September 19, 1895] 



NATURE 



507 



One of the first and most important matters of business pre- 

 sented was in reference to the proposed meeting of the British 

 Association in Toronto in 1897. The writer offered a resolution 

 cordially inviting the Association, in case they decide to accept 

 the invitations already sent them from Toronto to hold the 

 meeting there, to attend our meeting also as our guests, and re- 

 questing them to send early notice of the time of meeting to 

 the Permanent Secretary of our Association, that ample time 

 may be had to make suitable arrangements, and to renew the 

 delightful memories of the Philadelphia meeting in 1884. This 

 was referred to the Permanent Secretarj' with power. 



Should the Association come to America as proposed, it 

 seems probable that the long-deferred San Krancisco meeting 

 will then be held, as it is believed that many visitors will 

 desire to cross the continent by the Canadian Pacific Rail- 

 road, which was incomplete at the time of the Montreal 

 meeting in 1884 ; but many who attended that meeting went 

 as far w est as the road would then take them. As Sir Wm. 

 C. \'an Home, President of that road, is a member of the British 

 Association, and has been a member of ours, his influence is 

 relied on to secure favourable rates of transportation. Still 

 another factor is that the Christian Endeavour Societies expect 

 to meet at San Francisco in 1897, and as they are a mighty 

 army — 70,000 attended the Boston meeting this summer — the 

 railroads usually offer exceptional rates to secure their patronage, 

 and the .Associations can share in the benefit of the reduction. 



Of the 207 ]iapers read before the several Sec'ions, many 

 might be mentioned. The subject of colour and colour 

 standards, on which Mr. I'illsbury had an article in a recent 

 number of N'aturk, was presented by him and others, and reso- 

 lutions were passed looking toward the establishment of a colour 

 standard. E. R. von Xardroft' exhibited and described a new 

 apparatus for studying colour phenomena. Colour photography 

 was discussed and photographs exhibited by F. E. Ives. 



A process for photographing the vocal cords in action has 

 been discovered ijy F. S. Mucliey and Wm. Hallock, and it is 

 found that the pitch of a note is raised by rotating the arytenoid 

 cartilages without increasing the tension of the cords, just as a 

 violinist makes high notes by shortening the string with his 

 finger. \'oice analysis also has been studied by Messrs. Hallock 

 and Muckey, by an ingenious system of resonators for the funda- 

 mental and seven overtones, covering three octaves from the 

 fundamental C. These resonators are so arranged that the 

 vibration of each causes the flickering of a tiny gas jet, and by 

 obser%ing these it can be seen which of the overtones are sound- 

 ing, and by drawing straight or wavy lines to correspond with 

 each of these, a picture of the tone can be made. This will 

 enable a singer to see every tone in his voice, and learn wherein 

 he needs to correct it. 



The Weather Bureau of the United States supplied experts to 

 fill up an afternoon in a joint meeting of four Sections. Willis L. 

 Moore, the new chief of the bureau, spoke of the work in hand 

 and that ci>ntemplated. An elaborate scheme of observation of 

 upper strata of the air by kites and balloons and kite-balloons is 

 to be carried out ; and regular observations are to be made of 

 "sensible temperature" by the wet bulb thermometer. 



Frank N. Bigelow, in his jmper on .solar magnetic radiation 

 and weather forecasts, made some very remarkable statements. 

 The sun, he says, throws out curved lines of magnetic force. 

 These are connected with sun-spots, and with storms on the 

 earth. They have been studied by him so carefully that he fixes 

 the time of the .sun's axial revolution more accurately than ever 

 before at 26-67928 days, with a probable error only in the last 

 or possibly the two last figures. A surprising inference from his 

 studies is that the earth has a crust 800 miles thick, and the sun 

 has also a crust. Future investigation will supply data for a long 

 forecast of seasonal weather conditions, years ahead. Cleveland 

 Abbe followed with a paper on clouds and their nomenclature, 

 and Alfred J. Henry with some very beautiful cloud photographs. 



Electro-metallurgy has made rapid strides, and a paper on 

 calcium carbide, by P. de Chalmot and J. T. Morehead,gavean 

 account of the process used at their works in Spray, N'.C, for 

 cheap producti(jn of this compound by smelting together hme 

 and coke in the electric furnace. This enables them to produce 

 acetylene, the illuminating principle of gas, much cheaper than 

 any other process. 



A paper on the new process of making white-lead by electric 

 action was read by R. P. Williams before the .American Chemical 

 Society, which met at Si)ri[igfield two days earlier than the 

 Association. Mr. Williams describes the process, which will work 



NO. 1351, VOL. 52] 



a revolution in this industry. Instead of acetate of lead, as in 

 the old process, sodium nitrate is used together with sodium 

 bicarbonate. A number of cells are filled with the solution, with 

 plates of lead at one pole and of copper at the other. The 

 current from a dynamo causes nitric acid to be liberated and tc 

 combine with the lead. A number of reactions occur, with the 

 final production of white-lead in a very fine and uniform state 

 and of superior colouring quality. The chemicals can be re-used 

 indefinitely. As many as 500 pounds have already been made 

 at one charge. 



The Economic Section has always been one of great popular 

 interest. The monetary question, monometallism or bimetallism, 

 by J. W. Sylvester and Henry Farquhar ; taxation in the United 

 States, by Edward Atkinson ; growth of great cities, by E, L. 

 Corthell ; manual training in horticulture, by W. R. Lazenby, 

 were among the matters treated of. An effort was made to 

 widen the scope of this Section by a change of name. Its name 

 — Section of Economic Science and Statistics — was deemed 

 peculiarly undesirable, and after much discussion of the re- 

 spective merits of " sociologj- " and ".social and economic 

 science,'' the latter title was adopted as the name of Section I. 



Buffalo was unanimously chosen as the next place of meeting, 

 following the practice of the Association to meet at that city 

 every tenth year, beginning with 1866, when 79 members there 

 reorganised the Association after six years of suspended animation, 

 during which no meeting had been held. 



The time for meeting was much controverted. The Council 

 recommended a change to Monday as the opening day, which 

 met decided opposition, and on an informal vote 30 were op- 

 posed to it and only 27 favoured it ; but opposition at length 

 gave way, and the next meeting will begin on Monday, August 

 24, 1896, at Buffalo. 



Officers elected were — President : Edward D. Cope, of Phila- 

 delphia. Vice-Presidents : A, Mathematics and Astronomy, 

 William E. Story of Worcester ; B, Physics, Carl Leo Mees of 

 Terre Haute, Ind. ; C, Chemistry, W. A. NoyesofTerre Haute, 

 Ind. ; D, Mechanical Science and Engineering, Frank O. 

 Marvin of Lawrence, Kan. ; E, Geology and Geography, B. 

 K. Emerson of Amherst ; F, Zoolog)-, Theodore N. Gill of 

 Washington ; G, Botany, N. L. Britton of New A'ork city ; H, 

 Anthropolog)-, Alice C. Fletcher of Washington ; I, Social 

 Science, William R. Lazenby of Columbus, O. Permanent 

 Secretary : V. W. Putnam of Cambridge. General Secretary : 

 Charles R. Barnes of Madison, Wis. Secretary of the Council : 

 Asaph Hall, Junr.,of Ann .\rbor, Mich. Secretaries of the Sec- 

 tions : A, .\Iathematics and .\stronomy, Edwin B. Frost of 

 Hanover, N. II. ; B, Physics, Frank P. Whitman of Cleveland, 

 O. ; C, Chemistry. Frank P. Venable of Chapel Hill, N.C. ; 

 D, Mechanical Science and Engineering, John Galbraith of 

 Toronto, Can. ; E, Geology and Geography, .\. C. Gill of 

 Ithaca, N. V. ; F, Zoology, D. S. Keliicott of Columbus, O. ; 

 G, Botany, George F. Atkinson of Ithaca, N.V. ; H, Anthropo- 

 '"gy- John G. Bourke, United Stales Army; I, Social Science, 

 R. T. Colburn of Elizabeth, N'.J. Treasurer, R. S. Woodward 

 of New York. Wm. H. H.m.e. 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 



{^rhe Editor does not hold himself responsible for opinions ex- 

 pressed by his correspondents. Neither can he undertake 

 to return, or to correspond with the writers of, rejected 

 tnanuscripts intended for this or any other part of Nati;re. 

 No notice is taken of anonymous communications.'\ 



August Meteors. — Red Spot on Jupiter. 



As supplementary to my paper on the .\ugust meteors (Nature, 

 No. 1347. -August 22) and to Prof. A. S. Her.schel's interesting 

 letter on the same subject (Xo. 1349, September 5), I may note 

 that a further comparison of the recent observations has revealed 

 two additional instances of doubly observed meteors. 



On -August II, loh. 59m., Prof. Herschel at Slough recorded 

 a meteor equal in brightness to a first magnitude star and moving 

 swiftly along a path of 22.J" from 264' + 52° to 252° + 31°, or 

 from the head of Draco into Hercules. The meteor left a long, 

 thin, white streak for 2 sees., and the duration of flight was 

 estinrated as I sec. Mr. H. Corder, at Bridgwater, observed 

 the same object, noting the time as loh. 58m., and the apparent 

 path as 23° -f 53i° to 14° -I- 50° between Cassiopeia and 

 Andromeila. 



