736 
Proressork Gorpon H. True has been ap- 
pointed director of the Nevada Experiment 
Station, at Reno. 
Dr. ArtHuR B. Lams, protessor of chem- 
istry and director of the Havemeyer Chemical 
Laboratory of New York University, has been 
appointed assistant professor of chemistry at 
Harvard University. Professor Solon I. 
Bailey has been promoted to the Philips chair 
of astronomy vacant by the retirement. of 
Professor Arthur Searle, and Dr. Charles 
Palache has been promoted to a full professor- 
ship of mineralogy. 
Dr. Ira W. Howerty, of the University of 
Chicago, has been appointed professor of edu- 
cation and director of university extension in 
the University of California. Dr. J. C. Mer- 
riam has been promoted to a full professorship 
of paleontology. 
Dr. W. M. Concer Morea, assistant pro- 
fessor of chemistry at the University of Cali- 
fornia, has been appointed professor of chem- 
istry in Reed College. 
Dr. Franz DoFLetn, associate professor of 
zoology at Munich, has been called to the 
chair of zoology at Freiburg. 
DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE 
NON-EUCLWEAN GEOMETRY IN THE ENCYCLOPEDIA 
BRITANNICA 
THE sixth heading under the word Geometry 
is Non-Euclidean Geometry. The article is by 
Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, the best men 
in England to have written it, and is worthy 
this one of the three greatest works of refer- 
ence in the English tongue, the others being 
Murray’s dictionary and the Century. 
It begins: ‘ 
A short historical sketch will . .. describe the 
famous and interesting progress of thought on the 
subject. 
But first it gives characteristic properties, 
beginning with Bolyai’s space. 
The sum of the three angles of a triangle is 
always less than two right angles. The area of 
the triangle ABC is \*(m—A—B-C). If the base 
BC of a triangle is kept fixed and the vertex A 
SCIENCE 
[N.S. Vou. XXXV. No. 906 
moves in the fixed plane ABC, so’ that the area 
ABC is constant, then the locus of 4 is a line of 
equal distance from BC. This locus is not a 
straight. line. 
~ T have called it an equidistantial. 
The angle A [which a perpendicular to one of 
two parallels makes with the other] is called by 
N. I. Lobatchewsky the ‘‘angle of parallelism.’’ 
Here as everywhere else in the spelling of 
Lobachevski’s name, the authors have made a 
very regrettable slip. Lobacheyski transliter- 
ated his own name into French as Lobatcheff- 
sky, and so it stands in the “édition de 
Kasan,” 1886. 
In 1869 Potocki transliterates the name into 
French as Lobatchefsky, and this spelling is 
used in the French prospectus issued at Kazan 
to found the great Lobachevski prize; and the 
volume “In Memoriam N. I. Lobatschevskii,” 
bears as subtitle, Collection des mémoires 
présentés 4 la Société Physico-mathématique 
de Kasan pour la féte de inauguration du 
monument de Lobatchefsky (1/13 Septembre, 
1896) par Mm. Hermite, Halsted, Girardville, 
Laisant, Lemoine, Neuberg, Ocagne. 
My contribution I wrote while sojourning in 
Kazan, where I-had abundant opportunities to 
learn the name. Gino Loria adopts in Italian 
the spelling Lobatscheffsky. Now Lobachev- 
ski himself also transliterated his name into 
German, and it stands on the title page of the 
original edition of his Geometrische Unter- 
suchungen as Lobatschewsky. But Stickel 
and Engel Germanize it as Lobatschefskij, the 
abomination ij being an attempt to represent 
the i, as in Italian, and the i, very short, with 
which the name ends in Russian. My friend 
Sommerville falls into this pit, and spells the 
name Lobaéevskij. Had he dropped that j 
and replaced his fifth letter by its exact equiv- 
alent, our ch as in church, he would have had 
the proper English transliteration, Loba- 
chevski. 
If we be willing to permit in the Encyclo- 
pedia the final y, still as English its t is 
superfluous and its w is indefensible, so that, 
as the name occurs 25 times, there are 50 
places where the quicker the stereotype plates 
