CCXXXIX 



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Science, at one time, belonged to the few — the learned. She was 

 paraded on such high stilts, clothed in such uncommon garb, that the 

 gulf intervening between her votaries and the masses precluded all affec- 

 tion or appreciation for her by the latter. To the tendency of the one 

 class to break the cold, stiff crust of technicality which environed them, 

 and to the increased intelligence of the other, must in great measure be 

 attributed the extraordinary advancement of science of late years, and its 

 increasing popularization. She to-day belongs, not to the few, but to the 

 multitude ; and merely to chronicle her progress has become an art. The 

 collector in Nature's treasure-store, though thirsting for all knowledge the 

 mind is capable of, and loth to slight any specimen whatsoever that may 

 cross his path, yet, knowing the shortness of individual human life, passes 

 by the majority of the objects which he meets with, and confines his atten- 

 tion to those which more particularly belong to the department which he 

 has made a specialty of, and which he consequently best understands. Let 

 me in the same way pass over the great multitude of interesting subjects 

 that confront the chronicler of a year's progress in science, and confine 

 myself to a few of the more conspicuous events, and more particularly in 

 American science and in paths most trodden by our own members, and, 

 hence, most familiar to us. 



PHYSICS. 



A. M. Mayer has continued his researches in acoustics, determining the 

 conditions under which one sound may obliterate another. 



C. A. Young, of Hanover, N. H., has devised a method by which the 

 spectra of higher orders (even to the eighth or tenth) produced by gratings, 

 can be used for spectroscopic work. These are to be preferred, as their 

 dispersion is greater, and lines which appear single in those of lower or- 

 ders are seen double in the eighth or tenth spectrum. Ordinarily these 

 spectra overlap, and Young separates them by refracting them with a prism 

 in a direction at right angles to the direction of the dispersion by the grat- 

 ing. With this contrivance he has just demonstrated the displacement 

 of lines in the solar spectrum due to solar rotation, thus proving the appli- 

 cability of Doppler's principle of light — a theory which the researches of 

 Van der Willigen and Secchi had caused astronomers to doubt. 



A. H. Rowland, of John Hopkins University, has made important stu- 

 dies in the distribution of magnetism in bar magnets. He reaches the 

 conclusion that hardening is more useful in short-bar magnets than in 

 needles, and that boring a hole in the centre of the magnet is, in general, 

 hurtful. J. Trowbridge, of Harvard, demonstrates experimentally that by 

 distributing the fine wire of an induction coil upon two straight electro- 

 magnets (instead of one), whose poles are provided with armatures con- 

 sisting of bundles of thin, soft iron plates, the strength of the spark is 

 increased 400 per cent, when large condensers are used. 



A. S.Kimball, of the Worcester (Mass.) Institute of Industrial Science, 

 has investigated "Sliding Friction on an Inclined Plane," and finds that 

 the co-efficient of friction is a function of the velocity when the inclination 



