• SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS . 263 



field o])scrvations and laboratory experiments. The hopes of the 

 organizers of the Club have been abundantly justified by the results. 



R. B. S. 



THE ONE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE FOUNDING OF THE AMERICAN 



JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 



Dr. George F. Becker, of the Geological Survey, has written the 

 following ]ett{>r to Prof. E. S. Dana on the occasion of the one-hundredth 

 anniversary of the founding of the American Journal of Science. 



March 9, 1918. 

 Dear Dana: 



That a scientific journal should have lasted one hundred years is 

 much: that for a century it should have been conducted by only the 

 founder, his son-in-law, and his -grandson is, I believe, unexampled. 

 To me it is appalling to reflect upon the drudgery your family has 

 undergone in order that students of science might teach what they 

 know and learn what their fellows thought. With all possible allow- 

 ances for pride of achievement and for satisfaction in the respect of 

 every member of the scientific public, you and your kin must have 

 been sorely afflicted with the New England conscience. 



Up to about the time of our Civil War Silliman's Journal was partly 

 devoted to reproducing in full important papers which appeared in 

 European journals, to which few American readers had access. This 

 was a function on which Louis Agassiz laid stress, considering it how- 

 ever as a matter of course. The younger men of today would incline to 

 regard such a policy as provincial; but it was not. In the first half of 

 the last century the number of scientific workers in the whole world 

 was very Imiited, and papers recognized as important were reproduced 

 in extenso in most of the great journals such as the Philosophical Maga- 

 zine, the Annales de Cheniie et de Physique, Poggendorjf, etc. It was 

 assumed that the representative reader had access to no other similar 

 periodicals and was entitled to the news of the day. Neither were 

 bits of useful information then excluded. In hunting up a translation 

 by Thomas Young in the Philosophical Magazine of a paper by Laplace 

 on the construction of curves by their radii of curvature (a method 

 afterwards reinvented by Kelvin), I came upon a serious discussion of 

 how best to keep your razors sharp when your- beard becomes wiry! 



To me, and I fancy to a large part of the retiring generation, the file 

 of the American Journal seems a monument to James D. Dana. AVho 

 but he was industrious enough and nearly enough omniscient to deal 

 with the w^hole range of scientific thought? Young men in this Survey 

 'think of him as a mineralogist, or a geologist, and do not know that 

 he began his career as an instructor in mathematics and in early life 

 achieved fame as a zoologist. Louis Agassiz in 1847 wrote as follows 

 to Milne-Edwards : 



