fields of war and statecraft, and his honesty of purpose, sincerity of
action and accuracy of statement and method, so manifest throughout
his career as a soldier and statesman, are found also in the earlier
record. At the age of sixteen he crossed the Blue Ridge on horseback
and made a series of successful surveys in the Shenandoah valley,
overcoming physical obstacles with the method and system of a modern
scientist. At twenty-two he led a party into the wilderness of the
valley of the Ohio to treat with the French and Indians. He then became
acquainted with the great resources of the interior, and saw that
the valleys of the James and Potomac afforded unusual facilities for
lines of transportation for the trade ‘of a rising empire.’ In 1754 he
reported in favor of a scheme of communication between the Atlantic
states and the great west. Sixteen years later he suggested that the
project of opening up the Potomac be ‘recommended to public notice.’
The idea contained in the Potomac scheme was of far-reaching import,
and only the present generation can fully realize its significance.
Washington was not only the first to map and recommend the general
route of the great highways called the National Pike and the Chesapeake
and Ohio Canal, which are now in truth ‘becoming the channels of
conveyance of the extensive and valuable trade of a rising empire,’ but
he was also the first to predict the commercial success of that route
through the Mohawk valley which was afterwards taken by the Erie Canal
and the New York Central Railroad.
One hundred and fifteen years ago he asked: “Would it not be worthy
of the wisdom and attention of Congress to have the western waters
well explored, the navigation of them fully ascertained and accurately
laid down, and a complete and perfect map made of the country.... The
advantages would be unbounded, for sure I am that nature has made such
a display of her bounties in those regions that the more the country
is explored the more it will rise in estimation, consequently greater
will the revenue be to the Union.” Again he declared, “I shall not rest
contented until I have explored the western country and have traversed
those lines which have given bounds to a new empire.”
Washington did not do this as fully as he wished, but his ambition
has been and is being realized through the medium of hundreds of
enterprises under both national and private encouragement. The result
of a trip made in the fall of 1784 was the real historic beginning of
the Potomac enterprise. On his return he wrote to Benjamin Harrison,
Governor of Virginia, “I shall take the liberty now, my dear sir, to
suggest a matter which would mark your administration as an important
era in the annals of this country if it should be recommended by you
and adopted by the Assembly.” He reached far out for those days,
assuming Detroit as a point of departure for the trade of the northwest
territory. His confidence in the practical abilities of the American
people is shown by the remark, “A people who are possessed with the
spirit of commerce, who see and will pursue their destinies, may
achieve almost anything. No person who knows the temper, genius and
policy of this people as well as I do can harbor the smallest doubt.”
In urging the Potomac scheme, he later asked that commissioners be
appointed to make a careful survey of the Potomac and James rivers
to their respective sources, and that a complete map of the country
intervening between the seaboard, the Ohio waters and the Great Lakes
be presented to the people. “These things being done,” he says, “I
shall be mistaken if prejudice does not yield to facts, jealousy to
candor and finally, if reason and nature, thus aided, do not dictate
what is right and proper to be done.”
He introduced his plan to the notice of Congress, thus making the
first suggestion to that body of the policy of national improvements
which the present generation is carrying on, as well as of the policy
of exploration and national surveys to which our Government so firmly
adheres. To-day the Government is carrying forward surveying work by
means of the largest and most thoroughly equipped organizations in
existence, and thus is Washington honored.
The scientific men of to-day owe to Washington profound respect and
gratitude for the scientific spirit he cultivated in his work. The
Government once established on so high a plane, it necessarily followed
that all true science should be encouraged and be enlisted in the
development of the citizen and of the material resources of the nation.
CHARLES D. WALCOTT,
_U. S. Geological Survey_,
_Washington, D. C._
_SCIENCE AND FICTION._
The leading article of the June number of the _Century Magazine_ is
entitled “The Problem of increasing Human Energy,” and is written by
Nikola Tesla. Mr. Tesla offers the reader some naive verbal analogies
between the causes of human progress and the ‘energy’ of theoretical
physics, and a eulogy of a number of inventions which he expects to
make. He intersperses these with sundry remarkable statements such
as, “our own earth will be a lump of ice;” “Though this movement is
not of a translatory character, yet the general laws of mechanical
movement are applicable to it;” “That we can send a message to a planet
is certain, that we can get an answer is probable;” “It is highly
probable that if there are intelligent beings on Mars they have long
ago realized this very idea [the transmission of electrical energy for
industrial purposes without wires], _which would explain the changes on
its surface noted by astronomers_.” (The italics are our own.)
Mr. Tesla’s doctrine of human energy is in some ways as original as
the inventions and discoveries which he expects to make. Each of us
is, he says, a part of a unitary whole, ‘man.’ “This one human being
lives on and on.... Therein ... is to be found the partial explanation
of many of those marvelous phenomena of heredity which are the result
of countless centuries of feeble but persistent influence.” Now we may
“assume that human energy is measured by half the product of man’s
mass with the square of a certain hypothetical velocity ... the great
problem of science is, and always will be, to increase the energy thus
defined.... This mass is impelled in one direction by a force F, which
is resisted by another partly frictional and partly negative force R,
acting in a direction exactly opposite, and retarding the movement of
the mass.”
Unhappily Mr. Tesla in his enthusiasm to progress to recommendations of
religion, vegetarianism, the old régime for women and the artificial
preparation of nitrogen compounds, neglects to state which direction
is the proper one for the human mass to follow, north, south, east,
west, toward the moon or Sirius or to Dante’s Satan in the centre of
the earth. Nor does he explain how ‘enlightenment’ makes the mass of
human bodies go in an exactly opposite direction to that toward which
‘visionariness’ impels them, nor reveal why, if his account be true, he
and a ‘visionary’ can walk in the same direction. Of course the whole
notion that the ‘velocity’ of the human ‘mass,’ _i.e._ the space it
traverses in a given time, has any connection with human progress or is
of any value to anybody or anything, is absurd.
Mr. Tesla has enjoyed considerable, excellent repute as a gifted
student of certain electrical phenomena and one expects a good deal
from his “electrical experiments, now first published.” Mr. Tesla,
too, expects a good deal from them. It would take too long to even
note here all the important scientific discoveries which Mr. Tesla
expects to make or all the benefits which he expects to thereby confer
upon mankind in general and in particular upon those who exploit his
inventions. Some samples may be given. War will be rendered harmless by
being reduced to a sort of game between ‘telautaumata,’ machines which
behave “just like a blind-folded person obeying instructions received
through the ear,” any one of which is “enabled to move and to perform
all its operations with reason and intelligence.”
Says Mr. Tesla: “I purpose to show that, however impossible it may now
seem, an automaton may be contrived which will have its ‘own mind,’
and by this I mean that it will be able, independent of any operator,
left entirely to itself, to perform, in response to external influences
affecting its sensitive organs, a great variety of acts and operations
as if it had intelligence. It will be able to follow a course laid
out or to obey orders given far in advance; it will be capable of
distinguishing between what it ought and what it ought not to do, and
of making experiences or, otherwise stated, of recording impressions
which will definitely affect its subsequent actions. In fact, I have
already conceived such a plan.”
Inasmuch as the interest in this telautomatic warfare is to be purely
æsthetic, it would seem as if international bull-fights or kite-flying
or spelling matches or potato-races might do as well, and have the
added advantage of leaving Mr. Tesla’s expectations free to wander
among the following prospective discoveries.
New sources of energy, Mr. Tesla thinks, may be opened up, such as a
wheel which shall perform work without any further effort on our part
than that of constructing it. “Imagine a disc of some homogeneous
material turned perfectly true and arranged to turn in frictionless
bearings on a horizontal shaft above the ground. This disk, being under
the above conditions perfectly balanced, would rest in any position.
Now, it is possible that we may learn how to make such a disk rotate
continuously and perform work by the force of gravity without any
further effort on our part.... To make the disk rotate by the force of
gravity we have only to invent a screen against this force. By such a
screen we could prevent this force from acting on one half of the disk,
and the rotation of the latter would follow.”
Into further particulars concerning the nature of such a screen Mr.
Tesla does not enter, though it would seem a matter well fitted to
engage his peculiar gifts. The ‘screen against gravity’ idea has
already entered into a popular story, but scientific men have probably
not given it much consideration.
By producing a ‘sink’ or reservoir of a low temperature, thereby
inducing the heat of the ambient medium to transform itself in part
into other forms of energy (_e.g._ electrical), Mr. Tesla hopes to “get
any amount of energy without further effort” beyond the amount needed
to create the ‘sink.’ We should thus employ “an ideal way of obtaining
motor power,” and incidentally rebuke the narrow-minded physics of
Carnot and Lord Kelvin.
By means of his electrical oscillator Mr. Tesla has satisfied himself
that he can transmit electrical energy in large quantities without
wires. He expects that this can be done to great economic advantage.
Then would come the golden age. “Men could settle down everywhere,
fertilize and irrigate the soil with little effort, and convert barren
deserts into gardens, and thus the entire globe could be transformed
and made a fitter abode for mankind.”
The golden age figures largely in Mr. Tesla’s article; he offers us all
that is entrancing and wonderful. He is generous. We ask for the bread
of definite facts of science and intelligible evidence, but he gives
us the amethyst and topaz and diamonds of an ambient medium doing all
our work and the atmosphere transporting all our motive power and the
tyrant gravity held powerless by a screen, and Mr. Tesla correcting
Lord Kelvin’s errors. Still amethyst and topaz and diamonds are only
stones. They may dazzle the magazine reader, but they do not nourish
the student of science.
The editorial department of the _Century Magazine_ perhaps felt that
these jewels were a bit too bright. We read there that “much that
must seem speculative to the layman can take its proper place only in
the purview of the scientist.” Some conservative scientists will feel
like growling, “And much that must seem bosh to the man of science can
take its proper place only in the purview of the editorial departments
of popular magazines.” Leaving aside the present case, it is a fact
that the same care which is exercised by editors to secure in their
contributions excellence of style and syntax, a proper moral tone and
freedom from advertisement of business ventures, is not exercised to
secure accuracy in statements of fact or decent credibility in matters
of theory. The editors apparently impute to their readers a desire to
be entertained at all costs. They descend to a footing with the Sunday
newspaper instead of trying to rise to the level of such scientific
literature as Huxley or Tyndall gave us. They evidently often do not
know science from rubbish and apparently seldom make any effort to
find out the difference. They should at least submit their scientific
literature to competent men for criticism and revision.
The general public is helpless before any supposedly scientific
statement. It may judge vaguely by the standing of the paper or
magazine or book containing it, by the name of the writer or by the
general tone in which the article is written. But it cannot judge
definitely by comparison with relevant facts or by critically examining
the logic of the deductions, for the general public lacks both
knowledge of the relevant facts and training in logical criticism. That
a man should invent a microscope which will enable one to see objects
a million times as small as can be seen with the naked eye seems no
more questionable to the general public than that a man should cause
unfertilized eggs to develop. Yet the first would be impossible while
the second has been possible, probable, and still more lately proved.
Guidance in scientific matters should be welcome if only for the
protection thus given against fraudulent medicines, bogus inventions
and nonsensical enterprises.
PHYSICIST.
SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE.
_MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS._
The memoirs presented to the Cambridge Philosophical Society on the
occasion of the jubilee of Sir George Stokes, have been published
in a stately volume by the Cambridge University Press. A year ago
some four hundred men of science met at Cambridge to celebrate the
fiftieth anniversary of the appointment of Sir George Stokes to the
Lucasian professorship of mathematics, a chair held by Newton and
a distinguished line of mathematicians. An official account of the
proceedings, with a portrait of Professor Stokes, is given in the
volume now issued. The seventy-two institutions sending delegates are
arranged chronologically in the order of their foundation, and it is
not unworthy of note that among the sixteen oldest institutions, the
United States has five representatives, whereas Great Britain has
thirteen universities and colleges younger than the Johns Hopkins
University. The Rede lecture given by M. Alfred Cornu and entitled
‘La théorie des ondes lumineuses,’ is published in French, even the
quotations from Newton’s ‘Opticks’ being translated into that language.
M. Cornu states that by ‘une étude approfondie’ of the ‘Opticks,’
his lecture shows that Newton favored Descartes’s undulatory theory
of light, rather than the emission theory usually attributed to him.
The twenty-two memoirs that follow cover a wide range of subjects,
nearly all of which have, however, a connection with the researches
of Professor Stokes. They include three contributions from the United
States, mathematical papers by Profs. E. W. Brown and E. O. Lovett, and
a description by Professor Michelson of his echelon spectroscope.
In addition to this memorial volume, the Cambridge University Press,
which is represented in America by The Macmillan Company, is at
present publishing the collected papers of three eminent students of
mathematical physics. The first volume of Lord Rayleigh’s ‘Scientific
Papers’ contains seventy-eight contributions published from 1869 to
1881. The early papers show the influence of Maxwell, Lord Rayleigh’s
predecessor in the chair of experimental physics at Cambridge, but it
was apparently not until 1881 that he fully appreciated the importance
of Maxwell’s electro-magnetic theory of light. The papers on acoustics
were followed by the publication in 1877 of the classical work on the
‘Theory of Sound.’ Lord Rayleigh, at an early period, treated various
optical subjects, including some of the phenomena of color vision.
His explanation of the blue color of the sky and his treatment of
the resolving power of telescopes are well known. The contributions
on optics and acoustics have been continued to the present time, but
they by no means limit his interests. There are important papers on
hydrodynamics and mathematics, and longer and shorter contributions on
a great range of subjects in mathematical physics, the science which at
the present day is perhaps of supreme importance.
The second volume of Professor Tait’s ‘Scientific Papers’ contains
those published since 1881. The first volume consisted of sixty
papers, and this volume, which has followed with but little delay,
adds seventy-three. As must be the case in collected papers, some are
elaborate treatises while others fill only part of a single page;
some are extremely technical while others were first published in the
‘Encyclopædia Britannica’ and the ‘Contemporary Review.’ Among the
more elaborate papers are those on the physical properties of water
contributed to ‘The Voyage of H. M. S. Challenger,’ on the kinetic
theory of gases, on impact and on quaternions.
The third series just published by the Cambridge Press is the ‘Papers
on Mechanical and Physical Subjects’, by Prof. Osborne Reynolds, of
Owens College. The first volume contains forty papers from transactions
and journals issued from 1869 to 1882. The most elaborate memoir is
that on certain dimensional properties of matter in the gaseous state,
which includes experiments on thermal transpiration of gases through
porous plates and a theoretical extension of the dynamic theory of
gas. Many of the papers, such as those on meteorological phenomena
and the steering of vessels, are of popular interest. The Cambridge
University Press is performing a work of the utmost value to science
in undertaking the publication of these great volumes, and we can only
regret that, in spite of the beginnings made at Johns Hopkins, Chicago,
Pennsylvania and Columbia, American men of science have no such
opportunities for the publication of their works as those afforded at
Cambridge and Oxford.
_BOTANY._
That a large amount of popular interest centers in the study of tree
life and all subjects incidental to forestry and horticulture is
evidenced by the appearance of a second book on the subject under the
title of ‘Our Native Trees and How to Identify Them’ (Scribners), by
Harriet L. Keeler. The volume in question takes up the trees native of
northern United States east of the Rocky Mountains, together with a few
well-known foreign species which have become naturalized in this region.
The book opens with a key to the families of dicotyledonous species
based upon leaf characters, and every species receives not only a full
technical description, but also comes in for interesting comments
upon habit and general ecological relations. Numerous drawings and
half-tones add to the accuracy and clearness of the descriptions. It
is not too much to say that the photographic reproductions surpass in
beauty and presentation of detail any recent botanical publication, and
the venation of leaves is shown in most instances by this method quite
as well as it might be done by means of pen and ink sketches. The value
of the descriptions is heightened by the inclusion of notes of economic
interest. It is not unexpected that some errors should creep into the
discussions on almost all phases of botany which are interspersed
throughout the volume.
The appearance of a new botanical dictionary is most timely, and it
is fortunate that the task of its preparation should be undertaken
by such a skilful bibliographer as Mr. B. D. Jackson. His ‘Glossary
of Botanical Terms’ (Lippincott) contains fifteen thousand words,
or three times as many as have been included in any previous work
of this character. This is indicative of a most energetic pursuit
of investigations in all departments of the subject, and also of a
lamentable tendency to the coinage by botanists of new and unnecessary
terms upon the slightest pretext. A legitimate factor in the increase
of the contents of such a work consists in the inclusion of words in
common use which take on a technical meaning in botany; such, for
instance, as altitude, abnormal, abrupt, absolute, accidental back, etc.
Derivations are given, but the history of the terms has not been
attempted. According to the author, ‘anlage’ may be variously rendered
as _rudiment_, _inception_ or _primordium_. ‘Chlorophyll’ receives the
double consonant at the end of the last syllable against the popular
extra-botanical practice. Regarding ‘medullary’ the author says: “I
have given the accent as it is always spoken (medul’-lary) though all
of the dictionaries (_botanical?_) accent it as med’-ullary except
Henslow’s.” In this the author had in mind the practice among his
insular colleagues only, since the latter pronunciation is given in
the Standard, Century and Webster’s Dictionaries and is followed by
nine tenths of the American botanists. “Mycorhizome = mycorrhiza-like
structures in Corallorhiza and Epipogum roots,” and “Mycorrhiza =
symbiotic fungi on the roots of plants, prothallia, etc.,” are not only
incongruous with orthography and botanical fact, but also with the
usage of all recent writers on this subject.
While many other errors of this character could be adduced, the general
value of the book is scarcely lessened, and it will be of the greatest
service to the working botanist, not only in raising the general
literary tone of his writings, but also in placing at his command a
choice of all of the established terms dealing with any phase of the
subject; an aid which will be greatly conducive to increased accuracy
of statement.
A decade since, the majority of the botanists engaged in the study
of the distribution of plants on this continent, as well as the
strict systematists, were quite unanimously of the opinion that the
territory within the boundaries of the United States had been quite
thoroughly explored, and that the task of the collector are well-nigh
done. Despite this discouraging conclusion a few enthusiastic workers
have not intermitted their labors in a more critical consideration of
the floras of the newer and less thickly settled regions, with the
result that scores and hundreds of new species have been brought to
light each year, and the awakening interest in the subject promises a
re-exploration of the great West.
A striking example of the results awaiting the student in this line is
afforded by Dr. Rydberg’s ‘Flora of Montana and the Yellowstone Park’
(New York Botanical Garden), which has recently appeared. Although
the first collections of plants in this region were made by the Lewis
and Clarke expedition nearly a century ago, Dr. Ryberg finds 163 new
species and varieties in the 1,976 which he lists in this volume.
Of this number 487 are found on both the eastern and western slopes
of the continental divide, 268 on the eastern side only, 520 on the
western side only, 42 of which are arctic and inhabit the high mountain
summits, and 659 which have originated in the exact region under
discussion. Seven hundred and seventy-six of the species listed were
not included in Coulter’s ‘Rocky Mountain Botany,’ published a few
years ago.
The symposium on the ‘Plant Geography of North American,’ to be given
at the coming meeting of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science, will do much to systematize investigations of this
character and broaden the method of treatment accorded the subject in
the future.
_BIOLOGY._