Januabt 29, 1909] 



SCIENCE 



191 



■of colored photographs that often elicited 

 •applause from the audience. This paper will 

 be printed in full in the Journal of the Anthro- 

 pological Institute. Dr. Furness has traveled 

 a great deal in the far east and his compari- 

 sons of the Nagas with the interior tribes of 

 'Borneo will prove of value — as he knows them 

 all so well, as is proved by his recently pub- 

 lished magnificent volume on " The Home-life 

 of Borneo Head-hunters " (Lippincott Co.) 

 and by the very valuable collection he has 

 tgiven to the Free Science and Art Museum of 

 Philadelphia. Dr. Fumess does not find a 

 ■very close resemblance between the Nagas and 

 Borneans which some have expected should 

 ■occur. The Report of the Students Ethno- 

 logical Survey of Canada Committee is prac- 

 tically nothing more than a memoir by Mx. C. 

 Hill-Tout on the Mainland Halkome'lEm, a 

 •division of the Salish of British Columbia, 

 but more especially with the Tcil'qe'uk and 

 Kwa'ntlEn tribes of the Lower Fraser Eiver. 

 These ethnological studies run to over ninety 

 pages, the greater number of which are de- 

 ■voted to linguistics. The Royal Society of 

 Canada has at least awakened to the im- 

 portance of recording the rapidly vanishing 

 lore of the Canadian aborigines and it is to 

 Tdc hoped that some action will now result and 

 •that the Canadian government will assist in 

 this important national work. The reading 

 ■by Mr. J. L. Myres of a suggestive paper 

 ■written by Dr. W. H. Holmes, entitled " The 

 Classification and Arrangement of the Ex- 

 hibits in an Anthropological Museum" led to 

 a very interesting discussion in which Dr. W. 

 E. Hoyle, Professor Boyd Dawkins, both of 

 the Manchester Museum, Mr. H. Balfour, of 

 the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford; Mr. G. 

 Coffey, of the Royal Irish Academy Museum, 

 Dublin; Mr. E. Lovett, and Dr. A. C. Haddon 

 took part. Several speakers referred to char- 

 acteristic features of American museums and 

 pointed out some of the ways in which the 

 English museums could be rendered more in- 

 structive and popular. It is beginning to be 

 realized that a museum should be the educa- 

 tional center of a to-wn, but in order to be that 

 it must itself first be educational in its scope. 



H. 



SPECIAL ARTICLES 



THE PRESENCE OF 'WATER VAPOR IN THE ATMOS- 

 PHERE OF MARS DEMONSTRATED BY 

 QUANTITATIVE MEASUREMENTS 



In 1867, Huggins first announced his de- 

 tection of a slight intensification of the bands 

 of aqueous absorption in the spectrum of 

 Mars. The observation was an exceedingly 

 delicate one, and resting, as it did, solely on 

 eye-estimates of the relative intensities of 

 weak lines which certainly do not differ very 

 much in appearance, it is not remarkable that 

 other observers, with even more powerful 

 instnunents, have declined to endorse the 

 supposed intensification of aqueous bands, 

 and have even denied its existence. Vogel, 

 indeed, came to the aid of Huggins in 1873, 

 and the opinion of two such accomplished 

 observers was worth something. The ques- 

 tion, however, up to the present time, has re- 

 mained a matter of opinion only, with the 

 honors about equally divided, the Lick ob- 

 servers declaring positively that no intensifi- 

 cation was visible. 



Under these circumstances. Professor 

 Lowell's announcement that Mr. V. M. 

 Slipher had succeeded' in photographing the 

 little a band in the spectrum of Mars under 

 conditions which left no doubt of its' rela- 

 tively greater strength, may have passed with 

 some as no more than a fresh subject for 

 incredulity, and one to be relegated to the 

 same limbo of " matter of opinion." I there- 

 fore resolved to try to place these observations 

 on a more solid basis, and with material aid 

 from Professor Lowell, who has generously 

 placed at my disposal the means for testing 

 my ideas, I am now able not only to confirm 

 Mr. Slipher's discovery, but to give numerical 

 values for the amount of intensification of 

 the a band. Besides this, it now becomes pos- 

 sible to give an approximate estimate of the 

 amount of water vapor which is present in 

 the air of Mars. 



The instrument with which the examina- 

 tion of the spectrograms is made, I call a 

 spectral band-comparator. It can be used for 

 comparing the intensities of either lines or 

 bands in two different spectra, but was more 

 especially intended for the examination of 



