Septembee 6, 1895.J 



SCIENCE. 



309 



teacher of Lobacliewsky to be partly inferential, 

 and not to be taken literally." It is to be 

 taken, we suppose, in some ' Piekmckian' sense. 



This letter of Beez incited Dr. McClintock to 

 an examination of Beltrami's article and a pa- 

 per on it under the title ' On the early history 

 of the non-Euclidean geometry,' where among 

 other mistakes he makes one peculiarly enter- 

 taining. He says, p. 145, Bulletin, Vol. II. , of 

 Saccheri : ' ' He confessed to a distracting heret- 

 ical tendency on his part in favor of the ' hy- 

 pothesis anguli acuti,' a tendency against which, 

 however, he kept up a perpetual struggle (diu- 

 turnum proelium). After yielding so far as to 

 work out an accurate theory anticipating Lo- 

 batschewsky's doctrine of the parallel-angle, he 

 appears to have conquered the internal enemy 

 abruptly, since, to the surprise of his commen- 

 tator, Beltrami, he proceeded to announce dog- 

 matically that the specious ' hypothesis anguli 

 acuti ' is positively false. ' ' Who would suspect 

 that all that is a pure fairy tale evolved by Dr. 

 McClintock from his mistranslation of a passage 

 immediately announced by the two Latin words 

 he fortunately retained in parenthesis ! 



As some slight acknowledgment of the fine 

 spirit in which the previous criticisms had been 

 received, a transcript was made of a consider- 

 able portion of a copy of Saccheri then being 

 translated into English, the only copy then on 

 this continent, and sent to Dr. McClintock. 

 After another examination and comparison of 

 the article by Beltrami, Dr. McClintock wrote a 

 fi-auk acknowledgement of his mistake, but this 

 time published no correction. 



Mr. A. Ziwet, noticeable as a converted anti- 

 uon-Euclidean, repeats the older error in a re- 

 view of the translation of Vasiliev's Address on 

 Lobachevski : — "confirms the supposition that 

 the first impulse to these studies came to him, 

 at least indirectly, from Gauss. To the same 

 source of inspiration must be traced the almost 

 simultaneous, but independent, researches of 

 the Hungarian Wolfgang Bolyai and his son 

 Johann." [Science, March 29, 1895, p. 358.] 

 It is rather a pity if it ' m«si, ' since it never can 

 be. A life of Bolyai from original Magyar 

 sources, which is now in press, puts a totally 

 new aspect upon the whole matter, which need 

 not here be anticipated. These Magyar docu- 



ments make it possible to offer to Professor 

 Staeckel a slight correction, which is given as 

 homage to the extraordinarj^ accuracy of his 

 book. On p. 241 the title of the Tentamen in- 

 cludes the words 'Cum appendice triplici.' 

 Then follows the statement, "In dem dritten 

 Anhange, der nur 28 seiten umfasst, hat Johann 

 Bolyai seine neue Geometric entwickelt." 



It was not a third appendix, nor is it referred 

 to at all in the words ' cum appendice triplici. ' 

 These words, as explained in a prospectus is- 

 sued by Bolyai Farkas asking for subscribers, 

 referred to a real triple appendix, which ap- 

 pears, as it should, at the end of the book, 

 Tomus Secundus, pp. 265-322. 



The now world renowned Appendix by Bolyai 

 J4nos was an afterthought of the father, who 

 prompted the son not ' to occupy himself with 

 the theory of parallels,' as Staeckel says, but to 

 translate from the Magyar into Latin his treatise 

 discovered in 1823, given in writing to J. W. 

 von Eckwehr in 1825. The father, without 

 waiting for Vol. II. , inserted this Latin transla- 

 tion, with separate paging, as an appendix to 

 his Vol. I., where, counting a page for the title 

 and a page 'Explicatio Signorum,' it has 26 

 numbered pages, followed by two unnumbered 

 pages of Errata. The treatise itself, therefore, 

 contains only 24 pages — the most extraordinary 

 two dozen pages in the whole history of thought ! 

 Geoege Bruce Halsted. 



Austin, Texas. 



Chinook Texts. Franz Boas. Washington, 



1894. Pp.278. 



The linguist who in publishing elementary 

 treatises on the languages of primitive peoples 

 was the first to subjoin national texts and to 

 comment on these texts philologically, certainly 

 found the correct method. But it is a pity that 

 so few of his colleagues and co-workers have 

 followed his example, for ten pages of well- 

 edited texts of aboriginal, oral literature accom- 

 plish more for the deeper study of these forms 

 of human speech than one hundred pages of vo- 

 cabulary or of crude, undigested grammatic in- 

 formation. But recently the publishing of such 

 texts has become quite the fashion. The late 

 James O. Dorsey intended to publish a series of 

 works on the Omaha and Ponka language, and 



