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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



Newcomb and Young who have esti- 

 mated that the visible stars are fifty to 

 one hundred millions in number. 

 Assuming the average mass of these 

 stars to be equal to the mass of our 

 sun, the amount of mass in the visible 

 universe is about 2 X 10^" metric tons. 



Now, if these thousand million suns 

 had been uniformly distributed within 

 the sphere in question, and had started 

 from rest twenty-five million years ago, 

 they would have acquired under the law 

 of gravitation about such velocities as 

 the stars are now observed to possess; 

 or, if thousands of millions of years ago 

 they started from rest at mutual dis- 

 tances asunder, very great in compari- 

 son with the radius of the supposed 

 sphere, and so distributed that they 

 would now be temporarily equally 

 spaced in that sphere, their mean 

 velocities would be of the same order 

 as that actually observed. A non-uni- 

 form initial distribution of the suns 

 would give higher velocities for the 

 stars than the observed values; and any 

 great increase in the assumed number 

 of suns would require far greater 

 velocities than the observed values. 

 Hence Kelvin infers that the amount of 

 mass in our universe is greater than 

 one hundred million times and less 

 than two thousand million times our 

 sun's mass. 



That there would be plenty of room 

 for a thousand million suns in the 

 assumed sphere is shown by a striking 

 calculation made by KeMn. Thus, if 

 the suns were placed severally at the 

 centers of the thousand million cubes 

 into which their enclosing sphere may 

 be supposed to be divided, then each 

 sun would be nearly fifty million 

 million kilometres from each of its six 

 nearest neighbors. This distance is a 



little greater than the distance of the 

 nearest fixed stars from our solar sys- 

 tem. 



SCIENTIFIC ITEMS. 

 The great Nobel prizes, each of the 

 value of about $40,000, have now been 

 awarded for the first time as follows: 

 In Medicine to Professor Behring, in 

 physics to Professor Rontgen, in chem- 

 istry to Professor van't HoflF. The 

 prize for the promotion of peace has 

 been divided between Dr. Dumant and 

 M. Passy, and the prize in literature 

 has been awarded to M. Prudhomme. 



The Copley Medal of the Royal So- 

 ciety has been awarded to Professor J. 

 Willard Gibbs, of Yale University. — 

 Director W. W. Campbell, of the Lick 

 Observatory, has been elected an asso- 

 ciate member of the Royal Astronom- 

 ical Society. — Professor F. Lamson- 

 Scribner, of the United States Depart- 

 ment of Agriculture, has been given 

 charge of the Bureau of Agriculture 

 established in the Philippines. 



The most important scientific news 

 of the month is Mr. Carnegie's offer of 

 $10,000,000 to endow a national uni- 

 versity or institution for scientific re- 

 search at Washington. The national 

 government hesitates to accept the 

 bonds of the United States Steel Cor- 

 poration offered by Mr. Carnegie, but 

 this is a detail which will doubtless be 

 arranged. — On the same day that Mr. 

 Carnegie's gift became known, it was 

 announced that Mrs. Stanford had 

 signed the final papers transferring 

 property, estimated at $30,000,000, to 

 Leland Stanford Junior University. It 

 appears that the endowment of Stan- 

 ford is now about equal to the combined 

 endowment of our three richest univer- 

 sities — Harvard, Columbia and Chicago. 



