Febeuakt 25, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



299 



found and the other circumstances as related 

 by Professor Very, but he added a statement 

 with regard to a bright flash of light which he 

 had noticed in the sky during the evening of 

 October 7. His description, however, was 

 only that of an unusually brilliant shooting 

 star. A meteorite of the size of this specimen 

 would surely have illuminated the region 

 over many square miles with almost the light 

 of day, judging from the reports of known 

 meteorites which have been seen to fall, but 

 no such occurrence was reported from Nor- 

 wood. If the falling of a meteorite was the 

 cause of the broken bars, the mass has not 

 yet been found, or at any rate it was other 

 than the specimen described by Professor 

 Very and seen by me. 



The circumstantial nature of the observa- 

 tions made by the several persons who had 

 to do with digging up the "meteorite," as 

 quoted in the article to which reference is 

 made, are not as conclusive to me as they are 

 to Professor Very, through scepticism en- 

 gendered by the falsity of nearly all of the 

 many reports that have come to my office dur- 

 ing the past sixteen years in which people 

 have described " meteorites " that they " had 

 actually seen fall" at their feet or on the 

 lawn in front of their houses, or in the road, 

 or in some other very near-by place. On re- 

 quest, samples of some of these " meteorites " 

 have been sent in, one of them proving to be 

 a piece of fossiliferous limestone, another a 

 bit of furnace slag, another a glacial bowlder 

 of trap rock, another a glazed stone that had 

 been used in the wall of a limekiln, another a 

 glacial bowlder of quartzite covered with a 

 film of limonite. The list might be extended 

 almost indefinitely, but it is not worth while. 

 In almost every case mentioned, the mass 

 when found " was so hot that one could not 

 bear his hand on it." 



Edmund Otis Hovey 



American Museum of Natubal Histobt 



a word of explanation 

 To THE Editor of Science : May I trespass 

 on your space for a word of explanation? A 

 series of public lectures on human sense-or- 



gans recently delivered by me in Boston has 

 given occasion to a number of newspaper re- 

 ports. Most of these reports are entirely er- 

 roneous and misleading. None of them have 

 been published with my sanction, but, on the 

 contrary, quite against my wish. I am there- 

 fore not responsible for either their form or 

 content. G. H. Parker 



QUOTATIONS 



THE SERVICE PENSION OF THE CARNEGIE 

 FOUNDATION 



An official action taken two months ago, but 

 only now publicly announced, by the Carnegie 

 Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching 

 seems to have certain ethical aspects that de- 

 serve consideration, not only from members 

 of the teaching profession, but also from the 

 public at large. Those aspects will, I think, 

 become sufficiently apparent from a brief re- 

 cital of the facts in the matter. 



Upon its incorporation in 1906 the founda- 

 tion announced that it would grant retiring 

 allowances to teachers in accepted institutions 

 upon two grounds — old age and length of serv- 

 ice. The conditions relating to the old-age 

 pension are not relevant to the present com- 

 munication. The rule relating to service 

 pensions reads as follows : " Any person who 

 has had a service of twenty-five years as a 

 professor, and who is at the time a professor 

 in an accepted institution, shall be entitled 

 to a retiring allowance " — computed in a speci- 

 fied manner. Between April, 1906, and No- 

 vember, 1909, many university teachers and 

 many governing boards based definite plans 

 and actions of their own upon the supposition 

 that, so far as its resources extended, the Car- 

 negie Foundation would do what it had an- 

 nounced that it would do. The expectation 

 of a service pension was, in some cases, named 

 among the inducements offered men who re- 

 ceived calls to institutions upon the " ac- 

 cepted list " of the foundation ; it was in other 

 cases a motive for the refusal of otherwise ad- 

 vantageous calls to institutions not upon the 

 foundation. In instances either known or re- 

 ported to me, teachers nearing the time of 

 eligibility for a service pension have in a 

 great variety of ways altered their plans, 



