758 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XXIV. No. 624. 



26-29. Acting president, Professor W. M. Davis, 

 Harvard University; secretary, Professor Her- 

 man L. Fairchild, Rochester, N. Y. 



The Association of American Geographers. — 

 December Sl^aniiary 1. President, Cyrus C. 

 Adams, New York City; secretary, Albert P. 

 Brigham, Colgate University. 



The American Society of Zoologists. — Decem- 

 ber 27, 28, 29. President (Eastern Branch), Pro- 

 fessor W. E. Castle, Harvard University; secre- 

 tary, Professor H. S. Pratt, Haverford College. 

 President (Central Branch), Professor C. C. Nut- 

 ting, University of Iowa; secretary, Professor T. 

 G. See, University of Michigan. 



The Association of Economic Entomologists. — 

 December 28, 29. President, A. H. Kirkland, 

 Maiden, Mass.; secretary, A. F. Burgess, Colum- 

 bus, O. 



The Society of American Bacteriologists. — 

 President, Dr. E. F, Smith, U. S. Department of 

 Agriculture; secretary. Professor S. C. Prescott, 

 Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 



The American Physiological Society. — Decem- 

 ber 27, 28, 29. President, Professor W. H. 

 Howell, the Johns Hopkins University; secretary, 

 Professor Lafayette B. Mendel, 18 Trumbull St., 

 New Haven, Conn. 



The Association of American Anatomists. — De- 

 cember 27, 28, 29. President, Professor Frank- 

 lin P. Mall; secretary, Professor G. Carl Huber, 

 333 East Ann St., Ann Arbor, Mich. 



The Botanical Society of America. — December 

 27, 28, 29. President, Dr. F. S. Earle; secretary, 

 Dr. William Trelease, Missouri Botanical Garden, 

 St. Louis, Mo. 



The American Psychological Association. — De- 

 cember 27-28. President, Professor James R. 

 Angell, University of Chicago; secretary. Pro- 

 fessor Wm. Harper Davis, Lehigh University. 



The American Philosophical Association. — De- 

 cember 27-29. President, Professor William 

 James, Harvard University; secretary. Professor 

 John Grier Hibben, Princeton University. 



The American Anthropological Association. — 

 December 27-January 3. President, Professor F. 

 W. Putnam, Harvard University; secretary. Dr. 

 Geo. Grant MacCurdy, Yale University, New 

 Haven, Conn. 



The American Folk-lore Society. — December 

 27--January 3. President, Dr. A. L. Kroeber, 

 University of California; secretary, W. W. Newell, 

 Cambridge, Mass. 



Neio York State Science Teachers Association. 

 — December 26, 27. President, John F. Wood- 

 hull, Teachers College, Columbia University. 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS. 

 Early Chinese Writing. By Frank H. Chal- 



FANT. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum, 



Vol. IV., No. 1. 



The director of the Carnegie Museum, Dr. 

 W. J. Holland, deserves the thanks of oriental 

 scholars for his wisdom in inducing Mr. Chal- 

 fant to prepare this valuable and interesting 

 memoir on early Chinese writing. Mr. Chal- 

 fant has been a missionary in China for nine- 

 teen years, and he certainly employed his time 

 to good purpose in collecting data concerning 

 the early forms of Chinese ideographs. His 

 preliminary chapter on early writing derived 

 from ancient inscriptions is an excellent dis- 

 cussion of the meaning of these primitive 

 hieroglyphs, which began in the form of rude 

 pictographs, and afterwards developed into 

 what are commonly known as Chinese ideo- 

 graphs with their phonetics, radicals, etc. 

 The author justly says that it was unfortu- 

 nate that the word radical should have been 

 applied to certain characters which usually, 

 though not always, are associated with their 

 meaning. He calls attention to a marked 

 example of this incongruity in the group of 

 symbols under the radical corpse very few of 

 which have any relation to death.^ Mr, Chal- 

 fant says that the radicals should more prop- 

 erly be called ' determinates ' or ' classifiers.' 

 The Chinese character used to express the idea 

 means word-class or classifier, the colloquial 

 term being word-mother, which after all con- 

 veys the meaning of radical or root. We may 

 add that Dr. Edkins, the distinguished sino- 

 logue, in his ' Introduction to the Study of 

 Chinese Characters ' says the word radical is 

 misleading. He says the equivalent pu means 

 classes, and corresponds to our word kingdom, 

 in natural history, and orders in botany and 

 zoology. 



The student will find Mr. Chalf ant's memoir 

 of the greatest value in studying the evolution, 

 so to speak, of the Chinese ideogram. At the 



^ In no better way can one appreciate the utter 

 absence of scientific method in the Chinese than 

 by a study of their ideographs. It is enough to 

 say that European philologists alone have the 

 ability to make clear the origin and classification 

 of their symbols. 



