October 8, 1909] 



SCIENCE 



479 



cians, of wLicli Esperanto is the official lan- 

 guage. Their journal for May consisted of 

 24 pages devoted to important medical sub- 

 jects. Thus far, physicians have made more 

 use of Esperanto than any other profession. 

 They realize the importance to medical sci- 

 ence of an easy means of communication be- 

 tween men of the profession all over the world 

 and are rapidly coming to make use of Es- 

 peranto for this purpose. 



Some of the large type foundries of 

 Europe are now prepared to furnish the few 

 special letters required in printing Esperanto, 

 in various styles. 



Five international congresses for Esperanto 

 have been held, between thirty-five and forty 

 nations being represented either officially or 

 unofficially in the last three. The sixth inter- 

 national congress for Esperanto will be held 

 in Washington, D. C, in August, 1910. 



A strong organization exists in Europe, with 

 headquarters at Geneva, for the production of 

 technical vocabularies for Esperanto. The 

 writer has been requested to act as secretary 

 for this organization for the United States. 

 He would be glad to communicate with sci- 

 entists in all parts of the country who may be 

 interested in this work. It will only be a few 

 years until technical vocabularies will be 

 available, so that all important results of in- 

 vestigations can be printed in Esperanto, and 

 thus become available to the whole world. 



The fact that there are eighty-six periodicals 

 published in Esperanto, eight of which are 

 published in the United States, may be taken 

 as an index of the growth of the movement for 

 an international language, a movement which 

 now seems assured. Having taken the trouble 

 to learn the language I wish to assure those 

 who are interested that the amount of labor 

 involved in learning Esperanto is certainly 

 not more than one fiftieth that required to 

 learn German. W. J. Spillman 



U. S. DEPARTJfENT OF AgBICULTCEE 

 GEOLOGY AND COSMOGONY 



To THE Editor of Science: 1. In reply to 

 Professor Barrell's communication in your 

 issue of July 2, 1909, it is sufficient to say 

 that he carefully passes over the legitimate 



question under discussion, which is that the 

 mountains are formed by the sea, and not at 

 all by the shrinkage of the earth, as taught in 

 most of the books on geology. Since he has 

 thus evaded the issue, his long-drawn-out dis- 

 cussion requires no further notice. 



2. In reply to Moulton's statement in your 

 issue of July 23, let me say that my work on 

 the spiral nebulse and on the formation of the 

 solar system, under the secular action of a 

 resisting medium, was essentially completed 

 July 14, 1908, and my subsequent application 

 for copies of his papers (received here in 

 October, 1908) was simply to enable me to 

 make exact references in some of the argu- 

 ments refuting his theories. This is well 

 known here, for I was all the while in frequent 

 consultation with members of the astronomical 

 and mathematical faculty at Berkeley, and 

 they were fully informed of the results at 

 which I had arrived. My results were held 

 back for over six months (of. A. N., 4308), 

 and so new did the conclusions appear to the 

 astronomers of the Pacific coast that when my 

 paper was given to the Astronomical Society 

 of the Pacific, January 30, 1909, several of 

 them stated in public interviews in the San 

 Francisco papers that they were exactly the 

 opposite of previous theories. 



3. In the Astrophysical Journal for October, 

 1905, Moulton develops a theory that spiral 

 nebula are formed by one star passing by 

 another, and causing spiral ejections of prom- 

 inences under tidal forces. This idea seems to 

 have originated with Chamberlin, as outlined 

 in his paper on the " Function of Disruptive 

 Approach, etc.'" Here are some of the argu- 

 ments against these Chamberlin-Moulton the- 

 ories : If such tidal disruptions were in prog- 

 ress, spiral nebula; would be prevalent in the 

 Milky Way, and above all in globular clusters; 

 such is not the case. Perrine has recently 

 shown, in Lick Observatory Bulletin No. 155, 

 that the globular clusters are quite devoid of 

 nebulosity of any kind. Lastly, if spiral 

 nebulce are due to the disruption of one star 

 by another, then both stars would usually be 

 disrupted in passage, and spiral nebulas should 



' Astrophys. Jour., 14, 17-40, 1901. 



