416 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



moral end bring anybody to Christ, if, as he 

 elsewhere says, "there is a freshness and 

 a completeness about the ethics of the an- 

 cients which we seek in vain in the mod- 

 erns " ? Again, he remarks, " We might be 

 spared much of crudeness and violence and 

 one-sidedness, if people were aware that 

 what they hold to be the last result of mod- 

 ern enlightenment was, perhaps, the com- 

 monplace of two thousand years ago." But 

 would it not be better if we could be spared 

 something more of that crude, one-sided 

 education which disqualifies its victims from 

 understanding what are "the last results of 

 modern enlightenment " ? 



Annual Report of the Chief Signal-Of- 

 ficer to the Secretary of War, for 

 the Year 1879. Washington: Gov- 

 ernment Printing-Office. Pp. 782, with 

 Seventy-four Charts. 



The report claims that the duties of 

 corps analogous in their service to the Sig- 

 nal Corps become more prominent with each 

 ensuing year, and hardly a month passes 

 without some improvement in apparatus 

 deserving the attention of the office being 

 suggested. Instruction on the subjects bear- 

 ing on the duties of the service is given reg- 

 ularly at Fort Whipple, Virginia, whence it 

 is intended a supply of well-drilled men 

 shall be kept to draw from for the needs of 

 the work. The men of the Signal Corps be- 

 ing engaged on duty as constant in time of 

 peace as in the presence of actual war, re- 

 turn, it is admitted, more than the cost of 

 the service, and are at the same time kept 

 in readiness for any emergency of armed 

 duty by regular drills. The value of the 

 advantages gained by the existence of a 

 corps so trained and having its experts dis- 

 tributed as they ai'e over the country, can 

 hardly be estimated ; and the adoption of 

 the exercises and practice of the corps is 

 recommended to the militia of the several 

 States. The office is in communication with 

 numerous foreign correspondents, has offi- 

 cial relations with the scientific men and 

 chiefs of meteorological services of nearly 

 every prominent power in the northern 

 hemisphere, has become the acknowledged 

 center of meteorological information on the 

 continent, and has connected itself with the 

 meteorological work of the world. It had, 



at the date of the report, two hundred and 

 twenty-nine stations in the United States, 

 and also received reports from twenty sta- 

 tions in Canada and British America. The 

 summaries of the reports from these sta- 

 tions, which are published in the volume, 

 illustrate the variety of ways in which the 

 stations have made themselves useful and 

 beneficial to the people and interests of the 

 localities in which they are situated. 



First Annual Report of the Astronomer 

 in Charge of the IIorological and 

 Thermometry Bureaus of the Win- 

 chester Observatory of Yale Col- 

 lege, 1880-81. By Leonard Waldo. 

 New Haven : Tuttle, Morehouse & Tay- 

 lor. Pp. 32. 



The tests for watches are more strin- 

 gent in some points than those made at 

 Neufchatel and Geneva, but a uniform stand- 

 ard is declared desirable. The time, as de- 

 termined at the observatory, has been made 

 by law the standard for the State of Con- 

 necticut, the first instance in the United 

 States in which a State standard of time 

 has been officially adopted. The testing 

 of thermometers has been so satisfactorily 

 done that the makers, particularly the mak- 

 ers of physicians' thermometers, have ac- 

 cepted the authority of the observatory as 

 final, and have greatly improved under its 

 encouragement. Thus, while in June, 1880, 

 all the thermometers received were in error 

 over one third of a degree, and two per 

 cent, of them had errors exceeding a whole 

 degree, in April and May, 1881, four fifths 

 of all sent had errors of less than three 

 tenths of a degree. The experiments indi- 

 cate that the majority of physicians' ther- 

 mometers in use are from one half a degree 

 to two degrees too high. 



Report of Field Experiments with Ferti- 

 lizers. By Professor W. 0. Atwater, 

 Wesleyan University, Middletown, Con- 

 necticut. 1S8J. Pp.56, including five 

 tables. 



The investigations have now been con- 

 ducted for four years, both in the form of 

 general experiments involving the use of 

 seven or eight or more different kinds and 

 mixtures of fertilizing materials, containing 

 nitrogen, phosphoric acid, and potash, for 

 the purpose of ascertaining what fertilizing 



