS AND STAR NAMES.

In ancient times the practice was adopted of imagining the figures of
heroes and animals to be so outlined in the heavens as to include in
each figure a large group of the brighter stars. In a few cases some
vague resemblance may be traced between the configurations of the stars
and the features of the object they are supposed to represent; in
general, however, the arrangement seems quite arbitrary. One animal or
man could be fitted in as well as another. There is no historic record
or trace as to the time when the constellations were mapped out, or of
the process by which the outlines were traced. The names of heroes,
such as Perseus, Cepheus, Hercules, etc., intermingled with the names
of goddesses, show that the constellations were probably mapped out
during the heroic age. No maps are extant showing exactly how each
figure was placed in the constellation; but in the catalogue of stars
given by Ptolemy in his ‘Almagest,’ the positions of particular stars
on the supposed body of the hero, goddess or animal are designated with
such precision as he had at command, in some fairly precise position of
the figure. For example, Aldebaran is said to have formed the eye of
the Bull. Two other stars marked the right and left shoulders of Orion,
and a small cluster marked the position of his head. A row of three
stars in a horizontal line showed his belt, three stars in a vertical
line below them his sword. In this way the position of the figure can
be reproduced with a fair degree of certainty.

In the well-known constellation _Ursa Major_, the Great Bear,
familiarly known as the Dipper, three stars form the tail of the
animal, and four others a part of his body. This formation is not
unnatural, yet the figure of a dipper fits the stars much better than
that of a bear. In Cassiopeia, which is on the opposite side of the
pole from the Dipper, the brighter stars may easily be imagined to form
a chair in which a lady may be seated without further difficulty. As a
general rule, however, the resemblances of the stars to the figure are
so vague that the latter might be interchanged to any extent without
detracting from their appropriateness.

In any case, it was impossible so to arrange the figures that they
should cover the entire heavens; blank spaces were inevitably left
in which stars might be found. In order to include every star in
some constellation, the figures have been nearly ignored by modern
astronomers, and the heavens have been divided up, by somewhat
irregular lines, into patches, each of which contains the entire figure
as recognized by ancient astronomers. But all are not agreed as to the
exact outlines of these extended constellations, and, accordingly, a
star is sometimes placed in one constellation by one astronomer and in
another constellation by another astronomer.

The confusion thus arising is especially great in the southern
hemisphere, where it has been intensified by the subdivision of one
of the old constellations. The ancient constellation _Argo_ covered
so large a region of the heavens, and included so many conspicuous
stars, that it was divided into four, representing various parts of a
ship--the sail, the poop, the prow and the hull.

Dr. Gould, while director of the Cordoba Observatory, during the years
1870 to 1880, constructed the ‘Uranometria Argentina,’ in which all
the stars visible to the naked eye more than 10 degrees south of the
celestial equator were catalogued and mapped. He made a revision of the
boundaries of each constellation in such a way as to introduce greater
regularity. The rule generally followed was that the boundaries should,
so far as possible, run in either an east and west or a north and south
direction on the celestial sphere. They were so drawn that the smallest
possible change should be made in the notation of the conspicuous
stars; that is, the rule was that, if possible, each bright star should
be in the same constellation as before. The question whether this new
division shall replace the ancient one is one on which no consensus of
view has yet been reached by astronomers. Simplicity is undoubtedly
introduced by Gould’s arrangement; yet, in the course of time, owing
to precession, the lines on the sphere which now run north and south
or east and west will no longer do so, but will deviate almost to any
extent. The only advantage then kept will be that the bounding lines
will generally be arcs of great circles.

When the heavens began to be carefully studied, two or three centuries
ago, new constellations were introduced by Hevelius and other
astronomers to fill the vacant spaces left by the ancient ones of
Ptolemy. To some of these, rather fantastic names were given; the Bull
of Poniatowski, for example. Some of these new additions have been
retained to the present time, but in other cases the space occupied
by the proposed new constellation was filled up by extending the
boundaries of the older ones.

At the present time the astronomical world, by common consent,
recognizes eighty-nine constellations in the entire heavens. In this
enumeration _Argo_ is not counted, but its four subdivisions are taken
as separate constellations.

NAMES OF THE STARS.

A glance at the heavens will make it evident that the problem of
designating a star in such a way as to distinguish it from all its
neighbors must be a difficult one. If such be the case with the
comparatively small number of stars visible to the naked eye, how must
it be with the vast number that can be seen only with the telescope?
In the case of the great mass of telescopic stars we have no method
of designation except by the position of the star and its magnitude;
but with the brighter stars, and, indeed, with all that have been
catalogued, other means of identification are available.

It is but natural to give a special name to a conspicuous star.
That this was done in very early antiquity we know by the allusion
to Arcturus in the Book of Job. At least two such names, Castor and
Pollux, have come down to us from classical antiquity, but most of the
special names given to the stars in modern times are corruptions of
certain Arabic designations. As an example we may mention Aldebaran, a
corruption of Al Dabaran--The Follower. There is, however, a tendency
to replace these special names by a designation of the stars on a
system devised by Bayer early in the seventeenth century.

This system of naming stars is quite analogous to our system of
designating persons by a family name and a Christian name. The family
name of a star is that of the constellation to which it belongs. The
Christian name is a letter of the Greek or Roman alphabet, or a number.
As a number of men in different families may have the same Christian
name, so the Greek letter or number may be given to a star in any
number of constellations without confusion.

The work of Bayer was published under the title of ‘Uranometria,’ of
which the first edition appeared in 1601. This work consists mainly
of maps of the stars. In marking the stars with letters on the map,
the rule followed seems to have been to give the brighter stars the
earlier letters in the alphabet. Were this system followed absolutely,
the brighter stars should always be called α; the next in order β,
etc. But this is not always the case. Thus in the constellation
_Gemini_, the brighter star is Pollux, which is marked β, while α is
the second brightest. What system, if any, Bayer adopted in detail
has been a subject of discussion, but does not appear to have been
satisfactorily made out. Quite likely Bayer himself did not attempt
accurate observations on the brightness of the stars, but followed the
indications given by Ptolemy or the Arabian astronomers. As the number
of stars to be named in several constellations exceeds the number of
letters in the Greek alphabet, Bayer had recourse, after the Greek
alphabet was exhausted, to letters of the Roman alphabet. In this
case the letter _A_ was used as a capital, in order, doubtless, that
it should not be confounded with the Greek α. In other cases smaller
italics are used. In several catalogues since Bayer, new italic
letters have been added by various astronomers. Sometimes these have
met with general acceptance, and sometimes not.

Flamsteed was the first Astronomer Royal in England, and observed at
Greenwich from 1666 to 1715. Among his principal works is a catalogue
of stars in which the positions are given with greater accuracy than
had been attained by his predecessors. He slightly altered the Bayer
system by introducing numbers instead of Greek letters. This had the
advantage that there was no limit to the number of stars which could
be designated in each constellation. He assigned numbers to all the
brighter stars in the order of their right ascension, irrespective
of the letters used by Bayer. These numbers are extensively used to
the present day, and will doubtless continue to be the principal
designations of the stars to which they refer. It is very common in
our modern catalogues to give both the Bayer letter and the Flamsteed
number in the case of Bayer stars.

The catalogues by Flamsteed do not include quite all the stars visible
to the naked eye, but various uranometries have been published which
were intended to include all such stars. In such cases the designations
now used frequently correspond to the numbers given in the uranometries
of Bode, Argelander and Heis.

In recent times these uranometries have been supplemented by censuses
of the stars, which are intended to include all the stars to the ninth
or tenth magnitude. I shall speak of these in the next section; at
present it will suffice to say that stars are very generally designated
by their place in such a census.

There is still here and there some confusion both as to the boundaries
of the constellations and as to the names of a few of the stars in
them. I have already remarked that, in drawing the imaginary boundaries
on a star map, as representing the celestial sphere, different
astronomers have placed the lines differently. One of the regions in
which this is especially true is in the neighborhood of the north pole,
where some astronomers place stars in the constellation Cepheus which
others place in Ursa Minor. Hence in the Bayer system the same star may
have different names in different catalogues. Again, in extending the
names or numbers, some astronomers use names which others do not regard
as authoritative. The remapping of the southern constellation by Dr.
Gould changed the boundaries of most of the southern constellations in
a way already mentioned.

I have spoken of the subdivision of the great constellation _Argus_
into four separate ones. Bayer having assigned to the principal
stars in this constellation the Greek letters α, β, γ, etc., the
general practice among astronomers since the subdivision has been to
continue the designation of the stars thus marked as belonging to the
constellation _Argo_. Thus, for example, we have _Argus_, which after
the subdivision belonged to the constellation _Carina_. The variable
star η Argus also belongs to the constellation _Carina_. But in the
case of stars not marked by Bayer, the names were assigned according to
the subdivided constellations, _Vela_, _Carina_, etc. Confusing though
this proceeding may appear to be, it is not productive of serious
trouble. The main point is that the same star should always have the
same name in successive catalogues. Still, however, it has recently
become quite common to ignore the constellation _Argus_ altogether and
use only the names of its subdivisions. The reader must therefore be
on his guard against any mistake arising in this way in the study of
astronomical literature.

In star catalogues the position of a star in the heavens is sometimes
given in connection with its name. In this case the confusion arising
from the same star having different names may be avoided, since a
star can always be identified by its right ascension and declination.
The fact is that, so far as mere identification is concerned,
nothing but the statement of a star’s position is really necessary.
Unfortunately, the position constantly changes through the precession
of the equinoxes, so that this designation of a star is a variable
quantity. Hence the special names which we have described are the most
convenient to use in the case of well-known stars. In other cases a
star is designated by its number in some well-known catalogue. But even
here different astronomers choose different catalogues, so that there
are still different designations for the same star. The case is one in
which action of uniformity of practice is unattainable.


CATALOGUING AND NUMBERING THE STARS.

A catalogue or list of stars is a work giving for each star listed its
magnitude and its position on the celestial sphere, with such other
particulars as may be necessary to attain the object of the catalogue.
If the latter includes only the more conspicuous stars, it is common
to add the name of each star that has one; if none is recognized, the
constellation to which the star belongs is frequently given.

The position of a star on the celestial sphere is defined by its
right ascension and declination. These correspond to the longitude
and latitude of places on the earth, in the following way: Imagine a
plane passing through the center of the earth and coinciding with its
equator, to extend out so as to intersect the celestial sphere. The
line of intersection will be a great circle of the celestial sphere,
called the celestial equator. The axis of the earth, being also
indefinitely extended in both the north and the south directions, will
meet the celestial spheres in two opposite points, known as the north
and south celestial poles. The equator will then be a great circle 90°
from each pole. Then as meridians are drawn from pole to pole on the
earth, cutting the equator at different points, so imaginary meridians
are conceived as drawn from pole to pole on the celestial sphere.
Corresponding to parallels of latitude on the earth we have parallels
of declination on the celestial sphere. These are parallel to the
equator, and become smaller and smaller as we approach either pole. The
correspondence of the terrestrial and celestial circles is this:

To _latitude_ on the earth’s surface corresponds _declination_ in the
heavens.

To _longitude_ on the earth corresponds _right ascension_ in the
heavens.

A little study of these facts will show that the zenith of any point on
the earth’s surface is always in a declination equal to the latitude
of the place. For example, for an observer in Philadelphia, in 40°
latitude, the parallel of 40° north declination will always pass
through his zenith, and a star of that declination will, in the course
of its diurnal motion, also pass through his zenith.

So also to an observer on the equator the celestial sphere always spans
the visible celestial hemisphere through the east and west points.

In the case of the right ascension, the relation between the
terrestrial and celestial spheres is not constant, because of the
diurnal motion, which keeps the terrestrial meridians in constant
revolution relative to the celestial meridians. Allowing for this
motion, however, the system is the same. As we have on the earth’s
surface a prime meridian passing from pole to pole through the
Greenwich Observatory, so in the heavens a prime meridian passes from
one celestial pole to the other through the vernal equinox. Then to
define the right ascension of any star we imagine a great circle
passing from pole to pole through the star, as we imagine one to pass
from pole to pole through a city on the earth of which we wish to
designate the longitude. The actual angle which this meridian makes
with the prime meridian is the right ascension of the star as it is the
longitude of the place on the earth’s surface.

There is, however, a difference in the unit of angular measurement
commonly used for right ascensions in the heavens and longitude on the
earth. In astronomical practice, right ascension is very generally
expressed by hours, twenty-four of which make a complete circle,
corresponding to the apparent revolution of the celestial sphere in
twenty-four hours. The reason of this is that astronomers determine
right ascension by the time shown by a clock so regulated as to read 0
hrs., 0 min., 0 sec. when the vernal equinox crosses the meridian. The
hour hand of this clock makes a revolution through twenty-four hours
during the time that the earth makes one revolution on its axis, and
thus returns to 0 hrs., 0 min., 0 sec. when the vernal equinox again
crosses the meridian. A clock thus regulated is said to show sidereal
time. Then the right ascension of any star is equal to the sidereal
time at which it crosses the meridian of any point on the earth’s
surface. Right ascension thus designated in time may be changed to
degrees and minutes by multiplying by 15. Thus, one hour is equal to
15°; one minute of time is equal to 15′ of arc, and one second of time
to 1″ of arc.

It may be remarked that in astronomical practice terrestrial longitudes
are also expressed in time, the longitude of a place being designated
by the number of hours it may be east or west of Greenwich. Thus,
Washington is said to be 5h. 8m. 15s. west of Greenwich. This, however,
is not important for our present purpose.

The first astronomer who attempted to make a catalogue of all the known
stars is supposed to be Hipparchus, who flourished about 150 B.C. There
is an unverified tradition to the effect that he undertook this work
in consequence of the appearance of a new star in the heavens, and a
desire to leave on record, for the use of posterity, such information
respecting the heavens in his time that any changes which might take
place in them could be detected. This catalogue has not come down to
us--at least not in its original form.

Ptolemy, the celebrated author of the ‘Almagest,’ flourished A.D.
150. His great work contains the earliest catalogue of stars which
we have. There seems to be a certain probability that this catalogue
either may be that of Hipparchus adopted by Ptolemy unchanged, or may
be largely derived from Hipparchus. This, however, is little more than
a surmise, due to the fact that Ptolemy does not seem to have been a
great observer, but based his theories very largely on the observations
of his predecessors. The actual number of stars which it contains is
1,030. The positions of these are given in longitude and latitude, and
are also described by their places in the figure of the constellation
to which each may belong. Not unfrequently the longitude or latitude is
a degree or more in error, showing that the instruments with which the
position was determined were of rather rough construction.

So far as the writer is aware, no attempt to make a new catalogue of
the stars is found until the tenth century. Then arose the Persian
astronomer, Abd-Al-Rahman Al-Sufi, commonly known as Al-Sufi, who was
born A.D. 903 and lived until 986. Nothing is known of his life except
that he was a man celebrated for his learning, especially in astronomy.
His only work on the latter subject which has come down to us is a
description of the fixed stars, which was translated from the Arabic
by Schjellerup and published in 1874 by the St. Petersburg Academy of
Science. This work is based mainly on the catalogue of Ptolemy, all
the stars of which he claimed to have carefully examined. But he did
not add any new stars to Ptolemy’s list, nor, it would seem, did he
attempt to redetermine their positions. He simply used the longitudes
and latitudes of Ptolemy, the former being increased by 12° 42′ on
account of the precession during the interval between his time and
that to which Ptolemy’s catalogue was reduced. The translator says of
his work that it gives a description of the starry heavens at the time
of the author and is worthy of the highest confidence. The main body
of the work consists of a detailed description of each constellation,
mentioning the positions and appearances of the stars which it
contains. Here we find the Arabic names of the stars, which were not,
however, used as proper names, but seem rather to have been Arabic
words representing some real or supposed peculiarity of the separate
stars, or arbitrarily applied to them.

Four centuries later arose the celebrated Ulugh Beigh, grandson of
Tamerlane, who reigned at Samarcand in the middle of the fifteenth
century. Bailey says of him: “Ulugh Beigh was not only a warlike and
powerful monarch, but also an eminent promoter of the sciences and
of learned men. During his father’s lifetime he had attracted to his
capital all the most celebrated astronomers from different parts of
the world; he erected there an immense college and observatory, in
which above a hundred persons were constantly occupied in the pursuits
of science, and caused instruments to be constructed of a better form
and greater dimensions than any that had hitherto been used for making
astronomical observations.”

His fate was one which so enlightened a promoter of learning little
deserved; he was assassinated by the order of his own son, who desired
to succeed him on his throne; and in order to make his position the
more secure, also put his only brother to death. A catalogue of the
stars bears the name of this monarch; he is supposed to have made many
or most of the observations on which it is founded. Posterity will
be likely to suppose that a sovereign used the eyes of others more
than his own in making the observations. However this may be, his
catalogue seems to have been the first in which the positions of the
stars given by Ptolemy were carefully revised. He found that there
were twenty-seven of Ptolemy’s stars too far south to be visible at
Samarcand, and that eight others, although diligently looked after,
could not be discovered. It is curious that, like Al-Sufi, he does not
seem to have added any new stars to Ptolemy’s list.

Next in the order of time comes the work of Bayer, whose method of
naming the stars has already been described. The main feature of this
work consists of maps of all the constellations. Previous to his time,
celestial globes, made especially for the use of the navigator, took
the place of maps of the stars. The first edition of this book was
published in 1603, and is distinguished by the fact that a list of
stars in each constellation is printed on the backs of the maps. Bayer
did not confine himself to the northern hemisphere, but extended his
list over the whole celestial sphere, from the north to the south pole.

The catalogue of the celebrated Tycho Brahe, prepared toward the end of
the sixteenth century, though of great historic value, is of no special
interest to the general reader at the present time. A supplement to
it, continuing its list of stars to the south pole, was published by
Halley, who made the necessary observations during a journey to St.
Helena in 1677.

The catalogue of Hevelius, published in 1690, offers no feature of
special interest, except the addition of several new constellations
which he placed between those already known. Having the aid of the
telescope, he was able to include in his catalogue stars which had been
invisible to his predecessors.

Modern catalogues of the stars may be divided into two classes:
Those which include only stars of a special class, or stars of which
the observer sought to determine the position or magnitude with all
attainable precision; and catalogues intended to include all the
stars in any given region of the heavens, down to some fixed order of
magnitude. It may appear remarkable that no attempt of the latter sort
was seriously made until more than two centuries after the telescope
had been pointed at the heavens by Galileo. A reason for the absence
of such an attempt will be seen in the vast number of stars shown by
the telescope, the difficulty of stopping at any given point, and the
seeming impossibility of assigning positions to hundreds of thousands
of stars. The latter difficulty was overcome by the improved methods of
observation devised in modern times.

About the middle of the present century the celebrated Argelander
commenced the work of actually cataloguing all the stars of the
northern celestial hemisphere to magnitude 9½. This work was termed
a _Durchmusterung_ of the northern heavens, a term which has been
introduced into astronomy generally to designate a catalogue in which
all the stars down to a certain magnitude are supposed to be mustered,
as if a census of them were taken. The work fills three quarto volumes
and contains more than 310,000 stars, of each of which the magnitude
and the right ascension and declination are given. This work was
extended by Schönfeld, Argelander’s assistant and successor, to 22° of
south declination.

In the latitudes in which most of the great observatories of the
world are situated, that part of the celestial sphere within 40° or
50° of the south pole always remains below the horizon. Around this
invisible region a belt of somewhat indefinite breadth, 10° or more,
can be only imperfectly observed, owing to the nearness of the stars
to the horizon, and the brevity of the period between their rising
and setting. Up to the middle of the nineteenth century, the few
observatories situated in the southern hemisphere were too ill-endowed
to permit of their undertaking a complete census of this invisible
region.

The first considerable work emanating from the Cordoba Observatory,
under Gould, was a catalogue of all the stars from the south pole
to 10° of north declination which could be seen with the naked eye.
Another work, which was not issued until after Dr. Gould’s death, was
devoted to photographs of southern clusters of stars.

The work of the Cordoba Observatory, with which we are more especially
concerned in the present connection, consists of a ‘Durchmusterung’ of
the southern heavens, commencing at 22° of south declination, where
Schönfeld’s work ended, and continued to the south pole. This work
is still incomplete, but two volumes have been published by Thome,
extending to 41° of south declination. It is expected that the third is
approaching completion. This catalogue is, in one point at least, more
complete than that of Argelander and Schönfeld, as it contains all the
stars down to the tenth magnitude. The two volumes give the positions
and magnitudes of no less than 340,000 stars, and therefore more than
the catalogue of Argelander gives for the entire northern hemisphere.
If the remaining part of the heavens, from 42° to the south pole, is
equally rich, it will contain nearly half a million stars, and the
entire work will comprise more than 800,000 stars.

The Royal Observatory of the Cape of Good Hope, under the able and
energetic direction of Dr. David Gill, has undertaken a work of the
same kind, which is remarkable for being based on photography. The
history of this work is of great interest. In 1882 Gill secured the
aid of photographers at the Cape of Good Hope to take pictures of
the brilliant comet of that year, with a large camera. On developing
the pictures the remarkable discovery was made that not only all the
stars visible to the naked eye, but telescopic stars down to the ninth
or tenth magnitude were also found on the negatives. This remarkable
result suggested to Gill that here was a new and simple method of
cataloguing the stars. It was only necessary to photograph the heavens
and then measure the positions of the stars on the glass negatives,
which could be done with much greater ease and certainty than measures
could be made on the positions of the actual stars, which were in
constant apparent motion.

As soon as the necessary arrangements could be made and the apparatus
put into successful operation, Gill proceeded to the work of
photographing the entire southern heavens from 18° of south declination
to the celestial pole. The results of this work are found in the ‘Cape
Photographic Durchmusterung,’ a work in three quarto volumes, in which
the astronomers of all future time will find a permanent record of the
southern heavens towards the end of the nineteenth century. The actual
work of taking the photographs extended from 1887 to 1891. This,
however, was far from being the most difficult part of the enterprise.
The most arduous task of measuring the positions of a half-million of
stars on the negatives, including the determining of the magnitude of
each, was undertaken by Professor J. C. Kapetyn, of the University of
Groningen, Holland, and brought to a successful completion in the year
1899.

What the work gives is, in the first place, the magnitude and
approximate position of every star photographed. The determining of
the magnitude of a star is an important and delicate question. There
is no difficulty in determining, from the diameter of the image of the
star as seen in the microscope, what its photographic magnitude was
at the time of the exposure, as compared with other stars on the same
plate. But can we rely upon similar photographic magnitudes on a plate
corresponding to similar brightnesses of the stars? In the opinion of
Gill and Kapetyn we cannot. The transparency of the air varies from
night to night, and on a very clear night the same star will give a
stronger image than it will when the air is thick. Besides, slightly
different instruments were used in the course of the work. For these
reasons a scale of magnitude was determined on each plate by comparing
the photographic intensity of the images of a number of stars with the
magnitudes as observed with the eye by various observers. Thus on each
plate the magnitude was reduced to a visual scale.

It does not follow from this that the magnitudes are visual, and not
photographic. It is still true that a blue star will give a much
stronger photographic image than a red star of equal visual brightness.
In a general way, it may be said that the catalogue includes all the
stars to very nearly the tenth magnitude, and on most of the plates
stars of 10.5 were included. In fact, now and then is found a star of
the eleventh magnitude.

A feature of the work which adds greatly to its value is a careful
and exhaustive comparison of its results with previous catalogues of
the stars. When a star is found in any other catalogue the latter is
indicated. Most interesting is a complete list of catalogued stars
which ought to be on the photographic negatives, but were not found
there. Every such case was inexhaustibly investigated. Sometimes the
star was variable, sometimes it was so red in color that it failed
to impress itself on the plate, sometimes there were errors in the
catalogue.

The great enterprise of making a photographic map of the heavens
now being carried on as an international enterprise, having its
headquarters at Paris, is yet wider in its scope than the works we
have just described. One point of difference is that it is intended to
include all the stars, however faint, that admit of being photographed
with the instruments in use. The latter are constructed on a uniform
plan, the aperture of each being 34 centimetres, or 13.4 inches, and
the focal length 343 cm. Two sets of plates are taken, one to include
all the stars that the instrument will photograph near poles, and the
other only to take in those to the eleventh magnitude. Of the latter
it is intended to prepare a catalogue. Some portions of the German and
English catalogues have already been published, and their results will
be made use of in the course of the present work.


NUMBERING THE STARS.

Closely connected with the work of cataloguing the stars is that of
enumerating them. In view of what may possibly be associated with
any one star--planets with intellectual beings inhabiting them--the
question how many stars there are in the heavens is one of perennial
interest. But beyond the general statement we have already made, this
question does not admit of even an approximate answer. The question
which we should be able to answer is this: How many stars are there
of each easily visible magnitude? How many of the first magnitude, of
the second, of the third, and so on to the smallest that have been
measured? Even in this form we cannot answer the question in a way
which is at the same time precise and satisfactory. One magnitude
merges into another by insensible gradations, so that no two observers
will agree as to where the line should be drawn between them. The
difficulty is enhanced by the modern system--very necessary, it is
true--of regarding magnitude as a continuously varying quantity and
estimating it with all possible precision. In adjusting the new system
to the old one, it may be assumed that an average star of any given
magnitude on the old system would be designated by the corresponding
number on the new system. For example, an average star of the fourth
magnitude would be called 4.0; one of the fifth, 5.0, etc. Then the
brightest stars, which formerly were called of the fourth magnitude,
would now be, if the estimate were carried to hundredths, 3.50, while
the faintest would be 4.50. What were formerly called stars of the
fifth magnitude would range from 4.50 to 5.50, and so on. But we have
meet with a difficulty when we come to the sixth magnitude. On the
modern system, magnitude 6.0 represents the faintest star visible to
the naked eye; but the stars formerly included in this class would,
on the average, be somewhat brighter than this, because none could be
catalogued except those so visible.

The most complete enumeration of the lucid stars by magnitudes has been
made by Pickering (‘Annals of the Harvard Observatory,’ Vol. XIV). The
stars were classified by half magnitudes, calling

                     M.      M.
  Mag. 2.0 all from 1.75 to 2.25
       2.5 all from 2.25 to 2.75
       etc.,             etc.

For the northern stars Pickering used the Harvard Photometry; for the
southern, Gould’s ‘Uranometria Argentina.’ A zone from the equator to
30° south declination is common to both; for this zone I use Gould.
The number of each class in the entire sky, north and south of the
celestial equator, is as follows:

            Northern     Southern
           Hemisphere.  Hemisphere.
            Pickering.     Gould.     Total.

  1±              9          14          23
  2.0            17          15          32
  2.5            17          24          41
  3.0            37          41          78
  3.5            61          74         135
  4.0           114         126         240
  4.5           228         234         462
  5.0           450         426         876
  5.5           787         681       1,468
  6.0           789       1,189       1,978
              -----       -----       -----
  Sum.        2,509       2,824       5,333

It would seem from this that the number of lucid stars in the southern
celestial hemisphere is 315 greater than in the northern. But this
arises wholly from a seemingly greater number of stars of magnitude 6.
In the zone 0° to 30° S., Pickering has 214 stars of this class fewer
than Gould. Hence it is not likely that there is any really greater
richness of the southern sky.

The total number of lucid stars is thus found to be 5,333. But it is
not likely that stars of magnitudes 6.1 and 6.2 should be included in
this class, though this is done in the above table. From a careful
study and comparison of the same data from Pickering and Gould,
Schiaparelli enumerated the stars to magnitude 6.0. He found:

  North pole to 30° S.     3,113 stars.
  30° S. to south pole     1,190 stars.
                           -----
     Total lucid stars     4,303

For most purposes a classification by entire magnitudes is more
instructive than one by half magnitudes. From the third magnitude
downward we may assume that 40 per cent. of the stars of each half
magnitude belong to the magnitude next above, and 60 per cent. to that
next below. We thus find that of

                                        Total.
  Mag. 0 and 1 there are 21 stars          21
  Mag. 2 there are       52 stars          73
  Mag. 3 there are      157 stars         230
  Mag. 4 there are      506 stars         736
  Mag. 5 there are    1,740 stars       2,476
  Mag. 6 there are    5,171 stars       7,647

Here it is to be remarked that under magnitude 6 are included many
other than the lucid stars, namely, all down to magnitude 6.4. The last
column gives the entire number of stars down to each order of magnitude.

It will be remarked that the number of stars of each order is rather
more than three times that of the order next higher. How far does this
law extend? Argelander’s ‘Durchmusterung,’ which is supposed to include
all stars to magnitude 9.5, gives 315,039 stars for the northern
hemisphere, from which it would be inferred that the whole sky contains
630,000 stars to the ninth magnitude. Comparing this with the number
7,647 of stars to the magnitude 6.5, we see that it is forty-fold, so
that it would require a ratio of about 3.5 from each magnitude to the
next lower. But it is now found that Argelander’s list contains, in the
greater part of the heavens, all the stars to the tenth magnitude.

On the other hand, Thome’s Cordoba ‘Durchmusterung’ gives 340,380 stars
between the parallels -22° and -42°. This is 0.14725 of the whole sky,
so that, on Thome’s scale of magnitude, there are about 2,311,000 stars
to the tenth magnitude in the sky. This is more than three times the
Argelander number to the ninth magnitude.

It would, therefore, seem that the ratio of number for each magnitude
must exceed 3, even up to the tenth. If a ratio of only 3 extends four
steps farther, the whole number of stars in the sky down to magnitude
14.5 inclusive must approach 200 millions. Until the international
photographic chart of the sky is subjected to a detailed examination,
it is impossible to make an estimation with any approach to certainty.




COLONIES AND THE MOTHER COUNTRY (III).

BY JAMES COLLIER.


The relations between a great state and its subject peoples will vary
according to the status of these, as the relations between father and
son differ according as the latter is self-supporting or still under
tutelage. Roman provinces under the empire were classed as imperial
when they were directly controlled by the Emperor, or senatorial
when they were governed by the Senate and possessed a simulacrum of
self-government. The dual status in this mother country of nearly
the whole world foreshadows all subsequent relationships between a
mother country and its dependencies. Spain and Portugal governed their
colonies imperially, appointing all officers, immediately or through
their representative mediately enacting all laws, and leaving almost
as little freedom to their own countrymen as to the down-trodden
indigenes. More humanely, indeed, but in spite of conceded French
citizenship and theoretical equality, the French have ruled their
scattered dependencies with as little of the reality of public life.
The Dutch colonies are similarly controlled. The British Empire
presents a variegated picture where every color is blended and every
form of policy known among men is displayed. From it alone an Aristotle
might delineate the metaphysics of government or a Spencer construct
its physics. In Egypt and Crete, with practical possession, imperial
England is vassal to the Sultan, and she now holds the conquered
Soudan jointly with Egypt, but acknowledges no suzerainty. She is
herself suzerain of the two South African Boer republics and regent of
Zanzibar. In her magnificent dependency of India, 692 sovereignties and
chiefships form a ‘protected’ girdle around her own possessions, or
interlace or approach them. Between these beneficent despotisms and the
free states of Australia, South Africa or North America there seems to
be every possible variety of mingled absolutism and self-government.
Certain territories are governed by chartered companies; one (Rhodesia)
by a chartered company under the control of the Crown. Three native
territories are governed by officers under the High Commissioner of
South Africa; four others by the officers of Cape Colony. The status
of Crown colonies administered more or less directly by the Imperial
Government is almost as various. One colony may be dependent on
another, as Natal was for years on Cape Colony. Others exhibit in an
ascending scale the acquisition of the attributes of self-government.
The governor rules at first alone despotically, then with an executive
council, next with a nominated legislative council, further with the
latter partly elected, and finally with it wholly elective. At these
successive stages the colony is in a decreasing degree under the
control of the Imperial Government, and a scale might be drawn showing
groups of colonies indefinitely arrested at one or another of them.
Only colonies destined for complete freedom victoriously pass through
them all and emerge into full political manhood.

The duration of their infancy and youth is determined by internal and
external circumstances: (1) When a colony is systematically founded
and quickly peopled it may rapidly traverse the period of dependence,
and (like New Zealand or South Australia) be granted responsible
government in about fifteen years. (2) Convict colonies, like Tasmania
and New South Wales, may have fifty or sixty years of pupilage. (3) A
colony of retarded growth, like West Australia, may be nearly as long
a minor. (4) Colonies that have long to struggle with an overwhelming
mass of indigenes, like Cape Colony, may take half a century to ripen,
and even then, like Natal, may retain traces of the earlier state. (5)
When the mother country is herself despotically governed, as England
was under the Stuarts, the Commonwealth and the early Hanoverians,
colonies that possess every attribute qualifying them for freedom,
like many of the North American colonies, may be forcibly retained in
partial dependence. (6) The New England colonies, free from the start,
were connected with Britain by a shadowy tie of nominal allegiance,
tightened at times into real subjection. Lastly, a colony may revert,
like Jamaica, after years of Parliamentary institutions, to the
dependent position of a Crown colony.

So various and so intricate, so weak here, so strong there, and withal
so marvelously compacted, is the network of relations forming the
anatomy of the wonderful new type of social organism constituted by a
mother country, its free and its subject colonies, its protected states
and its dependencies.

The brain sometimes inhibits natural movements and enforces injurious
actions, as a morbid conscience often prescribes irksome duties and
forbids innocent pleasures. Fathers have misdirected the career of
their sons, and the unwisdom of mothers (Lady Ashton, in ‘The Bride of
Lammermoor,’ is a tragic, but far from a rare example) has destroyed
the happiness of their daughters. So governments inevitably hinder and
blunder, worry colonies by vexatious interferences or goad them into
insurrection. For more than thirty years Bishop Fonseca, the president
of the Council of the Indies, lay like an incubus on the Spanish
colonies in South America. His main object seemed to be to throw
impediments in the way of the great discoverers and rulers--Columbus
and Cortez. When Cortez planned the conquest of Mexico he experienced
protracted opposition from Fonseca, who “discouraged recruits,
stopped supplies and sequestered the property” Cortez sent to Spain.
The conqueror bitterly complained that he “had found it harder to
contend against his own countrymen than against the Aztecs.” The story
of Spain’s South American colonies is one of injustice, oppression
and downright robbery. The natives naturally suffered most. They were
condemned to forced labor in the mines under circumstances of extreme
barbarity, in order that large sums of money might be sent annually
to Spain. This insatiable demand neutralized all the efforts of the
best-intentioned viceroys and rendered all attempts at good government
nugatory. The Indians had further to submit to grinding oppression by
the local officials and to the exactions and tyranny of the priests.
The Spanish colonists had their own grievances. Articles of commerce
were excluded, or had their prices heightened by the monopoly of the
Cadiz merchants. They were oppressed by the military despotism of
the government. The political development of the colonies was made
impossible by the continued use of them for the purposes of the mother
country. What Spain was for three centuries, that was she till the
other day in her few remaining colonies. Lord Brassey writes of Cuba:
“The casual visitor can not fail to be impressed with the evidences of
inefficient administration. The fiscal policy is intensely exclusive.
The taxation is heavy, and the government absolutely despotic. The
police maintain a system of intolerable espionage. Every salaried
servant of the local government is a Spaniard, who regards Cuba as a
vassal state, over which Spain has unlimited rights, without reciprocal
duties or obligations. The system has already severed all her noble
settlements in South America from the mother country. In time it must
involve the loss of Cuba.”

If it were the case that the genesis and growth of the myriad buds
formed round a prolific hydroid were accelerated by magnetic shoots
(so to speak) from the parent zoöphyte, and ‘persons’ were thus
differentiated, we should have a true analogue to a kind of action
exercised by the mother country on its colonies. For it long supplies
them with the greater part of their brain power, governing force,
culture, science and experience of all sorts, and when these have
done their work a new political, intellectual and moral center is
created, which is henceforth self-subsistent; the colony has received a
soul, a mind, a heart. First, the governor is usually sent out by the
metropolis. Of six hundred and seventy-two rulers of South America,
from its conquest to its independence, only eighteen were Americans.
In French and Dutch colonies there are possibly no exceptions. Many
of the charter and proprietary colonies of North America elected
their own governors, and the insurrectionary governor of a Crown
colony, New York, was popularly elected. The lieutenant-governors
of the provinces of the Canadian Dominion are locally appointed.
With these and one or two other exceptions, the governor may be
considered as symbolizing (in so far as he has the capacity) the entire
civilization of the mother country. He brings much or little to the
colony he comes to govern. Sometimes, as in the case of Sir George
Gray, he brings intellectual superiority, and he may thus stimulate
its literary development, but that is rare. He oftener imparts an
aroma of gentility that is much appreciated by a certain class. He
may be of practical utility by applying the experience of a military
engineer, as did Sir William Jervois. He may have had large colonial
experience, like Sir Hercules Robinson, and use that to solve the
intricate political problems of his colony. If he is a collector, like
Sir George Gray, he may enrich it by bequests of libraries and museums.
If he possesses literary gifts and has passed through an eventful time,
he may enrich colonial history by dictating his biography, like one
colonial governor, or writing his reminiscences, like so many. And
lastly, after returning to the mother-land, he may continue to watch
over the interests of the colony or colonies he ruled; he may become
president or member of the Council of the Indies, like three viceroys
of Peru, or Parliamentary under-secretary for the colonies, like Sir
James Fergusson, or even his former colony’s agent-general, like Sir
W. Robinson. In Crown colonies the chief legal and administrative
officials are imperial appointees, and are only superseded by local
ministers when the colony is granted responsible government. In
a unique case, that of Queensland, after a constitution had been
conceded, the first governor took out with him the first premier; and
he too was afterwards able to safeguard its interests as permanent
under-secretary in London.

The Greek metropolis sometimes sent priests to its colonies, and
bishops are long appointed by the mother church. During the three
centuries of Peruvian dependence fully one in seven bishops--one
hundred and five against seven hundred and six--were native Americans.
Canada seems to have at length arrived at complete independence and
appoints Canadians. In Australasia and South Africa the metropolitans
and most of the suffragans are still nominated in England; a dean may
be transferred from one colony to another as a bishop; or a small and
poor diocese may elect one of its incumbents. Local jealousies and
possibly the absence of a commanding spirit combine with the desire
to have the best the home church can afford to give or the colonial
church procure to dictate the extraneous selection. The stream of
ecclesiastical culture flows likewise through the immigration or
importation of ministers of all denominations. It means, among
Catholics as among Protestants, the periodical addition to the
spiritual wealth of the colonies of an amount of talent and high
character which they would have been slow to acquire by natural growth.
University or collegiate professors are for quite as long appointed
by a committee of selection in the mother country. Such men--some
of them brilliant, laborious, enthusiastic--are a real acquisition
to communities immersed in material pursuits and cut off from the
movement of science in Europe, and their position is deservedly high
and well remunerated. Doctors, lawyers, artists, teachers, experts in
many departments, place the colonies in the same position relatively
to less-favored communities, as the sons of a squire relatively to
the sons of an artisan. In this respect, as in most others, a colony
follows the example of the mother country. The introduction of
literature, the sciences and the arts into the mother-land was to a
large extent at all stages in its history the work of aliens. It is so
still; the names of Bunsen, Rosen, Max Müller, Goldstücker, Aufrecht,
and a score of others, are proofs that men as well as things that are
‘made in Germany’ are still imported into England. To descend to the
mechanical arts, “the ranks of skilled workmen in America were and
are renewed from the more fertile soil of Europe”; even the workmen
in the Portland stone-quarries are imported from England. The second
mode in which foreign culture was introduced into the mother-land
in common with all others--visits made abroad for discipleship or
instruction--has all along been, and is now increasingly, maintained.
Colonial students go to Europe to be trained in medicine and law.
Experts go to become acquainted with advances in science and medicine,
or with recent improvements in mechanical processes. The wealthier
colonists who spend occasional seasons in Europe bring back new (or
antiquated) social or political notions, and Americans who thus try
to import into the United States an aristocratic style of living have
to be ridiculed out of it. The third method by which an infusion of
foreign civilization may pass into another community is by books, works
of plastic art, music, tools, implements and instruments, and into
this vast inheritance of the mother country the daughter colonies have
entered. They participate in the advances made by other countries as
well. The Canadian colonies owe only less to the United States than
to England, and American railway cars, agricultural implements and
household utensils are in use in Australasia. In New Zealand a French
Masonic lodge has struck root.

The new colonial centers thus formed react on the father-land, as we
may conceive the daughter buds to react on the parent hydroid. The
discovery of the New World and the successive entrance of the five
great maritime powers upon a long and fierce rivalry for its possession
transformed the politics of Europe. Great wars were undertaken solely
with this object. The political center of gravity was shifted from the
Mediterranean to the Atlantic. New industrial interests were created.
Insular and stagnant powers, isolated Continental powers, received a
fresh lease of life, and, along with warlike Continental powers, were
expanded to the measure of the globe. New sympathies were generated.
Wider horizons were opened out. The heart and brain of all were in a
manner enlarged. The policy of the mother country is even now being
modified by its colonies. “The paramount object in legislating for
colonies should be the welfare of the parent state,” frankly avows the
law officer of the Dutch East India Company at the Cape of Good Hope,
in 1779. The Ashburton Treaty and the Oregon Agreement were entered
into as if England and the United States were alone interested in
their provisions. Treaties are now concluded in the interests of the
colonies. Treaties are ‘denounced’ in order to allow them freedom to
tax foreign commodities. They are represented by commissioners, on an
equal footing with those of Britain, at conferences preparatory to the
conclusion of treaties, and colonial conferences are summoned in order
that the general views of the colonies may be ascertained.

There is a more direct reaction, resembling the adoption by an
admiring father of the sentiments and opinions of a son who is rising
in the world. The Greek cities that had planted colonies imitated
the republican institutions of these and deposed their kings. “The
American colonists,” says Bancroft, “founded their institutions on
popular freedom and ‘set an example to the nations.’ Already the ...
Anglo-Saxon emigrants were the hope of the world.” The filial free
colonies of Britain are exerting an influence on the domestic policy
of the father-land. An aged colonial ruler used to console himself
for exclusion from the English Parliament by cherishing the belief
that ideas and measures of his had passed into the public life of
England. Much of this is mere hallucination; some of it is reality. The
testimony of a sagacious and experienced statesman on this subject is
decisive:

    “To the influence of the American Union must be added that of
    the British colonies. The success of popular self-government in
    these thriving communities is reacting on political opinion at
    home with a force that no statesman neglects, and that is every
    day increasing. There is even a danger that the influence may go
    too far. They are solving some of our problems, but not under our
    conditions, and not in presence of the same difficulties. Still,
    the effect of colonial prosperity--a prosperity alike of admirable
    achievement and boundless promise--is irresistible. It imparts a
    freedom, an elasticity, an expansiveness, to English political
    notions, and gives our people a confidence in free institutions and
    popular government, which they would never have drawn from the most
    eloquent assumptions of speculative system-mongers, nor from any
    other source whatever, save practical experience carefully observed
    and rationally interpreted.”[I]

    [I] Morley, ‘Studies in Literature,’ pp. 126-7.

The New Zealand system of local government is a model which Great
Britain, at one time famous in that line, has not been ashamed to
imitate; the English county councils have been molded on those of her
colony. From the same colony the mother country borrowed her First
Offenders’ act. The restriction of electors to the exercise of a
single vote--unimportant excepting in principle in populous England,
but important in young countries where property is widely held--was
perseveringly proposed, and at length carried, by the aristocratic
leader of the democratic party in New Zealand, whence it is spreading
to the adjacent colonies; it has been for some years adopted by the
British Liberals as an article in their programme, and it is also a
plank in the European socialist platform. The general adhesion to an
eight hours’ day in the Australasian colonies is having an effect in
England and is probably the measure to which Mr. Morley refers as
likely to be dangerous; his opposition to it cost him his seat at
Newcastle. The adoption of female suffrage in two of these colonies
and the certainty of its adoption in others are habitually cited by
the advocates of the cause in England as an argument for its adoption
in England. The nationalization of the land has been a popular notion
in these same colonies ever since Henry George’s famous book was
published, and the large extent of private lands bought back by the
governments of New Zealand and Queensland has strengthened the hands of
the land-nationalizers in Europe. The advanced government socialism of
most of these colonies, made inevitable by the lack of private capital,
and its apparent success, furnish socialists of the German type with
weapons and encourage them to prophesy ‘the dawn of a revolutionary
epoch.’

The spiritual reaction of the colonies on the mother-land is much
less considerable, yet is not nil. One or two instances stand out
prominently. Jonathan Edwards is one of the giants of British as
well as of American theology, and his treatise on the freedom of the
will has counted for as much as Butler’s Analogy in the development
of English theological thought. Sam Slick has been the father or
foster-father of the portentous overgrowth of humor by which the United
States balances the devouring activity of its public and the overstrain
of its private life, but he has been practically inoperative on the
very different quality of English humor. From South Africa have come
influences of a sterner sort. “Who could have foreseen,” asks Mr.
Stead, “that the new, and in many respects the most distinctive, note
of the literature of the last decade of the nineteenth century would
be sounded by a little chit of a girl reared in the solemn stillness
of the Karoo, in the solitude of the African bush? The Cape has indeed
done yeoman’s service to the English-speaking world. To that pivot of
the empire we owe our most pronounced types of the imperial man and the
emancipated woman”--Cecil Rhodes and Olive Schreiner.




CAUSES OF DEGENERATION IN BLIND FISHES.

BY PROFESSOR CARL H. EIGENMANN,

INDIANA UNIVERSITY.


It may now be profitable to take up the causes leading to the small
degree of degeneration found in Chologaster, the degenerations of the
eye in Amblyopsis, Typhlichthys and Troglichthys to a mere vestige,
together with the total disappearance of some of the accessory
structures of the eye, as the muscles.

In the outset of this consideration we must guard against the almost
universal supposition that animals depending on their eyes for food are
or have been colonizing caves, or that the blind forms are the results
of catastrophes that have happened to eyed forms depending on their
eyesight for their existence. This idea, so prevalent, vitiates nearly
everything that has been written on the degeneration of the eyes of
cave animals.

Another word of warning ought perhaps to be added. The process of
degeneration found in the Amblyopsidæ need not necessarily be expected
to be identical with the degeneration of the same organs in another
group of animals, and, however much the conditions in one group may
illuminate the conditions in another, cross-country conclusions must be
guarded against.

The degeneration of organs ontogenetically and phylogenetically has
received a variety of explanations:

1. The organ diminishes with disuse (ontogenetic degeneration--Lamarck,
Roux, Packard), and the effect of this disuse appears to some extent in
the next generation (phylogenetic degeneration--Lamarck, Roux, Packard,
Kohl).

2. Through a condition of panmixia the general average maintained
by selection is reduced to the birth mean in one generation
(ontogenetic--Romanes, Lankester, Lloyd Morgan, Weismann) to
the greatest possible degeneration in succeeding generations
(phylogenetic--Weismann), or but little below the birth average of the
first generation (Weismann’s later view, Romanes, Morgan, Lankester).

3. Through natural selection (reversed), the struggle of persons,
the organ may be caused to degenerate either (A) by the migration
of persons with highly developed eyes from the colony living in the
dark (Lankester), or (B) through economy of weight and nutriment or
liability to injury (phylogenetic purely--Darwin, Romanes).

4. Through the struggle of parts for room or for food an unused organ
in the individual may be crowded (ontogenetic--Roux). This may lead
to the development of the used organ as against the disused through a
compensation of growth (Goethe, Saint-Hilaire, Roux); this ontogenetic
result becomes phylogenetic through transmission of the acquired
character (Roux), or is in its very nature phyloblastic (Kohl).

5. Through the struggle between soma and germ to produce the maximum
of efficiency of the former with the minimum expenditure to the latter
(ontogenetic and phylogenetic--Lendenfeld).

6. Through germinal selection, the struggle of the representatives of
organs in the germ (ontogenetic and phylogenetic--Weismann).

The idea of ontogenetic degeneration is intimately bound up with the
idea of phylogenetic degeneration. Logically we ought to consider first
the causes of individual degeneration, and then the processes or causes
that led to the transmission of this. Practically it is impossible to
do so, because many of the explanations are general. Only No. 4 of
the above may be taken in the ontogenetic sense purely, though it was
certainly also meant to explain phylogenetic degeneration. In many of
the explanations of particular cases of degeneration more than one
of the above principles are invoked, though only one was meant to be
used. In most cases, however, the discussions of degeneration have
been in general terms, without direct bearing on any specific instance
of degeneration in all its details. It must be evident that such
discussions can only by accident lead to right results.

By the Lamarckian ontogenetic degeneration is considered the result
of lack of use and consequent diminished blood supply. The results of
the diminution caused by the lack of use during one generation are
transmitted in some degree to the next generation, which thus starts at
a lower level. A continuation of the same conditions leads finally to
the great reduction and ultimate disappearance of an organ.

No one, so far as I am aware, has succeeded in accounting for
the degeneration of the eye by means of this view. Packard’s[J]
explanations are evidently a mixture of Lamarckism and Darwinism.

    [J] _American Naturalist_, September, 1894, vol. xxviii, p. 727.

Packard says: “When a number, few or many, of normal-seeing animals
enter a totally dark cave or stream, some may become blind sooner than
others,” some having the eye slightly modified by disuse, while others
may have in addition physical or functional defects, especially in the
optic nerves and ganglia. “The result of the union of such individuals
and adaptation to their Stygian life would be broods of young, some
with vision unimpaired, others with a tendency to blindness, while
in others there would be noticed the first steps in degeneration of
nervous power and nervous tissue.” Packard evidently had invertebrates
in mind. He clearly admits the cessation of selection or panmixia in
that those born with defects may breed with the others. He supposes
that the blind fauna may have arisen in but few or several generations,
a supposition that may be applicable to invertebrates, but certainly is
not to vertebrates. At first those becoming so modified that they can
do without the use of their eyes would greatly preponderate over those
‘congenitally blind.’ “So all the while the process of adaptation was
going on, the antennæ and other tactile organs increasing in length
and in the delicacy of structures, while the eyes were meanwhile
diminishing in strength of vision and their nervous force giving
out, after a few generations--perhaps only two or three--the number
of congenitally blind would increase, and eventually they would, in
their turn, preponderate in numbers.” Packard seems here to admit the
principle of degeneration as the result of compensation of growth, the
nervous force of the eye giving out with the increase of the tactile
and olfactory organs. It is somewhat doubtful in what sense the term
‘congenitally blind’ is used, but it probably means born blind as
the result of transmitted disuse, rather than blind as the result of
fortuitous variation. The effects of disuse are thus supposed, through
their transmission, to have given rise to generations of blind animals.
The continued degeneration is not discussed.

Romanes maintained that the beginning of degeneration was due to
cessation of selection, and continued degeneration to the reversal
of selection and final failing of the power of heredity. Selection
he supposed to be reversed because the organ no longer of use “is
absorbing nutriment, causing weight, occupying space and so on,
uselessly. Hence, even if it be not also a source of actual danger,
economy of growth will determine a reversal of selection against an
organ which is now not only useless, but deleterious.” This process
will continue until the organ becomes rudimentary and finally
disappears.

Roux[K] attempted chiefly to explain degeneration in the individual.
Degeneration is looked upon as the result of a struggle among the
parts for (_a_) room and (_b_) food. Without doubting that both these
principles are active agents in degeneration, it may be seriously
doubted whether they are effective in the degeneration of the eyes in
question. Certainly there can be no question of a struggle for room,
for the position and room formerly occupied by the eye is now filled
with fat, which can not have been operative against the eye. The
presence of this large fat mass in the former location of the eye, the
large reserve fat mass in the body, the uniformly good condition of
the fish and the low vitality, which enables them to live for months
without visible food, all argue against the possibility that the
struggle for food between parts was an active agent in the degeneration
of the eyes.

    [K] Gesammelte Abhandlungen, 1895.

Kohl[L] considers that “_Der Grund und direkter oder indirekter Anlass
zum Eintreten der Entwickelungshemmung ist Lichtmangel._” The method of
operation of the lack of light he conceived to be as follows:

    [L] Rudimentäre Wirbelthieraugen, 1893.

Other organs were developed to compensate for the disuse of the
eye; and as the developmental force was used in the formation of
these organs, each succeeding generation developed its eye less. The
degeneration is thus explained as the result of a struggle of parts,
although this term is nowhere used, acting through the principle of
compensation. The same objections may be offered to this explanation
of Kohl as to all his theoretical discussions--they are based on the
assumption of conditions and processes that have no existence. The
high development of ‘compensating’ organs is not primarily the result
of the loss of the eye, but the high development of the former organs
permitted the disuse and later degeneration of the latter. His whole
process is a phylogenetic one, without a preceding ontogenetic one,
though on this point he does not seem to be very clear himself, for on
one page we are told that degeneration leads to retardation, and on
another that degeneration is a consequence of retardation.

Ledenfeld[M] endeavors to apply Roux’s _Kampf der Theile_, with
reversed selection, to explain the conclusions reached by Kohl on the
processes and causes of degeneration. The struggle is represented as
taking place between the germ and soma, the former endeavoring to keep
the latter at the lowest efficient point as weapon for the germ. If a
series of individuals get into the dark the organs of vision are of no
advantage and reversed selection will bring about their degeneration.
The saving in ontogeny appears first as a retardation and then as a
cessation of development.

    [M] Zoölogischer Centralblatt, 1896.

Weismann[N] more recently accepts the view of Romanes, Morgan and
Lankester on the inadequacy of panmixia to explain the whole phenomena
of degeneration, and in his ‘Germinal Selection’ rejects the idea
of reversed selection, and suggests a new explanation for what
Romanes attributed to the failure of heredity and the Lamarckians to
transmission of the effects of disuse. The struggle of the parts of
Roux has been crowded by him back to the representatives of these parts
in the germ.

    [N] The Monist, 1896, pp. 250-274.

“The phenomena observed in the stunting, or degeneration, of parts
rendered useless ... show distinctly that ordinary selection, which
operates by the removal of entire persons--personal selection, as I
prefer to call it--can not be the only cause of degeneration, for
in most cases of degeneration it can not be assumed that slight
individual vacillations in the size of the organ in question have
possessed selective value. On the contrary, we see such retrogressions
effected apparently in the shape of a continuous evolutionary process
determined by internal causes, in the case of which there can be no
question whatever of selection of persons or of a survival of the
fittest--that is, of individuals with the smallest rudiments. The
gradual diminution continuing for thousands and thousands of years
and culminating in its final and absolute effacement” can only be
accomplished by germinal selection. Germinal selection as applied to
degeneration is the formal explanation of Romanes’ failure of heredity
through the struggle of parts for food. “Powerful determinants will
absorb nutriment more rapidly than weaker determinants. The latter,
accordingly, will grow more slowly and will produce weaker determinants
than the former.” If an organ is rendered useless, the size of this
organ is no longer an element in personal selection. This alone would
result in a slight degeneration. Minus variations are, however,
supposed to rest “on the weaker determinants of the germ, such as
absorb nutriment less powerfully than the rest. This will enable the
stronger determinants to deprive them even of the full quantum of food
corresponding to their weakened capacity of assimilation, and their
descendants will be weakened still more. Inasmuch, now, as no weeding
out of the weaker determinants of the hind leg [or eye] by personal
selection takes place on our hypothesis, inevitably the average
strength of this determinant must slowly but constantly diminish--that
is, the hind leg [or eye] must grow smaller and smaller until it
finally disappears altogether.... Panmixia is the indispensable
precondition of the whole process; for, owing to the fact that persons
with weak determinants are just as capable of life as those with
strong, ... solely by this means is a further weakening effected in the
following generations.”

This theory presupposes the complex structure of the germ plasm
formulated by Weismann and rejected by various persons for various
reasons. But granting Weismann the necessary structure of the germ
plasm, can germinal selection accomplish what is claimed for it? I
think not. Granting that variations occur about a mean, would not all
the effects claimed for minus variations be counteracted by positive
variations? Eye determinants, which, on account of their strength,
secure more than their fair share of food, and thereby produce eyes
that are as far above the mean as the others are below, and leave
descendent determinants that are still stronger than their ancestry
would balance the effect produced by weak-eye determinants. It is
evident that a large, really extravagant development of the eye
in such a fish as Chologaster would not effect the removal of the
individual by personal selection; still less so in Amblyopsis, which
not only lives in comparative abundance, but has lived for twenty
months in confinement without visible food, and in which the eye is
minute. It seems that all the admitted objections to degeneration by
panmixia apply with equal force to germinal selection. This, however,
would be changed were the effect of disuse admitted to affect the
determinants, and this it seems Weismann has unconsciously admitted.
So far we have considered germinal selection in the abstract only. All
its suppositions are found to be but a house of cards when the actual
conditions of degeneration are considered. We find that degeneration
is not a horizontal process affecting all the parts of an organ
alike, as Weismann presupposes, not even a process in the reverse
order of phyletic development, but the more vital, most worked parts
degenerate first with disuse and panmixia; the passive structures
remain longest. The rate of degeneration is proportional to the past
activity of the parts, and the statement that “passively functioning
parts--that is, parts which are not alterable during the individual
life by function--by the same laws also degenerate when they become
useless” finds no basis in fact, and is an example of the inexact
utterances abundant in the discussion of degeneration on which it is
entirely unsafe to build lofty theoretical structures. As one example
of the unequal degeneration we need only call attention to the scleral
cartilages and the rest of the eye of Troglichthys rosæ.

All are agreed that natural selection alone is insufficient to explain
all, if any, of the processes of degeneration. All either consciously
or not admit the principle of panmixia, and all are now agreed that
this process alone can not produce extensive degeneration. All are
agreed that the important point is degeneration beyond the point
reached by panmixia, the establishment of the degenerating process,
whatever it may be, in the germ, or, in other words, the breaking of
the power of heredity. It is in the explanation of the latter that
important differences of opinion exist.

Weismann attempts to explain the degeneration beyond the point which
panmixia can reach by a process which not only is insufficient, even
if all his premises are granted, to produce the desired result without
the help of use transmission, but has as its result a horizontal
degeneration which has no existence in fact.

Romanes supposed degeneration, beyond the point which may be reached
by panmixia, to be the result of personal selection and the failure of
the hereditary force. The former is not applicable to the species in
question, and is denied by such an ardent Darwinist as Weismann to be
applicable at all in accounting for degeneration. Moreover, the process
as explained by Romanes would result in a horizontal degeneration
which has no existence in fact. The second assumption, the failure of
hereditary force, is not distinguishable, as Morgan has pointed out,
from the effect of use transmission.

[Illustration: FIGS. 1-6.--Photographs of the upper halves of the heads
of specimens of nearly the same length under the same magnification, to
show the gradual decrease of the eye. The dotted line leads to the eye
in all cases.

  FIG. 1.--_Zygonectes notatus._
  FIG. 2.--_Chologaster papilliferus._
  FIG. 3.--_Chologaster Agassizii._
  FIG. 4.--_Amblyopsis spelæus._
  FIG. 5.--_Troglichthys rosæ._
  FIG. 6.--_Typhlichthys subterraneus._
]

The struggle of parts in the organism has not affected the eye through
the lack of room, since the space formerly occupied by the eye is now
filled by fat and not by an actively functioning organ. It is not
affected by the struggle for food, for stored food occupies the former
eye space. It could only be affected by the more active selection
of specific parts of food by some actively functioning organ. It
is possible that this has in fact affected the degeneration of the
eye. The theory explains degeneration in the individual, and implies
that the effect in the individual should be transmitted to the next
generation. This second part seems but the explanation of the workings
of the Lamarckian factor.

The Lamarckian view--that through disuse the organ is diminished
during the life of the individual, in part, at least, on account of
the diminution of the amount of blood going to a resting organ, and
that this effect is transmitted to succeeding generations--not only
would theoretically account for unlimited progressive degeneration,
but is the only view so far examined that does not on the face of it
present serious objections. Is this theory applicable in detail to the
conditions found in the Amblyopsidæ? Before going further, objections
may again be raised against the universal assumption that the cessation
of use and the consequent panmixia was a sudden process. This assumes
that the caves were peopled by a catastrophe. But it is absolutely
certain that the caves were not so peopled, that the cessation of use
was gradual, and the cessation of selection must also have been a
gradual process. There must have been ever-widening bounds within which
the variation of the eye would not subject the possessor to elimination.

Chologaster is in a stage of panmixia as far as the eye is concerned.
It is true the eye is still functional, but that the fish can do
without its use is evident by its general habit and by the fact that
it sometimes lives in caves. The present conditions have apparently
existed for countless generations--as long as the present habits have
existed--and yet the eye still maintains a higher degree of structure
than reverse selection, if operative, would lead us to expect, and
a lower than the birth mean of fishes depending on their eyes, the
condition that the state of panmixia alone would lead us to expect.
There is a staying quality about the eye with the degeneration, and
this can only be explained by the degree of use to which the eye is
subjected.

The results in Chologaster are due to panmixia and the limited degree
of use to which the eye is put. Chologaster Agassizii shows the rapid
diminution with total disuse.

The difference in the conditions between Chologaster and Amblyopsis,
Typhlichthys and Troglichthys, is that in the former the eyes are still
in use, except when living in caves; in the latter they have not been
in a position to be used for hundreds of generations. The transition
between conditions of possible use and absolute disuse may have been
rapid with each individual after permanently entering a cave. Panmixia,
as regards the minute eye, continued. Reversed selection, for economy,
can not have affected the eye for reasons already stated. The mere
loss of the force of heredity, unless this was caused by disuse, or
the process of germinal selection, can not have brought about the
conditions, because some parts have been affected more than others.

[Illustration: FIG. 7.--Head of a very young _Amblyopsis_ before all
the yolk is absorbed.]

Considering the parts most affected and the parts least affected, the
degree of use is the only cause capable of explaining the conditions.
Those parts most active during use are the ones reduced most--viz.,
the muscles, the retina, optic nerve and dioptric appliances, the lens
and vitreous parts. Those organs occupying a more passive position,
e. g., the scleral cartilages, have been much less affected. The lens
is one of the latest organs affected, not at all during use, possibly
because during use it would continuously be in use. It disappears most
rapidly after the beginning of absolute disuse both ontogenetically
and phylogenetically. All indications point to use and disuse as the
effective agents in molding the eye. The process, however, does not
give results with mathematical precision. In Typhlichthys subterraneus
the pigmented layer is affected differently from that of Amblyopsis.
The variable development of the eye muscles in different species would
offer another objection if we did not know of the variable condition
of these structures in different individuals. Chilton has objected
to the application of the Lamarckian factor to explain degeneration,
on account of the variable effects of degeneration in various
invertebrates. But such differences in the reaction are still less
explainable by any of the other theories.




THE EVOLUTION AND PRESENT STATUS OF THE AUTOMOBILE.

BY WILLIAM BAXTER, JR.


In this closing year of a century which is marked by unparalleled
advances in science and its applications to the industrial arts,
we are very much inclined to take it for granted that none of the
inventions that are regarded by us as indicative of the highest order
of progressive tendency, could by any possibility have been thought
of by our forefathers; and as the automobile is looked upon as an
ultra-progressive idea, no one who has not investigated the subject
would believe for a moment that its conception could antedate the
present generation, much less the present century. The records,
however, show that the subject engrossed the attention of inventive
minds many hundreds of years ago. In fact, as far back as the beginning
of the thirteenth century a Franciscan monk named Roger Bacon
prophesied that, the day would come when boats and carriages would be
propelled by machinery.

[Illustration: FIG. 1. CUGNOT’S STEAM GUN CARRIAGE, MADE IN 1763.]

The first authentic record of a self-propelled carriage dates back to
the middle of the sixteenth century. The inventor was Johann Haustach,
of Nuremburg. The device is described as a chariot propelled by the
force of springs, and it is said that it attained a speed of two
thousand paces per hour, about one mile and a quarter. Springs have
been tried by many inventors since that time, but always without
success from the simple fact that the amount of energy that can be
stored in a spring is practically insignificant.

In 1763 a Frenchman by the name of Cugnot devised a vehicle that
was propelled by steam, and a few years after the date of his first
experiment, constructed for the French Government a gun carriage which
is shown in Fig. 1. As will be seen, the design was of the tricycle
type, and it was intended to mount the gun between the rear wheels. The
boiler, which resembles a huge kettle, hung over the front end and was
apparently devoid of a smoke stack. Motion was imparted to the front
wheel by means of a ratchet. Although this invention is very crude, it
must be regarded as meritorious if we consider that it was made before
the steam engine had been developed in a successful form for stationary
purposes.

[Illustration: FIG. 2. SYMINGTON’S STEAM COACH, MADE IN 1784.]

The next effort to solve the problem was made by W. Symington in the
year 1784, the carriage devised by him being illustrated in Fig. 2.
This coach, although pretentious in appearance, was crude mechanically,
but it actually ran. The service, however, was not what could be called
satisfactory.

[Illustration: FIG. 3. TREVITHICK’S STEAM CARRIAGE, MADE IN 1803.]

In 1803, Richard Trevithick brought out the carriage shown in Fig.
3, which could run, but was artistically a failure. Moreover, the
machinery was such as would soon give out, even if well designed, on
account of its exposed position.

[Illustration: FIG. 4. STEAM COACH, MADE BY JAMES AND ANDERSON, ABOUT
1810.]

Between 1805 and 1830, quite a number of steam vehicles were invented
and put into practical operation. Fig. 4 shows a very elaborate coach
of this period, which was invented by W. H. James, and constructed with
the assistance of Sir James Anderson, Bart. The machinery used in this
design consisted of two powerful steam engines, one being connected
with each one of the hind wheels in a manner similar to that employed
in locomotives at the present time. The wheels were not fast upon the
axle, hence they could revolve at different velocities in rounding
curves. In this respect this invention embodied one of the features
commonly used by automobiles of the latest design. Two boilers were
provided, one for each engine, and the record says that with one boiler
the speed was six to seven miles per hour.

[Illustration: FIG. 5. STEAM OMNIBUS, MADE BY HANCOCK.]

Fig. 5 shows an omnibus invented by Hancock. This vehicle ran on a
regular route, carrying passengers from Pentonville to Finsbury
Square, London. Fig. 6 shows a carriage invented by Burstall and Hiel,
which attracted a great deal of attention. It was probably the most
complete and perfect mechanically of any invention that had been made
up to that time.

[Illustration: FIG. 6. BURSTALL AND HIEL’S STEAM CARRIAGE, MADE PRIOR
TO 1825.]

Fig. 7 shows a carriage invented by Squire and Maceroni, who had
been for a long time in the service of Goldsworth Gurney, one of the
most noted experimenters of his day in steam propulsion. A number of
carriages were made by these workers, on designs similar to Fig. 7, and
it is said that they ran at a high rate of speed, probably ten miles
per hour.

[Illustration: FIG. 7. STEAM CARRIAGE, MADE BY SQUIRE AND MACERONI.]

Fig. 8 illustrates an invention that is interesting from the fact that
it was to be operated by compressed air, and perhaps was the first
effort to utilize this form of stored energy for the propulsion of
vehicles. It was not a success, but its failure was due to the fact
that the inventor labored under the delusion that the laws of nature
could be circumvented by skillfully contrived mechanical devices so as
to obtain something from nothing. The body of the carriage was used as
a reservoir for the compressed air, and within the wheels were placed
a number of pumps, the short bars projecting from the peripheries
being the ends of the plungers. The expectation was that as the wheels
revolved, the plungers would be depressed, and thus air would be
pumped into the reservoirs and this air would operate the engine that
propelled the vehicle; hence the apparatus would supply its own power,
and realize perpetual motion. If this attempt to controvert the laws
of nature had not been relied upon, better results might have been
obtained.

[Illustration: FIG. 8. COMPRESSED AIR WAGON, MADE ABOUT 1810.]

The highly ornamental coach shown in Fig. 9 was invented by Dr.
Church about 1832. In addition to being ornamental, it was of massive
construction and large capacity, being able to accommodate fifty
passengers. Its operation is said to have been very satisfactory, a
high rate of speed being attained and all grades on ordinary roads
being easily mounted. The inventor swamped himself in endeavoring to
compete with railroads.

[Illustration: FIG. 9. SIDE VIEW OF DR. CHURCH’S STEAM COACH, MADE IN
1832.]

Perhaps the most perfect of all the early automobiles was the one
devised by Scott Russell, the celebrated designer of the Great Eastern.
This carriage is shown in Fig. 10. It was operated successfully, and
was able to mount the steepest hills and to attain a high rate of
speed, but as coal was used for fuel and the engines were of large
capacity, it is probable that the smoke, exhaust steam and noise of
the machinery were decidedly objectionable features. A line of these
coaches was put in commission in Glasgow in 1846, each one having a
seating capacity of twenty-six, six inside and twenty on the top. After
several months of successful operation, the line was withdrawn on
account of the opposition of the authorities and of the general public.

[Illustration: FIG. 9A. DR. CHURCH’S STEAM COACH ON THE ROAD.]

These few examples of the early attempts to solve the problem of
mechanical propulsion of vehicles are sufficient to show that the
automobile is not entirely a creation of the progressive mind of the
latter part of the nineteenth century, but that it engrossed the
attention of inventors more than one hundred and thirty years ago. The
success attained by the workers in this field at different periods was
directly in proportion to the degree to which the form of power used
had been perfected at the time. The first inventors attained but slight
success, owing to the fact that, in their time, the steam engine was in
a crude form, but as the construction of the latter improved, so did
that of the vehicles operated by it.

Before the days of steam, the power of wind mills was utilized to
propel vehicles, and with such success that in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries wind-propelled wagons or ‘Charvolants,’ as
they were called, were very numerous upon the flat plains of the
Netherlands.

[Illustration: FIG. 10. SCOTT RUSSELL’S STEAM CARRIAGE, MADE IN 1845.]

From 1845 up to the early nineties, a period of nearly half a century,
very little was done in the way of developing the automobile. From time
to time inventors in various parts of the world devoted themselves to
the subject, but they were generally looked upon as visionary cranks,
and their work attracted little attention. During this period there
was an almost universal prejudice against the use of any kind of
mechanical power upon the streets or public highways, and it is even
possible that if during these years any one had invented a horseless
carriage, perfect in every way, he would have failed to obtain proper
recognition. Prejudice against mechanically-propelled vehicles has
gradually worn away, probably because of the introduction of cable
and trolley cars, and at the present time the majority of people
desire to see the substitution of mechanical for animal power. As a
result of this change in public opinion, self-propelled vehicles are
accepted as entirely satisfactory, which a few years ago would have
been regarded as failures. Notwithstanding this tolerant feeling,
however, it is very doubtful whether the cumbersome coaches of the
early part of the century would be received with favor at the present
time when taste and requirements are entirely different. What is now
desired is a light, fast-running and attractive vehicle, which could
not be constructed along the lines followed by the inventors of former
days. The automobile of to-day is a far more perfect device than its
predecessors, although it can not be said to have reached a state of
perfection. As motive power, steam, gasoline and electricity are used.
Which of the three is the best, taking all things into consideration,
it would be difficult to say, as each one has its defects as well as
its advantages, and the evident superiority of each one in a certain
direction is offset by deficiencies in other directions.

In every civilized country, where the mechanic arts are far enough
advanced, automobiles are now being manufactured, but France is the
country where modern development first began, and up to the present
time it has maintained its leading position, although in quality of
product, other nations, if not on a par with it, are certainly not very
far behind.

[Illustration: FIG. 11. SERPOLLET CARRIAGE, A MODERN STEAM AUTOMOBILE
OF FRENCH DESIGN.]

The perfection to which the steam automobile has been developed in
these latter days is due mainly to the efforts of L. Serpollet, a
distinguished French engineer. Other highly successful steam carriages
are now manufactured in England and in this country, as well as in
several European nations, but Serpollet was the first to bring forth
a successful fast-running and attractive vehicle, and the others have
profited by his work.

[Illustration: FIG. 12. SIDE VIEW OF SERPOLLET CARRIAGE, SHOWING
LOCATION OF ENGINE, BOILER, CONDENSER, ETC.]

One of the many designs of Serpollet carriages is shown in Fig. 11;
Fig. 12 shows more fully the arrangement and location of the machinery.
The engine used in these vehicles is made with four cylinders of the
single action type; that is, they take steam at one end only. By using
this construction, while the number of cylinders is increased, the
other parts are greatly simplified, as the piston rods, crossheads and
guides can be dispensed with. In addition, the whole engine can be made
very compact.

[Illustration: FIG. 13. SHOWING DETAILS OF THE BOILER OF THE SERPOLLET
CARRIAGE.]

The boiler is of the flash type; that is, it carries no water
ordinarily, but when the engine is in operation, a pump injects into
the boiler at each stroke of the engine as much water as may be
required to generate the steam necessary to propel the vehicle; the
instant the water enters the boiler it is converted into steam. As
the amount of steam is proportional to the amount of water, it can
be seen that by regulating the water supply, the power of the engine
and thereby the speed of the carriage, can be controlled. This is the
method actually employed to control the speed. In starting, a handle
is moved which connects the engine, the boiler and the pump in the
proper relation; and while under way the velocity is varied by the
manipulation of a lever which controls the amount of water injected
into the boiler. The fuel used is kerosene, which is vaporized and then
fed into a properly constructed burner. The amount of oil supplied to
the burner is regulated by the same lever that regulates the supply of
water, so that both are increased or reduced in the proper proportion.
The boiler is constructed of a number of steel tubes, which are about
two and a half inches in diameter, and from three eighths to half an
inch thick. These tubes are pressed into the form shown in Fig. 13, the
dark line in the section marked A representing the interior space. A
number of tubes collapsed in this form and bent into the shape B, are
assembled as shown at C. The number of tubes depends upon the capacity
of the boiler. As the tubes are very thick, they can, without any
danger of bursting, be heated to so high a temperature that the water
injected into them is at once turned into steam.

In Fig. 12 it will be seen that the engine is located under the body
of the carriage between the two axles, and that motion is imparted to
the hind wheels by means of chains and sprocket wheels. The boiler is
located at the back of the vehicle, the lower part projecting some
distance below the rear axle. A small smoke stack at the rear of the
body allows the gases of combustion to escape. Between the front
wheels, a compact condenser is located, and into this the steam from
the engine is exhausted. The condenser serves two purposes; it recovers
a portion of the water that would otherwise escape into the air, and
thus increases the distance the carriage can run without a new supply,
and at the same time it lessens the noise produced by the exhaust, and
also the volume of steam escaping into the atmosphere, which in cold or
rainy weather becomes plainly visible.

[Illustration: FIG. 14. AN AMERICAN STEAM CARRIAGE OF 1900.]

Although we have been rather slow in this country in taking up the
automobile, inventors and manufacturers are now working at a pace that
will soon make up for lost time. We already have a number of designs
of steam carriages whose operation is highly creditable. Fig. 14
illustrates one of these. The design of the engine, boiler and other
mechanism can be well understood from Fig. 15, in which a portion of
the body is removed to expose the internal parts.

[Illustration: FIG. 15. SECTIONAL VIEW OF FIG. 14, SHOWING LOCATION OF
ENGINE, BOILER AND OTHER DETAILS.]

[Illustration: FIG. 15A. PLAN OF STEAM CARRIAGE SHOWN IN FIGS. 14 AND
15.]

The boiler is a very compact form of the upright type, such as is used
in fire engines. It is about fourteen inches in diameter and twenty
inches high. To increase its strength, it is surrounded with two layers
of piano wire. The engine is of the locomotive type, consisting of two
cylinders, the pistons of which are connected with cranks on the end
of the shaft, these cranks being set at right angles, so as to prevent
catching the engine on the dead center. The direction of rotation
is reversed by means of the ordinary link motion. The fuel used is
gasoline, which is carried in the cylindrical tank located under the
front of the carriage. The gasoline is vaporized and then, mixed with a
proper proportion of air, passes to a burner placed under the boiler.
The amount of steam generated is regulated by the amount of gasoline
supplied to the burner, and this supply in turn is regulated by the
pressure of the steam, so that the action is entirely automatic. The
cylinder H is a reservoir of compressed air, connected with tank I, so
that the gasoline is under pressure, and therefore is forced through
the pipe to the burner under the boiler. Between the burner and the
tank there is a valve controlled by the steam pressure, being opened
when the pressure is low and closed when it is high. When the pressure
reaches a certain point the valve is closed entirely, so that even if
the carriage is running very slowly, it is not possible to run the
pressure above the fixed limit. The exhaust passes from the engine
cylinders into a muffler, from which it escapes into the pipe K. This
pipe projects downward into an opening through the center of the water
tank, and the draught produced thereby draws the gases of combustion
through from the top of the boiler to the under side of the carriage
body, where they escape into the atmosphere.

[Illustration: FIG. 16. ENGINE OF CARRIAGE SHOWN IN FIG. 14.]

Directly in front of the exhaust muffler is seen the water gauge,
which is in such a position as to be outside of the carriage body,
as shown in Fig. 14. A mirror is placed at the front of the vehicle,
and by looking into this the water gauge can be seen. Fig. 14 also
shows clearly the position of the operating levers at the side of the
carriage.

The actual construction of the engine is better shown in Fig. 16, in
which A A are the cylinders, B is the steam chest and G G are the valve
rods. The piston rods connect with the crossheads C. The connecting
rods D transmit motion from the latter to the cranks E, and thus
rotate the shaft S. The link motions, by means of which the direction
of rotation is reversed, are at I I, and are operated by the lever G,
which is mounted upon the shaft F F. This shaft is directly connected
with the starting lever. The boiler feed pump is located at M. The
motion of the engine is transmitted to the rear axle of the carriage by
means of a chain that runs over the sprocket wheel L located between
the eccentrics K K. In Fig. 15, this wheel is located at D, and the
chain F connects it with the axle sprocket E.

[Illustration: FIG. 17. AMERICAN STEAM AUTOMOBILE OF 1900.]

Fig. 17 shows another American steam carriage. In this vehicle the
running gear is a complete truck, upon which the carriage body is
supported. The appearance of the truck with the body removed is shown
in Fig. 18. The boiler is of the tubular type and the double cylinder
engine is secured to its side. In this particular the construction
differs from that of the previously described carriage, for in that the
engine is attached to the cross-framing of the body of the vehicle.
Although the general appearance of the mechanism of these two carriages
is very similar, there are many differences in the details of their
construction. In both, vertical tubular boilers are used, and the steam
is generated by the use of gasoline, which is burned in the vaporized
state in specially constructed burners. The engine in both cases is
of the vertical double cylinder type, and motion is transmitted to
the hind axle by means of sprocket wheels and a chain; but here the
similarity ends; the minor details, which it is not necessary to refer
to in this connection, are with few exceptions very different.

[Illustration: FIG. 18.]

A careful examination of Figs. 11, 14 and 17 will show that from
an artistic point of view these examples of steam carriages are
satisfactory. In regard to their operation it can be said that they
have sufficient power to run up the steepest grades encountered on
ordinary roads at a fair rate of speed, while on level ground their
velocity is more than enough to satisfy the average rider. The danger
of explosion is so remote that it need not be considered. The Serpollet
boiler is practically inexplosive, while those used in the American
vehicles are so constructed that they can withstand a pressure far
greater than any they can be subjected to in practice. It might be
expected that the motion of the machinery would produce an unpleasant
vibration, but on account of the lightness of the moving parts and
careful balancing, this effect is much reduced. The use of gasoline as
fuel, in connection with automatic burners, eliminates the smoke and
ashes incident to the use of coal, and in addition reduces the labor of
handling the vehicle, as no attention need be given to the mechanism
other than to see that the water in the boiler is maintained at the
proper level. In the case of the Serpollet carriages, not even this
point need be looked after, as the feed of the boiler is perfectly
automatic.




SCIENTIFIC RESULTS OF THE NORWEGIAN POLAR EXPEDITION, 1893-1896.[O]

BY GENERAL A. W. GREELY, U. S. ARMY.

    [O] The Norwegian North Polar Expedition, 1893-1896. Scientific
        Results edited by Fridtjof Nansen. Vol. I. Longmans, Green
        & Co. N. Y., 1900. 1-16, 3 pl. 1-147, 3 pl. 1-26, 2 pl.
        1-53 pl. 1-137, 36 pl.


Few Arctic expeditions have done so much to increase the world’s
knowledge as to the physical condition of large areas of the north
polar zone as has that of the _Fram_, initiated and commanded by Dr.
Fridtjof Nansen.

The expedition was unique in many respects. The _Fram_ was a departure
from the accepted models of Arctic ships; the route followed was one
unindorsed by any Arctic authority. The ship was destined to drift
unprecedented distances, beset by the enormous ice-pack of the Arctic
ocean. The commander himself was not only to attain the highest
north, but was to make a most hazardous journey, which was to have
a successful and unexpected issue partly through the aid of another
polar expedition whose location and existence were unknown to the
expeditionary forces of the _Fram_. Electricity made the Arctic ship a
glow of light, a phonograph brought well-known voices to cheer their
hours of leisure. Indeed, every device that was deemed of value was
utilized.

The extent of the Arctic ocean traversed by the _Fram_ is indicated by
the simple fact that she passed over 120 degrees of longitude above the
eightieth parallel of north latitude, a distance of one-third around
the world on that parallel.

Nansen and Johansen, in an attempt to reach the Pole, left the _Fram_
March 14, 1895, in about 84° N., 100 E., but after an uneventful
journey with dogs, they were obliged to turn back on April 7, 1895, in
latitude 86° 14′ N. They aimed to reach Spitzbergen and after months
of weary effort and varying fortunes, these two hardy men landed on
the east coast of the Franz Josef archipelago. Coming winter forbade
further progress, so they constructed a hut and subsisted on land and
sea game that was fortunately abundant. In the spring of 1896, turning
southward, they attempted to reach by the kyak the east coast of
Spitzbergen, hoping to be picked up by Norwegian whalers who frequent
those waters. Fortunately for them, they met in April, 1896, Jackson,
the commander of the Jackson-Harmsworth expedition, near Cape Flora.

Meanwhile the _Fram_, continuing its westerly drift, in which it
passed the most northerly point reached by Parry in boats in 1827,
emerged from the ice-floe of the Arctic ocean in the late summer
of 1896 and reached Norway on August 20, about ten days later than
Nansen’s own arrival with the English expedition from Franz Josef Land.
The _Fram_ returned with its frame uninjured and its expeditionary
force in health, after having covered in its voyage across the unknown
Polar sea an enormous area, estimated at fifty thousand square miles.

[Illustration: DR. FRIDTJOF NANSEN.]

The most important discovery was the oceanic depth of the Arctic Sea,
where for hundreds of miles this unknown ocean disclosed a depth of
over two miles. Naturally the absence of land limited the phases of the
scientific work of the expeditionary force, which devoted itself to
recording the phenomena of the air and the sea.

Nansen in his separate journey utilized his brief opportunities in
Franz Josef Land so successfully that his contributions to the geology
of that region are of no small importance.

The world has looked forward with a degree of impatience to the
publication of the scientific results of this expedition, and now is
favored with the first volume, a beautiful quarto of some 479 pages,
with 46 fine plates. It consists of a series of memoirs on the building
of the ship, on the birds of the air, on the crustacean forms of sea
life and a geological study of the southern part of the archipelago
of Franz Josef Land. It is a striking tribute to English-speaking
scientists that the work will appear in English text only. Although
printed in Christiana, such has been the vigilance of the editors that
typographical errors are comparatively few.

The account by Colin Archer of the construction of the _Fram_ is not
without interest, in view of the fact that this vessel was built on
novel lines calculated to cause the ice to meet a sloping surface, so
that, pressing down under the bilge, it would cause the vessel to rise
and thus insure its immunity from destruction.

Archer says: “In order to utilize this principle, it was decided to
depart entirely from the usual deep-bilged form of section and to adopt
a shape which would afford the ice no point of attack normal to the
ship’s side, but would, as the horizontal pressure increased, force
the attacking floes to divide under the ship’s bottom, lifting her as
described above.... Plane or concave surfaces were avoided as much as
possible by giving her round and full lines. This, while increasing the
power to resist pressure from outside, also had the advantage of making
it easy for the ice to glide along the bottom in any direction.”

As great length is an element of weakness, the _Fram’s_ length was cut
down as much as possible, with a tendency to make its form circular
or oval. Various expedients were adopted to reduce the dead weight of
the ship by a judicious arrangement of materials. While economizing
weight, the cargo-carrying capacity of the ship could not be too much
reduced, and the great strength of the ship must be preserved. Inasmuch
as the broadside of the ship, both structurally and from its shape,
is its weakest part, it was necessary to adopt extraordinary measures
to strengthen it. This was done largely by adding stays of yellow
pine placed nearly at right angles to the ship’s sides, and securely
fastened with wooden knees. These were supplemented with upright
stanchions tied by iron straps.

While experienced whalers strongly advocated the square rig, Archer
decided to ignore their advice and rigged the _Fram_ as a fore-and-aft
three-masted schooner, which style of rig proved, under the
circumstances, to be most suitable. The slight increase in leakage is
believed by Archer to be due in part to the drawing of the oakum out of
the seams and in part to the expansion and contraction of the timbers.
While the _Fram_ was not subjected to such tremendous ice convulsions
as have been many other Arctic ships, yet her experiences were very
severe and may be considered to prove that the design and system of
construction adopted were the most efficient possible.

[Illustration: THE FRAM.]

The most extensive, if not the most important, of the treatises that
form this volume, relate to regions and investigations with which the
voyage of the _Fram_ were only incidentally connected. Reference is
had to the papers on the geological formations of Cape Flora, Franz
Josef Land, by Professors Nansen, Pompeckj and Nathorst. Dr. Nansen
most cordially acknowledges his great indebtedness to Mr. Jackson and
Dr. Reginald Koettlitz, respectively the leader and geologist of the
Jackson-Harmsworth expedition to Franz Josef Land, 1894-1896. The
latter of these gentlemen, in a spirit of broad scientific generosity,
accorded Dr. Nansen full and equal access to his discoveries, covering
three years’ work on Northbrook Island, among fossils and geological
conditions of special interest.

[Illustration: MAP SHOWING REGIONS TRAVERSED.]

Nansen confines himself to a brief geological sketch of Cape Flora
and its neighborhood; Pompeckj treats fully the Jurassic fauna, while
Nathorst briefly discusses the fossil plants.

Nansen says: “Through Jackson’s kindness and Koettlitz’s valuable
assistance, I was enabled to make a collection of fossils and rocks
from the Jurassic deposits of this locality.”

“(Koettlitz) took me to places where, before my arrival, he had already
found fossils, or had observed anything of importance. Had it not been
for him I should certainly not have been able to do what little I did
during the few days at my disposal. I agree with Koettlitz on all
essential points, and have nothing new of importance to add to what he
has already said.”

As Nansen elsewhere remarks, the memoirs of Pompeckj and Nathorst
supplement the papers of Koettlitz, Newton and Teall, which appeared in
the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, 1897, pp. 477-519, and
1898, pp. 620-651.

Pompeckj describes fully the various fossils, illustrates them with
wealth of detail, discusses their stratigraphical relations, and
outlines the paleographical history of Franz Josef Land.

Of the twenty-six species collected by Nansen no less than seventeen
are new as compared with the Jackson-Harmsworth collection, which
contains five species lacking to Nansen. There are representatives of
single species only of echinoderms, vermes and gastropods, the scarcity
of the last named being generally characteristic of the Jurassic
fauna of the arctic regions, whether in Siberia, Greenland, or Arctic
America. On the other hand, at Cape Flora the cephalopods and the
lamellibranchs predominate very largely. This fact makes most notable
the absence of the lamellibranch genus _Aucella_, with all other forms
that are especially characteristic of the higher Jura.

The following new species have been determined by Pompeckj:
_Pseudomonotis Jacksoni_, an ornamented shell of a remarkably large
Aviculid form. _Macrocephalites Koettlitzi_, a shell with a very narrow
umbilicus and almost completely encircling whorls. _Cadoceras Nanseni_,
an ammonite showing a flat disc-like growth, with moderately thick
whorls of which cross-sections are nearly elliptical. Another ammonite
may possibly be a variety of _C. Nanseni_, but Pompeckj considers that
it is a separate species owing to its wider umbilicus, less pronounced
involution and somewhat asymmetrical lobe-line.

Pompeckj’s outline of the paleontographical history of Franz Josef Land
is worthy of careful consideration by all interested in this department
of science, although many may differ from some of the conclusions
reached by him. Commenting on the stratigraphical studies of Prof. E.
T. Newton, Pompeckj states that his own investigations compel him to
differ materially from the inferences drawn and theories advanced by
that scientist.

Pompeckj says: “The occurrence of these three genera of Ammonites
proves that the marine fauna of Cape Flora contain representatives of
the Callovian. More recent marine horizons have certainly not been
formed at Cape Flora, as far as I can judge from the collection of
fossils before me.... The Oxfordian and all the more recent Jurassic
horizons do not occur as marine deposits at Cape Flora.”

He finds species pertaining to the Lower Bajocian, Lower, Middle and
Upper Callovian horizons. It is most interesting to note that only
one other part of the arctic regions, Prince Patrick Island, Parry
Archipelago, has produced fossils, described by Haughton as Lias, that
are certainly older than the Callovian. It is, however, recognized as
possible that Lundgreen’s fossils from East Greenland may form another
exception.

Pompeckj points out that while the Bajocian fauna of Cape Flora is
without analogy in the arctic regions, it nevertheless presents
distinct affinities to the Central European Jura, and especially
resembles the Russian Callovian.

Moreover, this Jurassic collection from Cape Flora is of special
importance in outlining the geographic distribution of that system.
Pompeckj adds: “Hence the existence of a Bajocian sea in the north of
the Eurasian Jura continent is proved beyond all doubt.... As early as
the Bajocian period, there existed a Shetland Straits, which separated
the Eurasian continent, existing through the Lias period until the end
of the Bathonian, from the nearctic Jura continent.”

The comments relative to the transition of Nova Zembla, Spitzbergen,
Franz Josef Land, and possibly Alaska, from land to sea and sea to
land, are of marked interest, indicating as they do that large areas of
polar regions were exposed in the mesozoic period to repeated and very
considerable oscillations of the sea level.

The more interesting of the Jurassic fossils, found at Cape Flora,
are shown in the accompanying illustration. _Cadocera Nanseni_ (n.
sp.), 1, 2, 3, 5, 6. _Cadoceras_, sp. ex. aff. _Cad. Nanseni_ (n.
sp.), 4. _Cadoceras Tchefkini_, d’Orb, 7. _Cadoceras_, sp. indet., 8.
_Quenstedoceras vertumnum_, Sintzow, 9. _Cadoceras Frearsi_, d’Orb, 10.
_Macrocephalites_, 11. _Macrocephalites Koettlitzi_, n. sp., 12.

The collections of fossil plants, made by Nansen in Franz Josef Land
through the courtesy of the Jackson-Harmsworth expedition, are of
scientific value as indicating the fossil Jurassic flora of Franz
Josef Land as compared with that of Spitzbergen. These collections
fill in a not inconsiderable gap in the Arctic regions, and Nathorst’s
investigations serve to confirm the opinions and statements made by
Professor Heer, whose five volumes of Flora Fossilis Arctica constitute
a monumental work. As is well known, research has established the
fact that at one time Spitzbergen was covered with a luxuriant
miocene vegetation--cypresses, birches, sequoiæ, oaks and planes. It
moreover appears that this growth was coincident with the period when
Spitzbergen, Greenland, Franz Josef Land and Nova Zembla experienced a
continental climate.

[Illustration: JURASSIC FOSSILS FOUND AT CAPE FLORA.]

As fossil collections accumulate, one appreciates more and more
the masterly manner in which Heer summed up the results of polar
exploration as regards Arctic vegetable paleontology. He was the
first to present to the world a clear idea of the vegetation of the
Cretaceous land, scarcely known to science until elucidated by him.
It developed that in Heer’s time, among the fossil plants found in
Spitzbergen alone were 7 ginkos, 8 pines, a short bamboo, 7 poplars, 3
maples and a fossil strawberry.

Dr. Nansen was fortunate in securing the co-operation of Prof. A. G.
Nathorst in the examination of the fossil plants collected in Franz
Josef Land, as he has devoted much time to the flora, present and past,
of various portions of the Arctic regions, especially Spitzbergen
and King Charles Land. Nathorst had the advantage of the notes of
Newton, J. H. Steele and R. Curtis on the fossils of Franz Josef Land,
published in the Quarterly Journal of Geological Science, London, vols.
53-54, 1897-1898.

Most unfortunately, the fossils were very fragmentary, the leaves in
themselves small and often indistinguishable in color from the rock, so
that their examination was made almost entirely under the magnifying
lens. While the organic substance of the plants was sometimes still
to be seen in a soft, brownish variety of rock, yet the harder
yellowish varieties offered only impressions, or cavities, their
organic substance having entirely disappeared. In cross fractures there
were sometimes cavities which were complete transverse sections of
coniferous leaves.

There were twenty-nine species, of which the entire number are
coniferous except one fungus, one fern, two palms and one uncertain.

Nathorst says: “The plant-bearing strata of Franz Josef Land, which are
yet known to us, all belong, with the exception of those from Cook’s
Rock and Cape Stephen, the age of which is still uncertain, to the
upper Jurassic, or the transition beds to the cretaceous, while as yet
no tertiary strata have been discovered.”

In geological age, while the Franz Josef flora resembles most the
previously known Jurassic floras of Siberia and Spitzbergen, yet
Nathorst considers the geological age different, and naturally places
it between the two, it being evidently younger than that of Siberia.

It is interesting to note that Doctor Koettlitz found in an isolated
basalt nunatak (rock or hill protruding from a glacier) fossil plants
similar to those found by himself and Nansen on the north side of
Cape Flora. These nunatak plants, which Koettlitz believed to be _in
situ_, are identified by Nathorst as Upper Jurassic, and came from an
elevation variously estimated as from six hundred to seven hundred and
fifty feet above the sea.

Nansen agrees with Koettlitz in believing that tree-trunks found by
them, charred into charcoal or partly silicified, chiefly belonged to
conifers growing on the soil over which basalt flows were discharged
during the Upper Jurassic or Lower Cretaceous age, and that they have
been charred by a flowing mass of lava that overwhelmed them.

These fossil plants tell the story of tremendous physical changes which
have produced very important modifications in climatic conditions
in the Arctic regions. The changes in the types of vegetable life
are apparently as extensive in high as in low latitudes. The lower
cretaceous flora is almost tropical, as is shown by the predominating
forms of this vegetation. Carboniferous formations obtain extensively
in the Arctic regions, as they occur in the Parry Archipelago,
Spitzbergen and in Siberia. During the carboniferous age there was a
great extent of land near the North Pole closely resembling that of
the temperate latitude of the same period, as is shown by the small
number of fossil plants that are peculiar to the Arctic regions. In the
tertiary period miocene flora flourished in Spitzbergen, where even
the lime, the juniper and poplars have been found near latitude 79 N.
Then also throve sequoias, which closely resemble trees growing in the
southern part of the United States. The miocene flora gives evidence
of a very great contrast between the climatic conditions at that epoch
between Europe and the Arctic regions.

The cretaceous flora throws important light on the changes of climate
in the Arctic regions, and, as has been pointed out, the tropical forms
predominate in the vegetation of the Lower Cretaceous flora. Heer’s
prediction that the plants found on the west coast of Spitzbergen would
also be found on the East Greenland coast has been fully verified.
Miocene plants have been found from Spitzbergen westward through
Iceland and Greenland to Banks Land and in the Parry Archipelago, and
it is interesting to note that more than one fourth of the Arctic
plants are common to the miocene of Europe; in Greenland and on
McKenzie the percentage is nearly one half.

In all probability, the paper which is of the highest popular interest
is the account of the birds by Robert Collet and Dr. Nansen. The
full notes regarding Arctic birds testify fully to the fact that
the observers had in view the principal points of ornithological
importance. These comprise not only a mere record of the presence or
absence of certain species, but also additional observations regarding
them in their Arctic habitat.

Certainly the reproach can not be brought against the expedition of the
_Fram_, which has obtained in the case of many Arctic expeditions, that
it has added nothing to ornithological Arctic data.

The account of the birds, prepared by Mr. Robert Collet, has been
compiled from the various journals of the expeditionary force,
supplemented by verbal comments of Nansen. The memoir contains such
specific data as enable students to determine not only the general
character of the avifauna as one moves northward in the Siberian ocean,
but also the arrival and departure of the migrants and the presence of
stragglers. Among the birds of special interest which were observed
are the gray plover, the gray phalarope, the sabine gull and the
cuneate or Ross’s gull.

One of the greatest authorities on Arctic birds, Prof. Alfred Newton,
of the University of Cambridge, has well said that in consideration of
the avifauna of any country its peculiarities can be determined only by
dismissing accidental stragglers from the discussion. In elucidating
the great question of geographical distribution, one must confine
himself to either the birds that breed therein, or to those species
which regularly frequent it for a considerable portion of the year.

Considering the enormous area covered by the _Fram_ expedition and
its great diversity of physical conditions of sea and land, it was
impossible to treat under a single heading the birds observed.

[Illustration: PSEUDALIBROTUS NANSENI, G. O. SARS.]

Mr. Collet has, therefore, been wise in dividing his notes into four
sections, covering the Asiatic coast, the Siberian ocean, the sledge
journey to Franz Josef Land, and the Arctic Ocean to the north of Franz
Josef Land and Spitzbergen. But for this division, confusion would
have resulted from combining birds of regions so widely extended in
longitude and latitude.

The notes show conclusively what might have been anticipated, that the
avifauna of the Siberian Sea, and especially that portion of the Arctic
Ocean to the north of Franz Josef Land and Spitzbergen, is strictly
limited.

Including the species observed during the entire voyage, there are only
thirty-three recorded. Only twenty-one species pertain to the Arctic
Ocean, whether as regular migrants or stragglers, after excluding the
twelve species which were observed near the Asiatic coast. The presence
on the shores of the Siberian Sea of some of these twelve, however, is
of ornithological interest. There may be specially mentioned the gray
goose (_Anser segetum_), long-tailed duck (_Harelda glacialis_), silver
gull (_Larus argentatus_), snowy owl (_Nyctea scandiaca_), gray plover
(_Squatarola helvetica_) and the red-necked phalarope (_Phalaropus
hyperboreous_).

Confining ourselves to birds observed to the north of 81° 30, attention
is called to the abundant avifauna of the western as compared with the
eastern hemisphere. In Kennedy Channel, Grinnell Land, there have been
recorded no less than thirty-two species against twenty-one noted by
the _Fram_ in this voyage, including those seen in Franz Josef Land.
This is not surprising, however, when it is considered that the drift
of the _Fram_ was across a deep ocean of large extent, which is covered
perpetually by an unbroken ice-pack, unrelieved by any view of land
until the north coast of Spitzbergen was seen.

Omitting the birds observed in Franz Josef Land, the paucity of species
frequenting the great western Arctic Ocean is even more apparent. The
striking dissimilarity of the four regions traversed by the _Fram_
is plainly evident from the bird-life recorded. While there were
observed nine species in the Siberian Sea, fifteen in the Franz Josef
Archipelago, eighteen in the Arctic Ocean and twenty-three on the
Asiatic coast, yet only five were common to all four regions, viz.:
the dovekie, the glaucous gull, the ivory gull, the kittiwake and the
snow-bird.

The Siberian Sea presented a most limited avifauna, as in addition to
the five common species, there were recorded in the first summer in the
ice only the little auk, the fulmar, the roseate gull and a small skua.
The entire absence of land or shore birds that frequent Arctic islands,
omitting a single straggling snow-bird, indicates clearly that the
Siberian Sea extends far northward unbroken by any land area.

The eighteen species of birds that were found in the Arctic Ocean,
far to the north, naturally demand special comment. The six following
species are doubtless stragglers: the ringed plover (_Aegialitis
hiaticula_), 82° 59′ N., the most northerly shore-bird of Spitzbergen,
Nordenskiold having observed it on Seven islands, 80° 45′ N.; the
eider duck (_Somateria mollissima_), 82° 55′ N., near Spitzbergen; the
arctic tern (_Sterna macrura_), 84° 32′ N.; the puffin (_Fratercula
arctica glacialis_), 83° 11′ N., near Spitzbergen; the black-backed
gull (_Larus marinus_), 84° 35′ N. 75° E., and the Sabine gull (_Xema
Sabini_), 83° N., near Spitzbergen.

Of other species, the roseate gull (_Rhodostethia rosea_), 84° 41′
N., disappeared as the _Fram_ drifted west from the longitude of
Franz Josef Land, to be replaced as Spitzbergen was neared by a
wader (_Crymophilus fulicarius_), 83° 01′ N.; forked-tailed skuas
(_Stercorarius pomatorhinus_), 82° 57′ N., and Bruennich’s guillemot
(_Uria lomvia_), 83° 11′ N. The glaucous gull (_Larus glaucus_), 84°
48′ N., and long-tailed skua (_Stercorarius longicaudus_), 84° 47′ N.,
although seen both summers, were quite infrequent. These data indicate
absence of land at any near distance to the north, and disclose the
interesting fact that only the six following species, including the
snow-bird who is more probably a straggler, can be classed as regular
summer migrants to the vast ice-fields which cover the Arctic Ocean to
the north of Spitzbergen and Franz Josef Land.

[Illustration: RHODOSTETHIA ROSEA (MAGG), 1824. YOUNG IN FIRST PLUMAGE.]

The little auk (_Alle alle_), 84° 48′ N., was visible almost daily near
the 83d parallel in great numbers during the summer season, wherever
there were numerous water channels near the _Fram_. Of 40 birds killed
at one time, only ten were females.

The dovekie (_Cepphus mandti_), 84° 32′ N., with the little auk, was
the most numerous of all birds in very high latitudes, and nearly 150
were shot for the table. Out of 40 specimens only 14 were males. The
dovekie came early, May 13, 1896.

The ivory gull (_Pagophila eburnea_) is also present the entire
summer. It was the first visitor in 1895, when on May 14 it was seen
in 84° 38′ N., and what is of special interest, was flying from the
north-northeast.

The snow bunting (_Plectrophenax nivalis_), although a land-bird, was
seen both summers at somewhat infrequent intervals, as far as 84°
45′ N. They fed on refuse near the ships, but were also seen near
water-holes, and appeared to be feeding on crustaceans. Two of three
specimens were males. The first specimen in 1895 visited the _Fram_
on May 22 in 84° 40′ N., and then flew towards the north. In 1896 it
appeared on April 25, the first bird of the year, in 84° 17′ N.

The kittiwake (_Rissa tridactyla_) was much less numerous than
the ivory gull. It was seen in 82° 54′ N. They fed, as a rule, on
crustaceans, although in one bird were found parts of a _Gadus saida_
about 70 mm. in length. A _Gadus_ about 120 mm. in length was observed
on July 16, 1895, in 84° 42′ N., the most northerly point at which any
fish has been found.

The fulmar (_Fulmarus glacialis_) came early in 1895, on May 13, and in
1896 on May 22. This bold, voracious bird fed on crustaceans usually,
and owing to its villainous smell was utilized principally as food for
dogs. The last bird of 1895, a fulmar, was seen on September 14, when
the _Fram_ was in 85° 05′ N., 79° E. This is the most northern latitude
in which any bird has ever been observed.

The fulmars and ivory gulls were very bold and noisy, the latter being
specially objectionable. Ivory gulls were seen at the winter hut in
Franz Josef Land until October, when all water had long been frozen
over, and appeared again as early as March 12, 1896.

The first roseate gulls were young birds observed August 3, 1894, in
81° 05′ N., 120° E., about 500 kilometres from the nearest land. A
long and interesting description is given of these gulls in various
stages. One of the beautiful plates, which is imperfectly reproduced,
shows the plumage of a very young gull about a month old. Their food
consists exclusively of small fish and crustaceans, of the latter the
_Hymenodora glacialis_ predominating. Large numbers of these beautiful
gulls were seen in 1895 to the northeast of Franz Josef Land, which
points to their breeding in that locality. One was seen by Nansen on
July 11, 1895, in 82° 08′ N., flying from the northeast.

The very full memoir on _Crustacea_ is by Dr. G. O. Sars, well known as
one of the editorial committee of the scientific work of the Norwegian
North Atlantic Expedition. As the greater number of marine vertebrate
animals collected by the Norwegian North Polar Expedition belong to
the _Crustacea_, this memoir covers the greater part of the marine
collection.

The _Copepoda_ are predominant, especially those belonging to the
_Calanoid_ group, having been taken at nearly every haul along the
whole route of the _Fram_. The zoölogical equipment of the _Fram_ was
based unfortunately on the supposition that the Siberian basin was
shallow, so that the enormous oceanic depths which were found were only
inadequately explored by an extemporized sounding apparatus.

While the results of the dredging operations indicate that there was
very little animal life at the bottom of the ocean, on the other hand,
it appears that the entire surface of the sea, which consisted usually
of small temporary openings in the ice-pack, was covered with abundant
life throughout the entire year even to the most northern latitudes.

Including surface and deep-sea specimens, there were taken on October
12, 1895, no less than eleven species in latitude 85° 13′ N., longitude
79° E. On June 28, 1895, in 84° 32′ N., 76° E., there were taken from
the surface by tow net in a large water-channel fourteen species. This
indicates abundant marine life in the sea immediately near the North
Pole.

The pelagic animals, therefore, were not found at the sea surface
alone, but were also drawn from considerable depths. Many specimens
were obtained from strata at least 250 metres below the surface, and in
a number of instances from depths ranging between 500 and 1,000 metres.
It is to be added that the imperfect development of the visual organs
of the peculiar amphipod, _Cyclocaris Guilelmi_, Chevreux, points to
abyssal habits, as similar conditions do in the cases of other pelagic
animals.

In general pelagic fauna in the Polar Sea resembles that of the
northern Atlantic basin, the greater number of species being common
to both. While several heretofore unknown forms collected by this
expedition may be peculiar to the polar basin, yet it is not improbable
that these forms also occur in the North Atlantic. This appears
probable, since the western part of the _Fram’s_ route lies on the
border of the two basins, where the fauna does not differ essentially
from that in the eastern part.

While the pelagic fauna of the Polar Sea, even in the lowest depths,
resembles that of the Atlantic basin, the great salinity of its water
clearly indicates that it comes from the North Atlantic, and it is
therefore more than probable that the migration of pelagic animals to
the North Polar Sea is also from the west.

Indeed, Doctor Sars is of the opinion that the greater part of the
pelagic life of the north-polar basin comes by the underlying easterly
current from the North Atlantic. On the other hand, it is evident that
the westerly-flowing surface current of the Siberian Sea is of vital
importance as a means of supplying nourishment to the marine animals
of the western Arctic Ocean. This food supply, microscopic algæ chiefly
_Diatomeae_, while very abundant on the surface of the Siberian Sea,
diminishes gradually towards the west. “Indeed,” says Sars, “without
such a constant conveyance of nourishing matter, there could be no such
rich animal life in the Polar Sea.”

A very remarkable fact was the presence of certain pelagic _Copepoda_,
which hitherto had only been observed in southern waters, and a
_Calanoid_ of the genus _Hemicalanus_ Claus, previously known only
from the Mediterranean and tropical parts of the Atlantic and Pacific
oceans. Two species of the genus _Oncoea_, which accord perfectly with
species in the Bay of Naples, were found in great abundance north of
the New Siberian Islands. Another copepod, of the genus _Lubbockia_
Claus, heretofore only known in the Mediterranean and tropical oceans,
was found in the same locality, with which was a small perfectly
hyaline copepod of the very remarkable genus _Mormonilla_, of which
heretofore only two species have been recorded, both in the tropical
Pacific and south of the equator.

Perhaps the most remarkable forms are those mentioned by Doctor Sars,
when he says: “The very close and apparently genetic relationship
between the two polar species of the amphipodous genus _Pseudalibrotos_
and those occurring in the Caspian Sea, is another remarkable instance
which seems fully to corroborate the correctness of the assumption
of geologists as to a direct connexion in olden times between this
isolated basin and the North Polar Sea.”

Both species, taken near 85° N., are regarded as the primitive types
from which the Caspian forms are descended. The more remarkable of the
Arctic forms, _P. Nanseni_, is reproduced on page 430.

To conclude, this volume is a most valuable contribution to the
scientific literature of the Arctic regions. It has but one marked
objection, its publication in such beautiful form and high price as
necessarily places this series beyond the means of many scientific
students.




DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE.


_LEGISLATION AGAINST MEDICAL DISCOVERY._[P]

    [P] An open letter from President Eliot of Harvard University
        to the Chairman of the Senate Committee on the District of
        Columbia.

DEAR SIR: I observe that a new bill on the subject of vivisection has
been introduced into the Senate, Bill No. 34. This bill is a slight
improvement on its predecessor, but it is still very objectionable. I
beg leave to state very briefly the objection to all such legislation.

1. To interfere with or retard the progress of medical discovery is an
inhuman thing. Within fifteen years medical research has made rapid
progress, almost exclusively through the use of the lower animals,
and what such research has done for the diagnosis and treatment of
diphtheria it can probably do in time for tuberculosis, erysipelis,
cerebro-spinal meningitis and cancer, to name only four horrible
scourges of mankind which are known to be of germ origin.

2. The human race makes use of animals without the smallest
compunctions as articles of food and as laborers. It kills them,
confines them, gelds them and interferes in all manner of ways with
their natural lives. The liberty we take with the animal creation in
using utterly insignificant numbers of them for scientific researches
is infinitesimal compared with the other liberties we take with
animals, and it is that use of animals from which the human race has
most to hope.

3. The few medical investigators can not, probably, be supervised or
inspected or controlled by any of the ordinary processes of Government
supervision. Neither can they properly be licensed, because there is no
competent supervising or licensing body. The Government may properly
license a plumber, because it can provide the proper examination
boards for plumbers; it can properly license young men to practice
medicine, because it can provide the proper examination boards for that
profession, and these boards can testify to the fitness of candidates;
but the Government cannot provide any board of officials competent to
testify to the fitness of the medical investigator.

4. The advocates of anti-vivisection laws consider themselves more
humane and merciful than the opponents of such laws. To my thinking
these unthinking advocates are really cruel to their own race. How
many cats or guinea pigs would you or I sacrifice to save the life
of our child or to win a chance of saving the life of our child? The
diphtheria-antitoxin has already saved the lives of many thousands
of human beings, yet it is produced through a moderate amount of
inconvenience and suffering inflicted on horses and through the
sacrifice of a moderate number of guinea pigs. Who are the merciful
people--the few physicians who superintend the making of the antitoxin
and make sure of its quality, or the people who cry out against the
infliction of any suffering on animals on behalf of mankind?

It is, of course, possible to legislate against an improper use of
vivisection. For instance, it should not be allowed in secondary
schools or before college classes for purposes of demonstration only;
but any attempt to interfere with the necessary processes of medical
investigation is, in my judgment, in the highest degree inexpedient,
and is fundamentally inhuman.

    Yours very truly,
        C. W. ELIOT.

  HON. JAMES MCMILLAN.


_THE HIGHER EDUCATION FOR COLORED YOUTH._

Prof. Shaler’s article in the June number of the POPULAR SCIENCE
MONTHLY was in many ways sensible and timely, but it seems to the
writer that in common with many other people he is misleading in his
remarks about higher education for the negro. One would think from
the great outcry against the higher education for young people of the
colored race, that scarcely any other kind of education was being given
them. On all sides we hear the familiar refrain: “The higher education
for the negro has been a failure.” Now success is a relative term. If
a mere handful of colored college graduates, in a few years, ought to
have settled the race problem, and induced their white fellow-citizens
to treat these graduates and all members of their race fairly, then
it has been a failure. But if the higher education should simply
give added power of mind, enlarge the mental grasp and capacity for
usefulness, lift up, socially, morally, religiously and financially,
not only its disciples, but also thousands who have been induced to
look upward by the force of their example, then the higher education
for colored youth has been a tremendous success. Is not the latter the
fair test? Of course the higher education of the few has not eliminated
crime. It has not done that for the white race. The writer is a colored
man and a college graduate. He can not see that the higher education
has any different effect on the colored youth from what it has on the
white. If there be any difference it is this: It raises the colored
youth from a lower social level, as a rule, and places him on a social
plane, relatively, among his own people, higher than it does in the
case of the white youth. The higher training, therefore, should be more
valuable to the colored youth.

In a recent address before a graduating class at Howard University,
the Hon. W. T. Harris, Commissioner of Education, submitted statistics
which showed that the proportionate number of secondary and higher
students to the whole number of children attending school in the United
States had increased from 2.22 per cent in 1879 to 5.01 per cent in
1897, nearly two and a half times; while the proportion of colored
students in secondary schools and colleges had increased very little
indeed, from 1 per cent to only 1.16 per cent. But the story is not yet
half told. According to the report of the Commissioner of Education,
1897-98, Vol. 2, page 2,097, the total number of students taking the
higher education in the United States, as a whole, was 144,477, being
1,980 to each million of the total population. The same report, page
2,480, gives the total number of colored students pursuing collegiate
courses in these much discussed colored colleges as 2,492. This is only
310 to the million of colored population, whereas the whole of the
United States, as shown above, had 1,980 to the million, nearly six
and a half times as many in proportion to population. This does not
look as if the entire colored population were rapidly stampeding to the
higher education, or as if the labor supply in the Southern States were
falling off from this cause.

This is an age of higher education for the masses. The increase
in the number of students taking the secondary and higher
education in the United States during the last ten years has been
phenomenal--unprecedented. Is the person of color so much superior to
the white that he does not need so much educational training? I think
not. In view of the history and present condition of this race, there
is an obvious necessity for a large number of educated and trained
teachers, ministers, physicians, lawyers and pharmacists; and in view
of the fact that this race has only one fifth of its quota pursuing
studies above the elementary grades, what fair mind will not say that
there is great need of more of the secondary and higher education for
colored youth, instead of less of it?

According to the report above cited, 161 academies and colleges for
colored youth in the United States reported. The total number enrolled
was 42,328, of which 2,492 were reported in collegiate grades, 13,669
in secondary grades and 26,167 in elementary grades. Even in these
colored colleges less than 6 per cent of the students are pursuing
collegiate courses. Of these, perhaps not more than 2 per cent are
pursuing a college course equal to that offered at Howard. Nearly
two thirds of the total enrollment in these colored colleges are
receiving elementary instruction in the three R’s. Classified by
courses of study, 1,711--217 in a million--were taking the classical
course; 1,200--150 in a million--the scientific; 4,449--555 to the
million--the normal course in preparation for teaching; 1,285--160 in
a million--professional courses; 9,724 the English course, and 244 the
business course. In each of these courses the colored race has only
about one fifth or one sixth of its quota. Is there anything in these
figures to alarm the nation?

About one third of the total number of students in these 161 colored
schools and colleges are taking industrial training. When we consider
the great demand for educated colored ministers, teachers and
physicians, and the quick reward for ability in these lines, on the
one hand, and the exclusiveness of some trade-unions in shutting
out colored workmen, on the other, the wonder is that one third of
the total number of colored youth in these schools have chosen the
industrial course. For it is by no means certain that they will be
allowed to work at their trades after they have learned them.

The number of colored students who have had even a smattering of the
higher education has been shown to be ridiculously small, and the total
number of colored graduates with the college degree proper does not at
the most liberal estimate exceed one thousand. Many of them are dead.
Of the number now living, almost every one can be located in some
useful and uplifting employment as ministers, teachers, physicians,
lawyers, business men, or as wives presiding over happy, prosperous,
cultured homes which white persons seldom enter except on business.
Our critics seem to know nothing of these homes, which, as a rule, are
owned by their occupants. For the most part these homes are scattered
throughout the South, and are centers of culture and refinement that
elevate the moral and social status of the entire community.

To deprive the youth of the colored race of the higher education is to
deprive them of all the nobler incentives to study, to sacrifice, to
struggle to get an education. Every thoughtful person knows that these
incentives are necessary for the white race; they are equally necessary
for the colored race. Neither the white youth nor the colored, in large
numbers, will toil and struggle and apply himself to get an education,
unless he sees that education brings power and a better living to its
possessors.

The colored race, like every other part of our population, needs all
kinds of education. It is a sheer fallacy and a grievous wrong to them
to hold _all_ of them down to the rudiments of an education, with
industrial training. All can not profit by the industrial training any
more than all can profit by the higher training. There is no conflict
between the advocates of industrial training and the higher education.
Both are right. Both are good in their respective spheres. At any
rate, it is not necessary to disparage the magnificent achievements
of colored persons who have received the higher training to make an
argument in favor of training _all_ of them in the manual trades, or to
justify their elimination from politics.

      ANDREW F. HILGER,
  _Washington, D. C._




SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE.


_GEOLOGY._

In accordance with the general results of Mr. G. K. Gilbert’s
investigation of recent earth movements in the Great Lakes region--that
the whole district is being lifted on one side or depressed on the
other, so that its plane is bodily canted toward the south-southwest,
and that the rate of change is such that the two ends of a line
one hundred miles long, running in a south-southwest direction,
are relatively displaced four tenths of a foot in one hundred
years--certain general consequences ensue. The waters of each lake are
gradually rising on the southern and western shores, or falling on
the northern and eastern shores, or both. This change is not directly
obvious, because masked by temporary changes due to inequalities of
rainfall and evaporation and various other causes, but it affects the
mean height of the lake surface. In Lake Ontario the water is advancing
on all shores, the rate at any place being proportional to its distance
from the isobase through the outlet. At Hamilton and Port Dalhousie
it amounts to six inches in a century. The water also advances on all
shores of Lake Erie, most rapidly at Toledo and Sandusky, where the
change is eight or nine inches a century. All about Lake Huron the
water is falling, most rapidly at the north and northeast; at Mackinac
the rate is six inches, and at the mouth of French River ten inches
a century. On Lake Superior the isobase of the outlet cuts the shore
at the international boundary; the water is advancing on the American
shore, and sinking on the Canadian. At Duluth the advance is six
inches, and at Huron Bay the recession is five inches a century. The
shores of Lake Michigan are divided by the Port Huron isobase. North
of Oconto and Manistee the water is falling; south of these places it
is rising, the rate at Milwaukee being five or six inches a century,
and at Chicago nine or ten inches. Eventually, unless a dam is erected
to prevent it, Lake Michigan will again overflow to the Illinois
River, its discharge occupying the channel carved by the outlet of a
Pleistocene glacial lake. The summit in that channel is now about eight
feet above the mean level of the lake, and the time before it will be
overtopped may be computed. For the mean lake stage such discharge will
begin in about one thousand years, and after fifteen hundred years
there will be no interruption. In about two thousand years the Illinois
River and the Niagara will carry equal portions of the surplus water
of the Great Lakes. In twenty-five hundred years the discharge of the
Niagara will be intermittent, failing at low stages of the lake, and in
thirty-five hundred years there will be no Niagara. The basin of Lake
Erie will then be tributary to Lake Huron, the current being reversed
in the Detroit and St. Clair channels.


_GEOGRAPHY._

Relating to the Royal Geographical Society the story of his exploration
of the Bolivian Andes, Sir Martin Conway spoke of his journey by way of
the Arequipa Railroad, Peru, to Lake Titicaca. That remarkable sheet
of water is fourteen times the size of the Lake of Geneva and twelve
thousand feet above the sea, and might be regarded as the remnant of
a far greater inland sea, now shrunk away. Driving from Chililaya, he
reached the snowy mountain called the Cordillera Real--the backbone of
Bolivia--which he had come especially to visit, and in the region of
which he spent four months. To the east the mountains fell very rapidly
to a low hill country and the fertile valleys that send their waters
to the river Beni. On the other side lay a high plateau, at a uniform
altitude of from twelve thousand to thirteen thousand feet, from which
the tops of low rocky hills here and there emerged. This plateau had
obviously been at one time submerged; evidence was plentiful that in
ancient times the glaciers enveloped a large part of the slopes that
led down to it from the main Cordilleras and reached down many miles
farther than now. In the immense pile of _débris_ left by the glaciers
deep valleys were afterward cut by the action of water, and into these
valleys the glaciers of a second period of advance protruded their
snouts, depositing moraines that could still be traced _in situ_ as
much as four or five miles below the present limit of the ice. Contrary
to the apparently general impression that the peaks of the Cordilleras
were volcanic, the author had not been able to find any trace of
volcanic action along the axis of the range. The Cordillera Real had
been elevated by a great earth movement, and the heart of the range
consisted of granites, schists and similar rocks. The whole range might
be described as highly mineralized. Gold was found at several points,
but the chief auriferous valleys were those on the east side of the
range. Just below the snowy mass of Cacaaca on the west was a really
enormous vein of tin; and antimony, cobalt and platinum have been found
in different parts. The great copper deposits were not in this range,
but farther west. The flora of the high regions of the Cordillera
Real was apparently sparse, but is probably more abundant in the
rainy season. Bird life was more prolific and birds were numerous, at
suitable places, up to an altitude of seventeen thousand feet above the
sea.


_ZOOLOGY._

The most recent elementary text-book in zoölogy is from the press of
The Macmillan Co. Professor and Mrs. Charles B. Davenport are the joint
authors. It is recognized now-a-days that what the general high school
or elementary student in zoölogy needs is not professional training
in that subject, but rather an opportunity to view the field so that
he may have as wide an acquaintance as may be of the forms of animals
and of their doings. This he needs that he may have an interest in
the things of nature and that he may be a more intelligent member of
society in the things pertaining to his welfare as affected by animals.
The book is therefore an attempt to restore the old natural history
in a newer garb. The text is divided into twenty-one chapters. The
first of these deals with ‘The Grasshopper and its Allies,’ followed
by others upon the butterfly, beetle, fly, spider, etc., similarly
treated. Each chapter has one or two ‘keys’--that is, arrangements
whereby the families of animals may be determined. The book is richly
illustrated by means of half-tone and line reproduction; a number of
photographs are from life, and one of these is a flash-light photograph
of a slug and an earthworm crawling upon a pavement at night! Outlines
for simple laboratory work and a list of books dealing with the
classification and habits of American animals are to be found in an
appendix. Many good things might be said of this contribution to
zoölogical text-books. This ought to be said, that it will be a book
which will be of value to any person who, while upon his holiday trip,
wishes to learn about the animals he may come across.


_ORNITHOLOGY._

Mr. Chapman is equally at home with camera or pen. In ‘Bird Studies
with a Camera, with Introductory Chapters on the Outfit and Methods
of the Bird Photographer,’ he gives us some of his many experiences
from Central Park to the swamps of Florida and the bare rocks of the
Gulf of St. Lawrence. The first two chapters are devoted to a brief
discussion of the outfit and methods of the bird photographer, and
these any one thinking of taking up this branch of art will do well
to read carefully. Mr. Chapman considers that a 4×5 plate is the size
best adapted for general purposes, and notes that while a lens with
short focus may serve for photographing nests and eggs, for the birds
themselves a rapid lens with focus of fourteen to eighteen inches
should be used. The rest of the book is for the general reader, and
contains many facts of interest concerning the haunts, habits, and home
life of a number of birds from the well-known sparrow to the unfamiliar
pelican, the accounts of the Bird Rock and Pelican Island being the
most interesting. Some of the illustrations are a little disappointing,
and emphasize the difficulties of photographing wild birds, but
there is ample compensation for these in the excellence of others,
particularly those devoted to Percé, Bonaventure and Bird Rock. This is
equally true of birds and scenery, the views of Percé Rock being the
finest that have fallen under our notice. Mr. Chapman’s estimate of the
feathered population of Great Bird Rock, which he puts at 4,000, is by
far the smallest yet made, and probably has the soundest basis, and
shows a sad diminution from the hosts of fifty years ago.

       *       *       *       *       *

‘Bird Homes,’ by A. Radclyffe Dugmore, seems well adapted for its
stated purpose of stimulating the love of birds, helping the ordinary
unscientific person to get some closer glimpses of them, and aiding
in the study of their wonderfully adapted nests and beautiful eggs.
Furthermore, it will probably create a strong desire in the reader to
become a photographer of birds and their nests. To further these aims
we have a first part containing half-a-dozen chapters devoted among
other things to birds’ nests and eggs, photographing nests and young
birds and the approximate dates when birds begin to nest, this being
adapted to the vicinity of New York.

Following this is the bulk of the volume, containing brief descriptions
of the birds, their nests, nesting places and eggs, and here the author
has confessedly borrowed from Bendire, Davie and other well-known
authorities, although one might wish that Mr. Dugmore had introduced
more of his own observations, since those given incidentally in the
first part are very interesting; where he indulges in theory he is
less successful. In place of the usual method of studying the nest
from the bird, we have that of studying the bird from the nest, and
for this purpose the nests are grouped in classes, a chapter being
devoted to each class; thus we have nests open, on the ground in open
fields, marshes and generally open country; open nests in trees; nests
in bridges, buildings, walls, etc. By this plan any one finding a nest
can, with a little care and observation, identify the bird that made
it. The illustrations, largely of nests and eggs, are a noteworthy
feature of the book, although the three-color process which succeeded
so admirably in Dr. Holland’s _Butterfly Book_, is here as equally
distinct a failure, the least bad of the colored plates being that
showing the nest of the yellow-breasted chat, the worst that of the
nest of the Baltimore oriole. Those in black and white, however, merit
the highest praise, and this includes the smaller cuts introduced as
decorative features in the first portion of the book. It would seem
difficult in a half-tone to improve on the plate of young crested
flycatchers for clearness of detail, while among others that deserve
special mention for artistic effect is the wood thrush on nest, and
the nests of the chestnut-sided, yellow, blue-winged and worm-eating
warblers. The general ‘get-up’ of the book is excellent, and the
printing of the plates separately permits the use of a deadfaced paper
for the text, which is pleasant to the eye.




THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE.


We are able to publish in the present issue of the MONTHLY the address
given by Mr. G. K. Gilbert as retiring president of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science. The problem that he
discusses is one of the most pressing for scientific workers, while at
the same time it is of interest to everyone, and the address is at once
an important contribution to the subject and an exposition that all can
understand. The mathematical physicists find that as an abode fitted
for life the earth can not be allowed a history indefinitely long--not
longer perhaps than 20,000,000 years--while the geologists with equally
strong arguments claim a much greater antiquity. The biologists
are also concerned, owing to the time taken up by the processes of
evolution, and their facts and interests range them with the geologists
rather than with the physicists. The man not versed in science would
also prefer to assign a long history to the earth, for while he may
be ready to let the ‘dead past bury its dead,’ he looks forward even
to the distant future, and the shorter the past history of the earth
the less the time it will continue to be habitable. We have thus a
question in the solution of which all the sciences are concerned, and
one possessing a dramatic interest that appeals to everyone. The unity
of science is well illustrated by such a problem. It was the subject of
the address of the retiring president of the Association, a geologist;
it might be taken as the subject for the address of the newly elected
president, a biologist and student of the processes of evolution;
and it is one to which the president of the meeting, a mathematical
physicist, has given special attention.

       *       *       *       *       *

Dr. Robert Simpson Woodward, who presided over the New York meeting of
the Association, is professor of mechanics and mathematical physics
and dean of the Faculty of Pure Science in Columbia University. He
was born at Rochester, Oakland County, Michigan, July 21, 1849,
and spent his early life on a farm with the exception of about two
years of experience in mercantile and manufacturing pursuits. He was
prepared for college at the Rochester Academy, entered the University
of Michigan in 1868, and was graduated in 1872 with the degree of C.
E. Twenty years later the same institution conferred upon him the
degree of Ph. D. While yet an undergraduate he entered the U. S. Lake
Survey, and immediately after graduation he was appointed assistant
engineer in that service. He was employed in the astronomical and
geodetic work of the Lake Survey until its completion in 1882. He then
accepted the position of assistant astronomer to the U. S. Transit of
Venus Commission and accompanied the expedition of Prof. Asaph Hall,
U. S. N., to San Antonio, Tex., to observe the transit of December,
1882. He remained with the Transit of Venus Commission until 1884,
when he resigned in order to take the position of astronomer in the
U. S. Geological Survey. After four years of service in this bureau
he resigned to accept the position of assistant in the U. S. Coast
and Geodetic Survey. This he held until 1893, when he retired from
the public service and accepted the call of Columbia University to
the chair of mechanics. In 1895, and again in 1900, he was elected
to the deanship of the graduate faculty of pure science in that
institution. Professor Woodward has published many papers on subjects
in astronomy, geodesy, mathematics and mechanics. He edited, and
contributed several chapters to the final report of the U. S. Lake
Survey, a volume of about one thousand quarto pages devoted chiefly to
a discussion of the geodetic work of the Survey done during the forty
years of its existence. He is the author of several of the Bulletins
of the U. S. Geological Survey, and of a memoir on the Iced Bar and
Long Tape Base Apparatus of the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey.
These forms of apparatus, devised and perfected by him, involve many
novel features and secure a much higher precision at a much smaller
cost than apparatus previously used. He prepared for the Smithsonian
Institution a volume entitled ‘Geographical Tables,’ being a manual
for astronomers, geographers, engineers and cartographers, published
in 1894. Several of his most important mathematical papers relate to
geophysics, especially those bearing on the secular cooling and cubical
contraction of the earth, on the form and position of the sea surface,
and on the profoundly difficult problem presented by the recently
discovered phenomenon of the variation of terrestrial latitudes.
Although most of his publications are necessarily of a highly technical
character, his semi-popular addresses and reviews have been widely read
and appreciated. Professor Woodward was an associate editor of the
‘Annals of Mathematics’ from 1889 to 1899 and has been an associate
editor of ‘Science’ since 1894. He has taken an active part in the
work of the scientific societies with which he is connected, and in
addition to the official positions he holds in the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, he has been honored by election to the
presidency of the American Mathematical Society and to the presidency
of the New York Academy of Sciences. Professor Woodward represents
the highest type of the man of science. Eminent for his original
contributions to science, a teacher of great intellectual and moral
influence, an administrator with unfailing tact and unerring judgment,
he confers an honor on the Association which has elected him to its
highest office.

       *       *       *       *       *

President Low welcomed the American Association to New York and to
Columbia University in an address which recounted the increased
recognition given to science by the city since the Association met
there thirteen years ago and the great progress of science itself. He
concluded with the following words: “I am especially glad to welcome
you because you are an Association for the _Advancement_ of Science.
That, after all, is what ought to make you feel at home in the
atmosphere of this university; for a university that does not assist
the advancement of science has hardly a right to call itself by that
great name. I heard Phillips Brooks say, in a sermon that I heard him
preach in Boston when this Association met there twenty years ago,
that you can get no idea of eternity, by adding century to century or
by piling æon upon æon; but that, if you will remember how little you
knew when you sat at your mother’s knee to learn the alphabet, and how
with every acquisition of knowledge which has marked the intervening
years you have come to feel, not how much more you know, but how much
more there is to be known, all can get some idea of how long eternity
can be, because all can understand that there never can be time enough
to enable any one to learn all that there is to know. There is so
much to be known, that even the great advances of the last generation
do not make us feel that everything is discovered, but they appeal
to new aspirations and awaken renewed energy in order to make fresh
discoveries in a region that teems with so much that is worthy of
knowledge. I congratulate you upon your success, and I bid you welcome
to Columbia.”

       *       *       *       *       *

In the course of his reply, the president of the Association, Professor
Woodward, said: “But surprising and gratifying as have been the
achievements of science in our day, their most important indication to
us is that there is indefinite room for improvement and advancement.
While we have witnessed the establishment of the two widest
generalizations of science, the doctrine of energy and the doctrine
of evolution, we have also witnessed the accumulation of an appalling
aggregate of unrelated facts. The proper interpretation of these must
lead to simplification and unification, and thence on to additional
generalizations. An almost inevitable result of the rapid developments
of the past three decades especially is that much that goes by the
name of science is quite unscientific. The elementary teaching and
the popular exposition of science have fallen, unluckily, into the
keeping largely of those who can not rise above the level of a purely
literary view of phenomena. Many of the bare facts of science are so
far stranger than fiction that the general public has become somewhat
over-credulous, and untrained minds fall an easy prey to the tricks
of the magazine romancer or to the schemes of the perpetual motion
promoter. Along with the growth of real science there has gone on also
a growth of pseudo-science. It is so much easier to accept sensational
than to interpret sound scientific literature, so much easier to
acquire the form than it is to possess the substance of thought that
the deluded enthusiast and the designing charlatan are not infrequently
mistaken by the expectant public for true men of science. There is,
therefore, plenty of work before us; and while our principal business
is the direct advancement of science, an important, though less
agreeable duty, at times, is the elimination of error and the exposure
of fraud.”

       *       *       *       *       *

The meeting of the Association in New York was of more than usual
importance. Not only did the nine sections of the Association hold
their daily sessions, but there were also fifteen special scientific
societies meeting simultaneously at Columbia University. Men of science
came together from all parts of the country to present the results of
the year’s research, to gain profit and pleasure from association with
other workers, and to return to their homes with increased knowledge
and renewed interest. It is obviously impossible to give here an
account of the hundreds of scientific papers presented, or even to
report upon the general proceedings of the Association. Two of the more
important actions may, however, be mentioned. It was decided to send
‘Science,’ our weekly journal of general science, to all members of the
Association without charge, and a section devoted to physiology and
experimental medicine was established. It was thought that the receipt
of a journal such as ‘Science’ would increase the membership of the
Association and lead to a greater interest in its work, as even those
who are unable to attend the meetings will hereafter have a definite
return for membership. The Association will be greatly strengthened
by giving recognition to the great group of sciences--physiology,
experimental psychology, anatomy, embryology, histology, morphology,
pathology, bacteriology and their applications--which have developed
with such remarkable activity within the past few years.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is not possible to report on the scientific work of the meeting in
part owing to its magnitude--the papers would fill the volumes of this
journal for several years to come. It is also true that each paper
taken singly is likely to be of interest only to the special student.
Specialization in science is absolutely necessary for its advance,
but the terminology required for exactness and economy makes the work
in each department scarcely intelligible to those not immediately
concerned, while the great detail necessary in careful research seems
almost trivial until we realize that it is upon such special work that
the general principles and the applications of science depend. We all
know that our ways of thought and habits of life are chiefly based
on the results of modern science. This has not been the result of a
sudden revelation, but of a continual growth, scarcely perceptible
until viewed from a distance. The importance of current political
events is magnified by the common interest they excite, whereas in
art, literature and science time is required before things can be
seen in their right perspective. We can, however, take the reports of
the three committees of the Association to which small grants were
made for research and use these as examples of the scientific work
described at the meeting. These committees were on ‘Anthropometry,’ on
‘The Quantitative Study of Variation’ and on ‘The Cave Fauna of North
America.’

       *       *       *       *       *

The committee on anthropometry is undertaking to make measurements of
the physical and mental traits of members of the Association, and to
encourage such work elsewhere. At the present time there exists but
little exact knowledge of how people differ from each other and of the
causes and results of such differences. Much has been written regarding
men of genius, criminals and other classes, but without an adequate
foundation of fact. The members of a scientific society are a fairly
homogeneous class, regarding whose heredity, education and achievements
correct information can be secured. The measurements made at the New
York meeting, determining such traits as size of head, strength,
eyesight, quickness of perception, memory, etc., will supply the
standard type for scientific men and their variations from this type.
When other classes of the community have been measured, comparisons can
be made and we shall know whether scientific men are more variable than
others, have larger heads, better memory and the like. Work of this
character has been carried on at Columbia University for some years.
The freshmen, both the men of Columbia College and the women of Barnard
College, are measured and tested with care, equal attention being paid
to mental and physical traits. Then the measurements are repeated at
the end of the senior year. Anthropometric work has also been done in
Great Britain under the auspices of Dr. Galton and Professor Pearson,
and we may perhaps hope that the time will come when we shall have as
exact knowledge about human differences as we now have about different
kinds of butterflies.

       *       *       *       *       *

Although geologists and botanists have defined hundreds of thousands
of species, they have not as a matter of fact until very recently
attempted to secure exact measurements of differences, and the
committee of the Association on ‘The Quantitative Study of Variation,’
of which Prof. Chas. B. Davenport is the recorder, aims to encourage
such work. It is now over forty years since the facts and arguments
presented in Darwin’s ‘Origin of Species’ paved the way for general
acceptance of the doctrine of evolution. But the objection is hardly
less valid to-day than it was then that the evidence for evolution
is almost wholly indirect. Over and over again naturalists have been
challenged to cite one case where a species in nature has changed
within historic times and repeatedly they have taken refuge in the
plea that the historic period is too short for a noticeable change to
have taken place. This plea can be accepted, however, only so long as
we have no exact way of measuring race change. When we can express
quantitatively the condition of a community to-day, we may hope to
be able to say whether any change has occurred after five, ten, or
a hundred years. The committee of the Association has especially
concerned itself with a piece of work which may be considered typical.
In the headwaters of the Tennessee River there lives a univalor mollusc
which is found nowhere else in the world and which belongs to a family
of molluscs that was early separated from its marine cogeners as a
fluviatile species. This genus, Io, varies greatly in different parts
of the Tennessee basin. In some places it is smooth; in others, spiny;
in others, long drawn out. Under a grant of the Association, Mr. C. C.
Adams, of Bloomington, Ill., visited this region; travelled down one of
the tributaries in a boat, collecting samples from every community of
Ios; and went by train up a second river collecting at every stopping
place. The results of this trip were, in a word, that in passing from
the mouth to the headwaters of the two parallel tributaries the shells
vary in parallel fashion and show a uniform, continuous change from the
spiny, elongated condition characteristic of the mouths of the rivers
to the smooth, more globose condition characteristic of the headwaters.
The additional grant by the Association of one hundred dollars will
assist Mr. Adams in making further quantitative studies on variation in
the genus Io.

       *       *       *       *       *

Hardly any fact has excited more interest among evolutionists than the
blindness of cave animals; and various theories have been advanced
to explain the fact. It is known that the blind condition is due to
a degeneration of formerly functional eyes. The difficulty has been
to understand what advantage is gained by losing the eyes even in a
locality where eyes are of no use. It has been affirmed that ‘Nature
is economical’ and will not expend energy in building an unnecessary
organ. Weismann has suggested that the only reason why we have eyes at
all is because Natural Selection is constantly weeding out poor eyes.
Withdraw the necessity for good eyes, and poor eyes and good eyes will
have an equal chance of surviving. According to a third theory, the
functional activity of any organ is essential to its maintenance. Just
as the unused arm withers so the unused eye degenerates. Of course all
these theories assume that the ancestors of the blind species--for
instance, of the blind fishes--had originally no inherent tendency to
blindness or degeneration of the eyes. This assumption has, however,
been recently combatted by Professor Eigenmann, who has shown that
although many kinds of fish are accidentally swept into caves, only
one kind has become blind; of this kind the nearest allies which live
in open streams shun the light, live in crevices and under stones, and
have less perfect eyes than other fishes. Some of the allies of such
light-shunning fishes have made their way into caves, and have there
worked out their tendency to a reduction of eyes. That has been the
history of eyeless fishes. To continue the researches of Professor
Eigenmann, so auspiciously begun, the Association last year granted
one hundred dollars to a committee on the cave vertebrates of North
America. With the aid of the grant Dr. Eigenmann has during the past
year penetrated into numerous caves and obtained much additional
material for his researches.

       *       *       *       *       *

The American Association will meet next year at Denver, beginning on
August 26th. The newly elected officers are:

_President._

Prof. Charles Sedgwick Minot, Harvard Medical School.

_Vice-Presidents._

Mathematics and Astronomy: Prof. James McMahon, Cornell University.

Physics: Prof. D. D. Brace, University of Nebraska.

Chemistry: Prof. John H. Long, Northwestern University.

Mechanical Science and Engineering: Prof. H. S. Jacoby, Cornell
University.

Geology and Geography: Prof. C. R. Van Hise, University of Wisconsin.

Zoölogy: President D. S. Jordan, Leland Stanford Jr. University.

Botany: B. T. Galloway, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D.
C.

Anthropology: J. W. Fewkes, Bureau of Ethnology, Washington, D. C.

Economic Science and Statistics: John Hyde, Department of Agriculture,
Washington, D. C.

_Permanent Secretary._

L. O. Howard, U. S. Department of Agriculture, Washington, D. C.

_General Secretary._

Prof. William Hallock, Columbia University, New York.

_Secretary of the Council._

D. T. McDougal, New York Botanical Gardens.

_Secretaries of the Sections._

Mathematics and Astronomy: Prof. H. C. Lord, Ohio State University.

Physics: J. O. Reed, University of Michigan.

Chemistry: Prof. W. McPherson, Ohio State University.

Mechanical Science and Engineering: William H. Jacques, Boston, Mass.

Geology and Geography: Dr. R. A. F. Penrose, Pierce, Ariz.

Zoölogy: Prof. H. B. Ward, University of Nebraska.

Botany: A. S. Hitchcock, Manhattan, Kan.

Anthropology: G. G. McCurdy, Yale University.

Economic Science and Statistics: Miss C. A. Benneson, Cambridge, Mass.

_Treasurer._

Prof. R. S. Woodward, Columbia University.

       *       *       *       *       *

The National Educational Association, which held its annual session
at Charleston during the week beginning on July 9th, is the leading
representative of the many educational associations of the country.
Its membership includes the ablest teachers of education in colleges
and the most successful school superintendents and teachers. Its
meetings give occasion for discussions of matters of educational
theory and practice in many ways comparable to the discussions in
scientific societies. The program of the present meeting shows that
like the scientific associations, the National Educational Association
has become differentiated into a number of practically isolated
sections with differing interests. There are separate departments of
Kindergarten Education, Manual Training, Child Study, Normal Schools,
Libraries, etc. The Department of Superintendence now has a special
meeting at a different time and place. There are also general sessions,
and these have not become mere formal business meetings. The leading
topic for discussion this year seems to have been the proposed National
University at Washington. The most obviously important service which
the Association has rendered to educational endeavor has been its
elaboration (through efficient committees) and publication of reports
on Secondary Education, Elementary Education, Rural Schools and College
Entrance Requirements. These reports represent if not demonstrable
facts, at least the well-considered opinion of competent judges and
they have had a highly beneficial influence. Dr. J. M. Green, of
Newark, will preside over next year’s meeting. The decision in regard
to the place has been left to the executive committee, the claims of
Detroit, Cincinnati and Tacoma having been especially urged.

       *       *       *       *       *

The opening of a summer school at Columbia University and the
attendance at Harvard University of a large proportion of all the
school teachers of Cuba are important steps towards increasing the
usefulness of our institutions for higher education. The grounds,
buildings and equipment of Columbia University have cost in the
neighborhood of $10,000,000, and to let these lie idle and rusting
for nearly one-third of the year is evidently wasteful. But it is not
only a question of the most economical administration of these trust
funds that is at issue. The teachers of the country, perhaps 500,000
in number, have had just enough education to profit particularly by
attendance at a university. They are engaged at their work during
three-fourths of the year, but their summers can be spent in no more
pleasant and useful way than by attending a university summer school.
It would be good business policy for school boards to send their
teachers to the summer schools, except that the benefit might not be
reaped locally, as each teacher would soon deserve a better position
than he now has. It is, however, not only for teachers that university
sessions during the summer are needed. The long vacation is largely a
tradition from the time when boys were most usefully occupied on the
farm during the summer. It is doubtful whether students now come back
to college in the autumn in an improved physical or moral condition.
They might spend their time to advantage, but are not likely to do so
at the ordinary summer resort. It is admitted by everyone that young
men are too old when they leave college and the professional schools.
Reforms are needed in various directions, but an obvious one is not to
take four years for three years’ work. Though university professors,
who for the general good need freedom from routine teaching for other
work, should be allowed leave of absence for a part of the year, it
does not follow that they should all be away at the same time. It seems
probable that the example set by the University of Chicago, which holds
four sessions extending through the year, will be followed by all our
universities.

       *       *       *       *       *

The third International Conference on a Catalogue of Scientific
Literature was held in London on June 12th and 13th. It will be
remembered by those who are interested in the organization of science
that a conference on this subject was called by the Royal Society in
1896 at which it was proposed to undertake by international coöperation
a catalogue of contributions to science. Certain details were arranged
and others were left to a committee of the Royal Society. Under the
auspices of this committee schedules of classification were drawn up
and estimates of the cost secured. A second conference was held in
1898, and after various changes in the plans for the catalogue it
was at the recent Conference definitely decided to proceed with its
publication. It is estimated that the cost will be covered by the sale
of three hundred sets, and different governments or national agencies
have made themselves responsible for a certain number of sets, Germany
and Great Britain for example, subscribing for forty-five sets, each
costing £17. The Catalogue will be published in seventeen volumes
devoted to as many sciences, and will be both an author’s and a subject
index. The collection of material is to commence from January 1, 1901.
While all scientific men welcome improvements in cataloguing scientific
literature, the arrangements proposed by the Royal Society and by the
different conferences have met with some criticism. The serious mistake
has been made of entirely ignoring the catalogues and bibliographies
already existing for most of the sciences, and it is not certain that
the elaborate and expensive machinery proposed will be as useful as
some plan would have been for unifying the existing agencies. Still
in the end there must be some international and uniform method for
cataloguing scientific literature, and it is to be hoped that our
Government will do its share toward supporting the present undertaking.




Transcribers’ Notes


Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a
predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not
changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced
quotation marks retained.

Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.

Page 342: “millenium” was printed that way.

Page 366: “to smear the statues of Jupiter” was misprinted as
“statutes”.

Page 387: “we have meet with a difficulty” was printed that way.

Page 387: “cm.” originally was printed as “c. m.”