756 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXVII. No. 959 



fessor may achieve! But the experiment 

 usually serves only to continue through four 

 years further a task which a brief glance 

 through the school pedigree would have shown 

 to be hopeless against hope. Education must 

 in some way have its basis of selection and 

 differentiation no less efficient than has been 

 that of organic nature. One of the most 

 hopeful of these means, so far as the writer 

 can perceive, is through what may be desig- 

 nated as educational eugenics, the application 

 of the principles of eugenics to problems of 

 mind to the function of the schools, and pre- 

 eminently to the college and university, in the 

 same general way through which we are pre- 

 suming to secure better social and racial germ 

 plasms. 



Assuming what is now generally conceded, 

 that all human characteristics are inherited 

 in probably equal degree, and this must in- 

 clude mental traits and aptitudes, then it is 

 not Utopian to anticipate the existence of po- 

 tentialities of intellect which it may be pos- 

 sible to distinguish early in development, if 

 indeed they may not be predicted on some 

 basis such as Mendelism, and which may serve 

 as an index of fitness for or against prospec- 

 tive scholastic eminence of such nature as to 

 warrant encouragement or inhibition, as the 

 case may be. This does not imply that all 

 educational eilort need be intercepted; to the 

 contrary, it means rather differentiation of 

 aims and methods. One may give no promise 

 whatever of fitness for distinctively literary 

 or scientific or pedagogical education, yet 

 may be safely directed toward technical, voca- 

 tional or industrial education. In other 

 words, our program, like that of eugenics in 

 general, should be selective in both a positive 

 and a negative sense; fitness should be sought 

 and fostered in every reasonable way, while 

 the unfit should be deflected or diverted into 

 avenues in which some outlook may prompt 

 specialized training adapted to such better- 

 ment as may be within realization. 



Let me close as I began, with a call for 

 ampler and more critical vital statistics. 

 They are needed in almost every phase of our 

 complex modern social and civil life. They 



can be made contributory to health, to moral 

 and social conservation, and, as it seems to 

 me, to educational progress toward a degree 

 of efficiency and excellence for which it will 

 no longer be necessary to apologize or explain. 



Chas. W. Hargitt 

 Syracuse University 



to trace the lines of poece in an electro- 

 static field 



Mr. E. F. D'Arcy describes an arrange- 

 ment for tracing the lines of force of an elec- 

 trostatic field in Nature, of March 20. Mr. 

 D'Arcy's method is to support a metal ball at 

 the top of a tall glass tube standing upon a 

 float in a tray of mercury. Then, according 

 to Mr. D'Arcy, the insulated ball follows the 

 horizontal lines of force of the electric field 

 between the properly placed terminals of a 

 large electric machine. 



Another method for tracing the lines of 

 force in an electric field is described by Mr. 

 B. M. Neville in Nature of April 3. Mr. 

 Neville simply allows a scrap of cotton-wool 

 to fall between the knobs of an electric ma- 

 chine. As soon as the bit of cotton-wool 

 touches one of the terminals it becomes 

 charged and moves off rapidly along a line of 

 force. 



The most satisfactory method known to the 

 writer for tracing the lines of force in an 

 electrostatic field is to suspend a toothpick by 

 fine thread from the end of a long handle. 

 When placed in the electric field the sus- 

 pended toothpick behaves exactly like a com- 

 pass in a magnetic field, and points in the di- 

 rection of the field. 



The method suggested by Mr. D'Arcy is 

 open to the objection that an insulated metal 

 ball does not, in general, tend to move along 

 the lines of force in an electric field. The ob- 

 jection to Mr. Neville's arrangement is that 

 the piece of cotton-wool moves too rapidly. 

 W. S. Franklin 



HIGH SCHOOL BOTANY 



The fact that an idea is a decade old is not 

 necessarily a recommendation for it; but if it 



