POPULAR MISCELLANY. 



that, regarding a plant or an animal as aa 

 organism, we concern ourselves primarily 

 with its activities or its energies. These are 

 naturally distinguishable into two kinds, ac- 

 cording as we consider the action of the 

 whole organism in its relation to the exter- 

 nal world or to other organisms, or the ac- 

 tion of the parts or organs in their relation 

 to each other. This distinction has always 

 existed, but has only lately come into such 

 prominence that it divides biologists into 

 two camps those who make it their aim to 

 investigate the action of the organism and 

 its parts by the accepted methods of phys- 

 ics and chemistry ; and those who interest 

 themselves rather in considering the place 

 which each organism occupies and the % part 

 it plays in the economy of Nature. 



A Tear's Work in Physics. Among the 

 notable papers of the year resulting from 

 studies in physics, Mr. R. T. Glazebrook, sec- 

 tional president in the British Association, 

 mentioned Mr. E. R. Griffith's redetermina- 

 tion of the mechanical equivalent of heat 

 a work which it has taken five years 

 to complete. With the exception of one 

 group of experiments the results differ by 

 less than one part in ten thousand. During 

 his investigation Mr. Griffith proved an exact 

 accordance between the scale of tempera- 

 ture as determined by comparing his plati- 

 num thermometer with the air thermometer 

 made in 1890 by Callendar and himself, and 

 that of the nitrogen thermometer of the 

 Bureau International at Sevres. Among 

 other long investigations completed during 

 the year was Rowland's Table of Standard 

 Wave Lengths. The photographic map of 

 the solar spectrum taken by Mr. Riggs with 

 a Rowland grating was also finished. Lord 

 Rayleigh's paper on the Intensity of Light 

 reflected from Water and Mercury at nearly 

 perpendicular incidence, combined with the 

 experiments on reflection from liquid sur- 

 faces in the neighborhood of the polarizing 

 angle, establishes results of the utmost im- 

 portance in optical theory. " There is," says 

 Lord Rayleigh, "no experimental evidence 

 against the rigorous application of Fresnel's 

 formula for the reflection of polarized 

 light to the ideal case of an abrupt tran- 

 sition between two uniform transparent 

 media." Prof. Dewar has continued his ex- 



periments on the liquefaction of oxygen and 

 nitrogen on a large scale. To a physicist 

 perhaps the most important results of the 

 research are the discovery of the magnetic 

 properties of liquid oxygen, and the proof of 

 the fact that the resistance of certain pure 

 metals vanishes at absolute zero. The last 

 discovery is borne out by Griffiths and Cal- 

 lendar's experiments with their platinum 

 thermometers. Mr. Williams's article on 

 the Relation of the Dimensions of Physical 

 Quantities to Directions in Space led to an 

 interesting discussion. 



The Polar Basin. In his presidential ad- 

 dress before the Geographical Section of the 

 British Association Mr. Henry Seebohm, after 

 stating that the foundation of all geography 

 is exploration, and that its scientific study 

 requires a knowledge of cartography and of 

 meteorology or climatology, elaborated these 

 subjects in detail, taking the polar basin as 

 an example. There is, he said, only ne 

 polar basin ; the relative distribution of land 

 and water and the geographical distribution 

 of light and heat in the arctic region are ab- 

 solutely unique. In no other part of the 

 world is a similar climate to be found. The 

 distribution of land and water round the 

 south pole is almost the converse of that 

 round the north pole. In the one we have 

 a mountain of snow and ice covering a lofty 

 mass of congealed water surrounded by an 

 ocean stretching away with very little inter- 

 ruption from land to the confines of the 

 tropics. In the other we have a basin of 

 water surrounding a comparatively flat plain 

 of pack ice, some of which is probably per- 

 manent (the so-called palacocrystic sea), but 

 most of which is driven hither and thither 

 in summer by winds and currents, and is 

 walled in by continental and island barriers 

 broken only by the narrow outlets of Bering 

 Strait and Baffin's Bay, and the broader gulf 

 which leads to the Atlantic Ocean, and even 

 that interrupted by Iceland, Spitzbergen, and 

 Franz Josef Land. If we assume that the 

 unknown regions are principally sea, then 

 the polar basin, including the area drained 

 by all rivers flowing into the Arctic Sea, may 

 be roughly estimated to contain about 14,- 

 000,000 square miles, of which half is land 

 and half water. In the coldest part of the 

 basin the land is either glacier or tundra, 



