making West Point a school for Signal Service officers, and for training those preparing for Arctic, Antarctic, and Ocean-dredging explorations!

Speaking of institutions of education, the National University has completed its endowment of six million dollars, and has commenced its organization by the appointment of a Board of Directors. It is to be located at Chicago, St. Louis, or Omaha, as the Board shall conclude. For the President of this University, an evening paper rather lightly says: "so much difficulty exists in selecting an individual belonging to this world, combining all the desired requisites, that it is in contemplation to wait (our moon being uninhabited) until one can be obtained from the planet Mars, or possibly Jupiter. The latter will no doubt be best,—as one who can bear the great heat of that planet will be well fitted to meet the fiery criticism to which he will be subjected on all sides."

Industrial and half-time manual-labor schools are now, in the public school systems of our States, getting to be the rule rather than the exception. Astonishing it is, also, to look back to the time, which I can remember, when, instead of the natural and rational method of coeducation of the sexes, now universal (with very few exceptions), it was a common thing for boys and girls, young men and young women, to be educated,—monastery and nunnery fashion,—entirely apart!

Out-of-door schools are a grand improvement of our times. They are the old kindergartens of Pestalozzi and Froebel developed. The best that I know is in West Philadelphia, near the Acclimatarium. In winter, the teachers and children go together for study into the inclosures of the Acclimatarium, for at least three hours every day. In summer, their range is extended through Fairmount Park, and farther, for the same or a longer period. The pupils enter this school at six or seven years of age, and continue the "nature course" until twelve or thirteen. Then they take up, elsewhere, a larger share of book studies; so that they may be, by sixteen, seventeen, or eighteen, prepared for college, if desired; and after college, for the Universities.

The degrees of Bachelor and Master of Education, first bestowed by some of the great Western Universities, are now granted also by most of our kindred Eastern institutions.

Everybody is satisfied that the great English Spelling Reform is not going on too fast. Our children are taught the new spelling, the books being, in all the public schools, changed once in ten years. With this gradual transition, under the direction of the Anglo-American Philological Association, we are safely approaching an era of reasonable orthography.

A seemingly extreme rule, but really very good, has lately been passed by the directors of three of the largest public libraries in this country, at the urgency of the Department of Mental Hygiene of the American Social Science Association. It is, that no novels shall be given out on the application of minors; and that only one novel in three months may be taken out in any one stockholder's name.

December 1st, 1931.

The presidential address at the annual meeting of the Intercontinental Scientific Congress, this year held at Melbourne, Australia, has just been published. I find in it mention of the following, among other, late advances in science.

Proof seems to be accumulating that the suggestion made by Lockyer in 1879, that all the supposed chemical elements are really modifications of the same substance, and that soon after made by others, that this common substance is only condensed universal ether, the medium of luminous, electrical, and other vibrations, is going to be accepted as correct. The opinion that the panæther, as it is best called, is not atomic in its constitution, while all the combinable elements are so, is also gaining ground.

More exact knowledge being now had of the relations existing among the different so-called elements, it has become possible to work out the atomic theory, so far as to prove that the law of chemical attraction is identical with that of gravitation; namely, that its force is directly in proportion to the number and mass of the atoms, and inversely as the squares of their distances: atomic distances being, by extremely abstruse calculations, approximately estimated. The long wished for full explanation of the relations between frictional electricity, voltaism, magnetism, heat, and light, seems likely soon to be obtained; and, consequently, also the exact physical relations of the vital or formative force of animals and plants.

It is quite well understood that, as Newton himself anticipated, the law of gravitation was but a step, though a very great and important one, in the generalization of cosmic changes and forces. We seem to be on the eve of another advance, needing only the completion of some difficult mathematical and physical analyses,—in which all so-called attractions and repulsions whatever will be resolved into results or phenomena of motion; ethereal, atomic, molecular, and massive motions; whose mutual reactions and momenta make the infinite complexity of the universe. Towards such a conclusion, serviceable contributions were made many years since, by three American cosmologists, Norton, Pliny Chase, and Kirkwood.

The 320th asteroid was discovered at Pike's Peak observatory, during last summer. I may jot down here too, the record of the first observation of a new telescopic comet, last month, by a senior student of Bryn Mawr College for Women.

Australia, according to the address mentioned, has at last furnished to palæontologists the real missing link, not between men and apes, which they have generally given up, but between vertebrate and invertebrate animals. So that the famous ascidian mollusc, with a semi-vertebral larval stage, which nourished in the writings of Darwin and others, is no longer needful. The fossil referred to is an ancient fish-like worm, or worm-like fish, to which the name of Entomicthys amphisoma has been provisionally given. It is still more remarkable than the amphioxus or lancelet, which has been long known.

By the improved methods of measuring both space and time in practical astronomy, it has been rendered nearly or quite certain that our earth is gradually approaching the sun; and that the same is true of all the other planets. Small as the rate of this approach is, it is enough to confirm the belief of Sir William Thomson and others in the 19th century, that our solar system is constructed for finite (not, as Laplace and Lagrange thought, infinite) duration; the whole economy of planets will at last run down like a clock, and all the elements will be melted together with fervent heat.

Among the leading discoveries of the year is that of the long-looked-for third moon of the extra-Neptunian planet. The name of that planet itself, although it has been known since 1885, is not yet finally settled. Some call it Pluto; others Terminus; it being almost certainly the outermost body of our solar system.

A good observation of the intra-Mercurial planet Vulcan was made from Mount Everest some weeks ago, by the Hindu astronomer-imperial on duty there.

Of the corona seen around the sun during eclipses, the tendency now seems to be to return to the explanation long ago proposed and discarded; that it is neither telluric, i.e. produced by our atmosphere, nor, strictly or only, solar; but mainly selenic; that is, caused by the rays of the sun being diffracted around the edge of the moon intervening between us and it. The different appearances of the corona as seen