570 



THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



the star places of to-day are a little better 

 than those of seventy-five years ago, but 

 even yet there is great room for improve- 

 ment. One of the commonest applications 

 of these star places is to the determination 

 of latitude, but it is very doubtful if there is 

 any point on the face of the earth whose 

 latitude is known certainly within one tenth 

 of a second. Looking at the question from 

 another point of view, it is notorious that the 

 contact observations of the transits of Venus 

 in 1761 and 1769 were so discordant that 

 from the same observations Encke and E. J. 

 Stone got respectively for the solar parallax 

 8'59 seconds and 8'91 seconds. In 1870 no 

 one thought it possible that there could be 

 any such difficulty with the contact observa- 

 tions of the then approaching transits of 

 1874 and 1882, but we have found from sad 

 experience that our vaunted modern instru- 

 ments gave very little better results for the 

 last pair of transits than our predecessors 

 obtained with much cruder appliances in 

 1761 and 1769. 



Women in the Higher Education. The 



facts presented in a special report on wom- 

 en's education, given in the University Con- 

 vocation Proceedings for 1893, show that 

 women are gaining in every educational field. 

 The secondary schools of the State returned 

 in that year 23,556 girls of academic grade 

 to 18,243 boys ; and of 438 honor credentials 

 issued, 298, or more than two thirds, were 

 to girls. The number of women in colleges 

 had risen to 2,923, of whom 2,078 were in 

 the eight specifically women's colleges, be- 

 sides 880 in subfreshnien classes. The pro- 

 fessional and technical schools returned 4,043 

 women, and the special schools 3,308. The 

 number of girls entering college from regents' 

 schools was eighty-four per cent greater than 

 the year before, and the increase promised 

 to continue in the current year. Of the 

 teachers in the New York common schools 

 28,869 were women. In the United States 

 there were in 1890, 125,525 men and 238,397 

 women teachers. Two years later the num- 

 ber of men had decreased 3,974, and the 

 number of women had increased 14,383. 

 Women are more and more employed as 

 teachers in the grammar and higher schools 

 and in colleges and the university ; more of 

 the graduates from women's colleges are 



entering the medical profession ; progress is 

 making in the legal education of women ; 

 and opportunities are now offered them to 



take a theological course. 



An Old Book of the Weather. The first 

 of a series of reproductions of old books on 

 meteorology and terrestrial magnetism un- 

 dertaken by Dr. D. Hellmann, of Berlin, is 

 the WeUcrbiichlnn, or Little Book of the 

 Weather, of L. Reyman, the oldest German 

 book on meteorology. It was published at 

 Augsburg in 1505, and passed through sev- 

 enteen editions in thirty-four years. It has 

 also been translated into English. It is es- 

 sentially an elementary manual for foretell- 

 ing the weather from the rudimentary data 

 which the science of the time possessed. 

 The barometer and thermometer were not 

 known, and the principal rules found in Rey- 

 man's book are drawn from the appearance 

 of the sky and clouds, the optical phenomena 

 of the atmosphere, the direction of the wind, 

 the phases of the moon, and other like signs. 

 Most of them were known to the ancients 

 and the Arabs, from whose writings the au- 

 thor has derived them expressing them al- 

 ways concisely and intelligibly to the public. 

 The book is much superior in scientific char- 

 acter to the weather-predicting almanacs of 

 our time ; for, instead of pretending to fore- 

 tell the weather a year in advance, as they 

 do, it has simply given the signs by which 

 its course may be foreseen a short time in 

 advance. 



Play and Study. In a paper on Child 

 Stiidy in Summer Schools, President G. Stan- 

 ley Hall obsei'ves that practically we have to 

 act as if there were no such thing as pure 

 thought. Children have no thought without 

 motion. Motion and thought go together, 

 and if you make them sit still they can not 

 think. Their minds will not move unless their 

 bodies move along with them. We weaken 

 thought if we try to eliminate motion. In 

 the child study at the summer school one 

 thousand children's games were selected and 

 studied, then arithmetic games and geogra- 

 phy games, and those that gave strength to 

 the shoulders and hips, " and we had every- 

 thing that was taught in the whole grammar 

 course without any exception and a good deal 

 more. We cut down these games to one hun- 



