42 REPORTS ON THE STATE OF SCIENCE.—1914. 
a competent Director, with the requisite mathematical knowledge, 
cannot be put lower than 5001. or 600]. a year, and there is at 
present no prospect of obtaining even this endowment. The super- 
intendence has, of course, been hitherto provided voluntarily by Milne 
himself; and a certain amount of volunteer attention is available for 
the present. But seismology is developing so rapidly that the whole- 
hearted attention of at least one English mathematician should be 
devoted to it; and if an endowment for a British Director could be 
obtained this would surely be the most direct method of doing 
justice to a new and fascinating science which was nurtured by an 
Englishman. The negative result of previous appeals to the Govern- 
ment does not encourage the hope of their taking any action, and 
the chief hope thus lies in the direction of private benefaction. 
Is it too much to hope that some generous benefactor will provide a 
firm footing for seismology ? 
The present state of affairs is as follows:—The Shide Observatory 
is rented from Mrs. Milne at 20]. a year. The work of the Shide 
station and the collation of results from other stations is being 
done by Mr. J. H. Burgess, who assisted Professor Milne in the later 
years of his life, especially after the return of Shinobu Hirota to 
Japan. At the time of Professor Milne’s death the work of collation 
was in arrear; and in order to bring it up to date assistance is 
being temporarily rendered by Mr. 8. W. Pring (who had already 
considerable knowledge of the work) and his daughter. The general 
superintendence is undertaken by the Chairman of this Committee, 
partly by correspondence and partly by personal visits to Shide (on 
September 20-21, January 17-20, March 29-April 2, and May 9-11). 
Registers. Card Catalogue System. Monthly Bulletins.—The 
form of the Circulars has been changed. Up to the present the in- 
formation supplied by each individual station has been printed separ- 
ately, thus leaving the formal collation of results to others. But 
since a good deal of collation was actually done at Shide in order 
to eliminate accidental tremors from the records, it seemed desirable 
to render this work generally available at the cost of a slight 
extension. The collation was formerly done in a large book with 
ruled columns, one double page being devoted to each month. In 
place of this a card catalogue system has been adopted. The 
information supplied by the stations is copied on to cards, a separate 
card for each day. A cabinet of twelve drawers (one for each calendar 
month) has been made, each drawer divided into 32 partitions (4 x 8) 
corresponding to the days of the month (with 1—4 over), and the 
cards are slipped into the proper partition as they are copied off. 
When all the records have been received for the month (and the 
stations have been asked kindly to send their records each month) it 
is easily seen by comparison of the different cards in any partition 
which are the important quakes and which are microseisms or 
accidental tremors. For the first few months of 1913 details were 
printed for all disturbances recorded at more than four stations; but 
experience quickly showed that much of this information was of 
