484 TEE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



under nine catagories, as indicated in the following list, where the 

 approximate number of words and percentage of total space alloted to 

 material of each class is also given. 



Number of Per Cent, of 



Words Space 



Reports of proceedings 14,420 26 



General information about the congress 10,510 19 



Reports of social functions 10,310 19 



Personal notes 6,720 12 



Interviews 5,020 9 



Accounts of geological excursions 4,020 7 



Reports on individual papers 3,160 6 



Editorials 1,240 2 



Discussions of scientific questions of popular in- 

 terest 120 6 



About twenty-six per cent, of the space of the text was given to a 

 more or less formal record of the proceedings of the congress, its gen- 

 eral sessions, and the sessions of its various sections. A large part of 

 this space was given to the reporting of the addresses of welcome by the 

 government officials and of the replies to these addresses. In the prep- 

 aration of copy of this kind the reportorial staffs of our large dailie3 

 are trained experts and this part of the work was well performed. Not 

 so with the reporting of the professional papers and discussions ! Some 

 of the reporters wisely inserted merely the titles of the papers which 

 were read, and the names of the authors. 



It is evident that many of these papers were such that reporting 

 even their title seems to have been quite purposeless in a daily paper. 

 The giving of an intelligent statement of their contents by anybody but 

 a specialist would have been impossible. It may have been useless to 

 attempt reporting the papers with such titles as "A physico-chemical 

 contribution to the study of dolomitization " ; "On regional granitiza- 

 tion " ; " Fractional crystallization, the prime factor in the differentia- 

 tion of rock magmas," and some others. How utterly hopeless it is for 

 the reporter, in journalistic haste, to present to the general reader a 

 comprehensible abstract of a scientific paper, is evident from one report 

 made of a paper on some explorations in South America, by an American 

 geologist. The author is mentioned as attributing the presence of great 

 interior basins to the unequal warping of the earth in the process of 

 elevation. To illustrate this point the reporter then quotes the gentle- 

 man as follows : 



It might seem strange to you to live 5,000 miles above the sea, but we think 

 of it as a flat plane. First, there is the plateau sloping at the coast toward the 

 ocean, then the pre-Andean depression and again the depression and again the 

 mountains, which are on the average 70 miles across. The streams that flow 

 west through the Andes, causing international disputes between the Argentine 

 and Chili as to boundaries can probably be attributed to glacial erasion. 



