May 13, 1898.] 



SCIENCK 



677 



Heinrich Eies, Ph.D. (Columbia), has been 

 appointed instructor in economic geology in 

 Cornell University. 



Pkofessor J. H. Wells has been appointed 

 professor of mechanical engineering in the Uni- 

 versity of Montana. 



DISCUSSION AND COBRESPONDENCE. 



A ' CENTUEY OF GEOGRAPHY IN THE UNITED 

 STATES. ' 



To THE Editor OF Science : In the preamble 

 to his address entitled a ' Century of Geography 

 in the United States ' (this Journal, April 22, 

 1898) Mr. Marcus Baker states that he pro- 

 poses to give 'a general review of the century's 

 progress in the diffusion of geographic knowl- 

 edge in and as to the United States.' For his 

 material he looks ' not to the repulsive black 

 volumes that have for years been poured out 

 over the country from the government printing 

 office,' which represent the increase, but 'to 

 text-books, to public addresses in Congress and 

 out, to newspaper and magazine articles, and 

 to public lectures,' which represent the di^usiore 

 of geographic knowledge. 



. While it would thus appear that Mr. Baker 

 had intended his address to be of a popular 

 rather than of a scientific nature, yet this does 

 not justify him in making misleading or in- 

 correct statements in regard to the sources from 

 which his geographic knowledge is derived. 

 Such statements are even more liable to do 

 harm in popular addresses than in scientific 

 ones, for the reason that his hearers are less 

 likely to verify them by reference to the origi- 

 nal sources of information. 



I beg to call the attention of your readers, 

 therefore, to certain of these inaccuracies and 

 misleading statements that have attracted my 

 notice. 



1. Powell's first voyage through the canyons 

 of the Colorado was not made in the same year 

 that Alaska was purchased, but two years after, 

 or in 1869. 



2. The statement that, at the time the U. S. 

 Geological Survey undertook the gigantic task 

 of making a topographical map of the entire 

 United States, ' topographic maps did not exist,' 



except of 'a fringe of lake and seacoast,' is not 

 only misleading, but does injustice to the work 

 of the earlier organizations, without essentially 

 enhancing that of the present, to which Mr. 

 Baker is now attached. The earlier topo- 

 graphical work which Mr. Baker ignores in- 

 cludes nearly 90,000 square miles in a belt 

 extending entirely across the Cordilleran system 

 mapped both topographically and geologically 

 by the 40th parallel survey and an area of 

 about 70,000 square miles in Colorado and ad- 

 joining States mapped in like manner by the 

 Hayden survey. While these maps are on a 

 smaller scale, and hence give less detail than 

 those made by the present organization, they 

 have been proved by long test to possess a 

 substantial accuracy commensurate with their 

 scale, and are not surpassed or even equalled by 

 corresponding maps in any part of the world. 

 3. Finally, while enumerating in considerable 

 detail all the other organizations which have 

 contributed to our knowledge of the geography 

 of the country, Mr. Baker has studiously avoided 

 all mention of the Fortieth Parallel Survey, the 

 first to introduce modern methods of topo- 

 graphic surveying into American cartography 

 and to whose pioneer work all the subsequent 

 organizations have been more or less indebted, 

 as I showed in my address on the ' Geology of 

 Government Explorations,' published in this 

 Journal in January, 1897. 



S. F. Emmons. 



COLOR VISION. 



My thanks are due Professor Titchener for 

 his appreciative criticism and reply to my re- 

 cent paper on Color Vision. He confirms some 

 of my most important points in showing that 

 the number of competitors for the credit of new 

 color hypotheses is even greater than I had sup- 

 posed. It is reassuring to be told that "The 

 psychologist must know them in the sense that 

 he must know his literature at large. He is no 

 more disturbed by them, however, than is the 

 biologist by the thousand and one theories of 

 heredity and transmission that have been for- 

 mulated since the days of pangenesis." 



I am quite willing to be corrected by so com- 

 petent a psychologist if I was mistaken in think- 

 ing that Wundt's hypothesis has a good follow- 



