662 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S, Vol. VII. No. 176. 



it has been possible to see in the chromo- 

 spheric spectrum a great number of faint 

 bright lines which were wholly beyond the 

 reach of the 12-inch telescope used in my 

 previous investigations. In this way it has 

 been found that carbon vapor exists in the 

 vaporous sea which covers the brilliant sur- 

 face of the photosphere. 



It will be admitted, I think, from what 

 has been said, that great telescopes really 

 have a mission to perform. While, on the 

 one hand, they are not endowed with the 

 almost miraculous gifts which imaginative 

 persons would place to their credit, they do 

 possess properties which render them much 

 superior to smaller instruments and well 

 worth all the expenditure their construc- 

 tion has involved. In answering the ques- 

 tion : ' Do large telescopes pay ?' it is simply 

 a matter of determining whether the work 

 which cannot be done without the aid of 

 such telescopes is really worth doing. !N"o 

 one who is familiar with this work is likely 

 to deny that it is worth all the money and 

 time and labor that can be devoted to 

 it. I therefore confidently believe that the 

 generous benefactions which during the last 

 quarter century have permitted the erec- 

 tion of large telescopes in various parts of 

 the world have been wisely directed, and 

 that further sums might well be expended, 

 particularly in the southern hemisphere, in 

 the establishment of still more powerful 

 instruments. 



George E. Hale. 



JULIUS SACHS* 

 Aftek great suffering, Julius Sachs sank 

 peacefully to rest at six o'clock on the 

 morning of the 29th May, 1897, at Wiirz- 

 burg, the scene for many years of his labors. 

 Wherever scientific botany has a home, 

 and by many outside the narrow circle of 



* A translation for Science Progress, by Miss E. D. 

 Shipley, from an article by Professor K. Goebel in 

 Flora. 



specialists, this loss has been regarded as 

 irreparable. By no one has it been felt 

 more keenly than by the writer of these 

 lines, who will always thankfully recall the 

 happiness it has been to him to have been 

 closely connected throughout a long series 

 of years as pupil and friend with him who 

 has passed from our midst. 



When I attempt to briefly sketch the life 

 of the man to whose brilliant intellect 

 botany is so greatly indebted, there rises 

 involuntarily to my mind the saying of 

 Petrarch's : 



Si quis tota die currens 

 Pervenit ad vesperam satis est. 



Yes, his life was a struggle, a ceaseless, 

 single-minded pressing forward without 

 rest to the goal of knowledge. To him 

 study, research, teaching, were not merely 

 the external activities of his calling that 

 might be laid aside for hours, days or even 

 weeks, and then be again resumed. They 

 absorbed his whole being more than was 

 good for his personal welfare. But the , 

 evening came after this long day in which 

 he had so faithfully labored. No one 

 realized this more fully than he himself. 

 A prey to physical suffering, his sharpest 

 pang was that he could no longer work for 

 science with his former energy, and if any- 

 thing made it hard for him to face death 

 it was the knowledge that he must leave 

 behind as an unfinished sketch much that 

 he wanted to say to the world. 



He had been chiefly occupied during these 

 last years with a work which, under the 

 title of Pi'incipien Vegetabilischer Gestaltung 

 (^Principles of Vegetable Form), was to set 

 forth his views upon causal morphology. 

 " I should feel it an immense grief if I were 

 prevented from writing this book," he says. 

 ' ' It would embody the thought of forty 

 years, and it is alwaj^s important that one's 

 ideas should be long and thoroughly brooded 

 over. To finish it would render the last 



