Januaet 7, 1921] 



SCIENCE 



21 



Each newly discovered one is of interest and 

 perhaps a note should be made of the occur- 

 rence of a rather large dike recently found. 

 It has been exposed at the eastern side of the 

 Portland cement quarry east of Shurger Point, 

 six miles north of Ithaca. It is the first of the 

 Ithaca region dikes found in limestone and is 

 exposed for the height of the Tully limestone 

 at the north and south walls of the quarry and 

 in the shales along the quarry bed. 



No contact action was noticed. In places 

 there is a thin calcite streak at the side of the 

 dike, in others there is a tight contact between 

 dike and wall rock. Strise on the calcite gave 

 evidence of horizontal movement. The dike 

 varies in width from 11" to 18" and is decid- 

 edly green, due to the serpentine in it. It 

 strikes about N 3° E., parallel to the dip 

 joints, like all the dikes near Ithaca. There 

 may be some connection between this dike 

 and a group of smaller dikes east of Ludlow- 

 ville, two miles to the north. 



Pearl Sheldon 



Cornell tlNivEKSiaT 



THE HAWAIIAN OLONA 



! To THE Editor op Science : In Science^ for 

 September 10, 1920, p. 240, Mr. Vaughan Mac- 

 Caughey again calls attention to the remark- 

 ably durable fiber of the Hawaiian Olona, and 

 quotes Dr. N. Eussel's rather inaccurate ac- 

 count of the people making the fiber and its 

 products, fish nets and cords, some used espe- 

 cially for fish-lines. In view of the possible 

 importance of this product, it seems worth 

 while to correct certain statements. The name 

 of the bird caught for its yellow feathers was 

 0-0 not O-u. As late as 1864, when the pres- 

 ent writer first visited the Hawaiian Islands, 

 there were some natives at Olaa still beating 

 the mamake kapa and twisting the olona fiber 

 on their thighs. On the island of Molokai, as 

 late as 1889 a photograph was taken of a na- 

 tive scraping the fiber. Surely Mr. Mac- 

 Caughey must be aware that in the Bishop 

 Museum in Honolulu, is a fine cast from life of 

 a native preparing this fine fiber, and there are 



1 N. S., Vol. LII., No. 1341. 



many specimens of both the raw material, the 

 finished product and the laau Jcahiolond or 

 scraper which was sometimes a shell papaua 

 (Meleagrina margaritifera) but more com- 

 monly a sharpened bone from the back of the 

 lionu, a sea turtle not a (fish, as Dr. Eussel 

 has it). The boards were made of any hard 

 wood; the naou of Dr. Eussel was perhaps the 

 naio, or bastard sandalwood. 



As a specimen of the remarkable durability 

 of the fiber, there is in the Bishop Museum a 

 ball of fish-line used by the Kamehamehas for 

 a hundred years and it is still in perfect con- 

 dition. 



William T. Brigham 



QUOTATIONS 



PROFESSOR MICHELSON ON THE APPLICATION 

 OF INTERFERENCE METHODS TO ASTRO- 

 NOMICAL MEASUREMENTS 



The first information Professor A. S. Ed- 

 dington, Plumian professor of astronomy at 

 Cambridge University, received that his theo- 

 retical deductions concerning the angular 

 diameters of certain stars and of the Betel- 

 geuse, in particular, had been confirmed by 

 Professor Michelson [in his paper at the Chi- 

 cago meeting] was from a cable message from 

 the New York Times. He was extremely in- 

 terested and delighted at the results obtained 

 and is anxiously awaiting full details. 



Talking to the New York Times correspond- 

 ent he pointed out that many years ago Pro- 

 fessor Michelson suggested a plan for measur- 

 ing, at any rate to a much greater degree of 

 accuracy than before, diameters of stars by the 

 wave theory of light. 



" For some time now," he said, " they have 

 been carrying on these experiments at Mount 

 Wilson, and I presume that it is there that 

 these most interesting results have been ob- 

 tained. The great difficulty that they have had 

 to contend with has, of course, been what is 

 known as atmospheric tremor. They have been 

 trying Michelson's methods and previously had 

 obtained some very interesting results, but 

 these were only with regard to very close double 

 stars. By this means they got some very suc- 

 cessful results with double stars, but when they 



