March 4, 1921] 



SCIENCE 



213 



like to blow a blast on a David Wilbur Horn. 

 To him I will say merely " Quis custodiet 

 ipsos oustodes ? " Let the chemist take heed 

 when murdering romance lest he also murder 

 Cicero. I beg to associate myself with that 

 veteran story-teller, T. C. Mendenhall, whose 

 stories were so good that it never occurred to 

 any one to doubt them. 



I will take a little whack at the Galileo 

 story myself, after relating my experience 

 with the Wood story. In the summer of 1912 

 I was on the train going from London " up " 

 to Cambridge with the guests for the quarter 

 millenium of the Eoyal Society when I heard 

 Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler telling it to Sir 

 Oliver Lodge, and I assisted him, as Professor 

 Wood had told it to me several years before 

 as having happened at Easthampton. What 

 was my surprise then at seeing Professor 

 Campbell's account as happening later at the 

 Lick Observatory! I immediately wrote him 

 and Professor Wood. In my opinion Wood's 

 story is the better, but I never could believe 

 that the deiinition in that revolving mercury 

 paraboloid could be good enough for a farmer 

 to make such an observation. I always felt 

 that this telescoi)e in the well was one of 

 Professor Wood's jokes. It was particularly 

 wooden. Perhaps Professor Wood will par- 

 don me if I insert some lines that I wrote 

 in his guest book expressing my feelings on 

 the subject. It will easily be seen that I am 

 no great poet. 



Ding, dong, bell, 



Prof is in the well. 



What did he put in? 



Lots of time and tin.i 



What did he get out? 



Nothing, just about. 



What a silly prof was that, 



He never knew what he was at. 



I am bound to admit that the Eoyal Society 

 did not agree with me when they elected him 

 a foreign member. 



As for Galileo, some years ago I was in- 

 vited to deliver an address at the dedication 

 of a new physical laboratory at a great uni- 

 versity not a thousand miles from here. Sup- 



1 Poetic for mercury. 



posing I was to be " the big noise " I pre- 

 pared an address about an hour long, but was 

 somewhat disconcerted on being introduced 

 by the dean in an address of about half an 

 hour, in which much of the wind was taken 

 out of my sails. In it he used the words, 

 " When Galileo dropped the two weights from 

 the tower of Pisa he sounded the death-knell 

 of the Aristotelian philosophy." Singularly 

 enough the same sentence occurred in my 

 address. But I had my revenge. In begin- 

 ning I disclaimed all possibility of thought- 

 transference, and when I came to the quoted 

 words I added " as Sir Oliver Lodge says." I 

 was rewarded with roars of laughter, and 

 when I arrived at the club was told that the 

 joke was much appreciated, as the dean was 

 not popular. The joke would have been on 

 me, however, if my manuscript had been 

 looked at, for no more than the dean had I 

 given Lodge credit for the remark that we 

 both had cribbed. He laughs best who laughs 

 last, for the dean is now president of that 

 great university, while the subscriber is even 

 less of a noise that he was then. However, 

 hurrah for history! was it Napoleon who 

 called it " mensonges convenus " ? 



Arthur Gordon Webster 

 WoRCEsi-EE, Mass., 

 February 13 



ARCHEOLOGICAL SPECIMENS FOR MUSEUMS 



The curator of the Museum at Phillips 

 Academy has received authority from the 

 trustees to reduce the number of specimens 

 possessed by the department of archeology. 

 We have large numbers of various objects in 

 stone, bone and clay, found during the course 

 of our explorations in New England, the 

 Middle West and the South. We propose as- 

 sembling collections ranging from 500 to as 

 high as 4,000 si)eoimens, all recorded as to 

 locality from our catalogue, etc., and to send 

 these to museums, natural history societies, 

 etc. There is no condition, but it is requested 

 that certain of the specimens be exhibited. 

 They will be found of value to students. 

 These exhibits have cost us a great deal to 

 accumulate, and while we ask no financial 



