638 



PHYSICS, PROGRESS OF, IN 1896. 



victory was won by hard fighting at the heights of 

 Cacaron, where a rebel cartridge factory was found 

 and a large quantity of munitions was taken. After 

 losing 600 men in the bombardment and assault, the 

 rebels formed an ambuscade in the bush for the 

 pursuing Spaniards, whose commander suspected 

 such a design and set the woods on fire before at- 

 tacking, causing 200 deaths from fire. The fleeing 

 insurgents were outflanked by another column and 

 were utterly routed, losing 500 more. These vic- 

 tories severed communications between the rebels 

 in Nueva Ecija and Bulacan and those of Cavite 

 and prevented rebels of Manila from joining the 

 armed forced in Bulacan. Aguinaldo, who in- 

 tended to form a junction with the army raised in 

 Bulucan, was compelled to retire from Pasig into 

 Cavite, and was afterward superseded as com- 

 mander-in-chief of the rebels by Andres Bonifacio. 

 Many rebels of Bulacan embraced the offer of am- 

 nesty. 



Dr. Jose Rizal, who escaped at the beginning of 

 the rebellion on a Spanish steamer, on board of 

 which he was arrested at Barcelona on Oct. 4, was 

 brought to Manila for trial, sentenced to death, and 

 shot on Dec. 29. He was the author of the consti- 

 tution of the Philippine League. Pedro Roxas was 

 also shot, not publicly in Manila, but at Agana. the 

 capital of the Mariana Islands, where 83 exiled 

 political prisoners were killed by their guards, who 

 reported that they had attempted to escape. At 

 the end of the year 80 prominent suspects of Luzon, 

 including several priests, were sentenced to death. 

 At the same time Gen. Polivieja issued a proclama- 

 tion offering amnesty to all who surrendered within 

 eleven days. 



PHYSICS, PROGRESS OF, IN 1896. Con- 

 stitution of Matter, etc. Matter ami Envrgy. 

 Ostwald, in an address on " Scientific Materialism,'' 

 delivered at Liibeck in September, 1895, and pub- 

 lished in the " Zeitschrift fiir physikalische Chemie 

 (XVIII, p. 305), states his belief that the explanation 

 of natural phenomena by describing the motion of 

 atoms must be given up and a better one substi- 

 tuted. He would represent all phenomena by con- 

 ceptions of energy alone, matter being, according to 

 his view, nothing but a group of different energies 

 arranged in space. He regards the identification 

 of different energies with the mechanical form as a 

 step in the wrong direction, and would make no 

 hypothesis regarding their connection except that 

 which is specified in the law of conservation. 



Absorptive Force. Muller-Erzbach (Wiedemann's 

 "Annalen," August) says that he has proved that 

 absorptive force for instance, that which is ex- 

 erted by a solid on a vapor may act across a thin 

 layer of a perfectly neutral substance, such as 

 water. It therefore differs from other forms of 

 molecular attraction in being able to act at an ap- 

 preciable distance (not exceeding - 0025 millimetre) 

 across intervening bodies. 



Metallic Structure. Charpy (Paris Academy of 

 Sciences, July 27) has tested the suggestion of Hart- 

 mann that metals, in spite of their heterogeneous 

 structure, behave under stress as homogeneous 

 bodies, and finds that, on the contrary, displace- 

 ments vary from point to point according to the 

 microscopic structure. 



Mechanics. Pendulums. Lippmann (Paris 

 Academy of Sciences, Jan. 20) has studied the con- 

 ditions necessary for keeping up the motion of a 

 pendulum without interfering with its time of oscil- 

 lation. That a given instantaneous impulse, as in a 

 clock, should not disturb the period, it is necessary 

 and sufficient that it should occur exactly at the in- 

 stant when the pendulum passes through its equilib- 

 rium position. Lippmann has succeeded in devis- 

 ing an electrical arrangement that fulfills this con- 



dition. Horace Darwin exhibited recently to the 

 London Royal Society (" Nature," May 14) a bifilar 

 pendulum made after a design suggested originally 

 by Lord Kelvin for observing slow tilts and pulsa- 

 tions of the earth's crust. It will show a tilt of less 

 than a^-jj of a second an angle less than that sub- 

 tended by an inch at a distance of 1,000 miles. 

 Tisserand (Paris Academy of Sciences, March 6) 

 reports that the variations in the rate of oscillation 

 of the underground pendulum at the Paris Ob- 

 servatory follow the variations in atmospheric pres- 

 sure, although an attempt is made to keep the pres- 

 sure constant around it. 



Torsion. Peddie (Edinburgh Royal Society, 

 March 2) finds that for every wire there is a critical 

 angle such that when the range of oscillation is 

 equal to it the loss of energy per oscillation is 

 totally independent of the magnitude of the initial 

 range and of fatigue. When the range is greater 

 than this angle, the loss of energy is increased by 

 fatigue; when less, it is decreased. 

 - Pressure on a Spherical Shell. Chree (Cam- 

 bridge [England] Philosophical Society, Jan. 27) 

 has proved mathematically that in the case of a 

 thin spherical shell that is exposed to uniform but 

 different normal pressures over its two surfaces, the 

 effect of external pressure is to increase any origi- 

 nal departure from sphericity, while that of inter- 

 nal pressure is to decrease it. 



Mnfion of Projectiles. Tait (Edinburgh Royal 

 Society, Jan. 6) has further investigated the path 

 of a rotating spherical projectile, and has deduced 

 mathematically some remarkable paths, some of 

 which are even concave upward. He has succeeded 

 in reproducing some of these experimentally, using 

 a teetotum. 



Liquids. Solution. Donnau (" Nature.'' May 

 21) suggests that the dependence of the color of a 

 solution on the nature of the solvent may be due to 

 the fact that absorption of light is a case of elec- 

 trical resonance, and he deduces mathematically a 

 formula for expressing the fact that, as the index 

 of refraction of the solvent increases, the principal 

 absorption band travels toward the red a result 

 identical with the law that was deduced experi- 

 mentally by Kundt. Nicoll (Edinburgh Royal So- 

 ciety, Feb. 3) has determined the molecular volume 

 of iodine in different solutions, and finds that it is 

 constant at about 85. whether the molecule is of 

 the form I 2 or I 4 . He concludes that the molecules 

 in the gaseous form and in dilute solution are truly 

 comparable. Loomis ("Physical Review," Janu- 

 ary-February) has studied, by improved methods, 

 the lowering of the freezing point of a liquid by 

 the presence of a dissolved salt, and finds in gen- 

 eral that his results agree with the theory of elec- 

 trolytic dissociation. Guntz (Paris Academy of 

 Sciences) accounts for the energetic properties of 

 the residues of metals extracted from their amal- 

 gams at a low temperature by supposing that the 

 residue actually consists, for the most part, of tho 

 element in the atomic state. This hypothesis is 

 supported by thermo-chemical data. 



Density. Mace de Lepinay (Paris Academy of 

 Sciences, March 9), after weighing a quartz cube in 

 water, finds, as the final result, that the_mass of_ a 

 cubic decimetre of pure water at 4 C. is - 999954, 

 with a possible error of 6 units in the last figure. 



Viscosity. Thorpe and Rodger (London Royal 

 Society, June 11) have established a relationship 

 between the viscosity of liquids and their chemical 

 constitution. One of the most striking points of 

 connection is the influence exerted by oxygen ac- 

 cording to the mode of its association with other 

 atoms in the molecule, hydroxyl-oxygen differing 

 markedly in this respect from carbonyl-oxygen and 

 ether-oxygen from either. In homologous series 



