898 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXVI. No. 678 



Lindahl, of Rock Island, and Marey, of the 

 Northwestern, joined us in 1880, and Eob- 

 ertson, of Carlinville, in 1882, and a few 

 additional members of the facility of the 

 State University paid us the compliment 

 of an initiation fee when we held our meet- 

 ing at Urbana, but went no farther with us. 

 If there was any professional or active 

 worker in biology or geology at any other 

 Illinois college at the time, we never made 

 his acquaintance nor he ours. Of the state 

 scientific officials there were only Worthen, 

 Thomas and Forbes. Thomas left the state 

 in 1883, but the two others stayed with the 

 society to the end. 



It should be remembered, in this connec- 

 tion, that this was a time when college men, 

 as a rule, worked like dray-horses and were 

 paid like oxen, and the sacrifice of time 

 and means necessary to prepare adequately 

 for the annual and semi-annual meetings 

 of the society, and then to attend them, was 

 more than they could, or ought to, make, 

 except for some really important end. 



It will be seen that, under these condi- 

 tions, our membership would now be almost 

 wholly classed as amateurs. The active 

 members of the last two years were chiefly 

 collectors of specimens, and species-stu- 

 dents of the old school— a few still-glowing 

 brands from the enthusiasms of the ex- 

 ploration period, with scarcely a spark to 

 testify to the coming illumination, in the 

 midst of which it is our present privilege 

 to live. And so the society passed, leaving 

 no permanent material product of its work, 

 except' private collections and such papers 

 of its members as were published here and 

 there, as each individual thought best. 



Does this account seem discouraging to 

 our present undertaking? I do not think 

 that it ought to; but quite the contrary. 

 If, under such conditions, with so little 

 material, and — as a reasonable modesty 

 perhaps requires that I should add— under 

 such general management, it was possible 



then for us to organize a state natural his- 

 tory society and to keep it actively at work 

 for seven years, we ought now, 1 think, 

 with all our present comparatively immense 

 advantages, to found a state academy of 

 sciences which shall live and thrive at least 

 for seventy years, and, for all that I can 

 see, for seventy times seven— by which time 

 we shall all have been long relieved from 

 all our responsibilities, and the labors and 

 the honors of scientific enterprise will have 

 been handed on to our remote successors. 



S. A. FOEBES 

 UsrasRSiTY OF Illinois 



MEDALS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY^ 

 The Copley medal is awarded to Pro- 

 fessor Albert Abraham Michelson, foreign 

 member of the Royal Society, on the 

 ground of his experimental investigations 

 in optics. 



In 1879 Michelson brought out a deter- 

 mination of the velocity of light by an 

 improved method, based on Foucault's 

 v/hich gave 299,980 kilometers per second. 

 Three years later, by means of a modifica- 

 tion of the method, capable of even greater 

 precision, he found for this constant, of 

 fundamental importance for electric as 

 well as optical science, the value of 299,853 

 kilometers. 



Michelson has been a pioneer in the 

 construction of interferometers, which are 

 now indispensable in optics and metrology. 

 With his new instrument, at Paris, he de- 

 termined the absolute wave-lengths of the 

 red, green and blue lines of cadmium by 

 counting the number of fringes (twice the 

 number of wave-lengths) corresponding to 

 the length of the standard meter of the 

 Bureau International des Poids et Mesures. 

 He found the meter to be 1,553,164 times 

 the wave-length of the red line of cad- 



' Concluding part of the presidential address of 

 Lord Rayleigh — read at the anniversary meeting 

 of the Royal Society on November 30. 



