30 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XIX. No. 470. 



glands of mosquitoes infected with yellow 

 fever, an animal organism which the members 

 of the American Commission classified as a 

 Protozoan of the order of Coccidiida. 



Dr. Henry R. Carter, a distinguished sur- 

 geon of the Public Health and Marine-Hos- 

 pital Service, in a letter dated October 31, 

 1903, says that while attending the Public 

 Health convention in New Orleans, on De- 

 cember 12, 1902, he visited Professor Beyer's 

 laboratory in Tulane University, with several 

 other physicians, and was shown a number of 

 slides under the microscope. These showed. 

 Professor Beyer told him, sections of the 

 stomach walls, thorax and salivary cells of 

 mosquitoes, with bodies which Professor Beyer 

 claimed were the eoccidium, and explained the 

 stages in detail. Dr. Carter says that un- 

 questionably, at that time. Professor Beyer 

 claimed that his slides showed the sexual 

 stages of a eoccidium and that he had demon- 

 strated the sexual cycle of a eoccidium in the 

 infected Stygomyia fasciata. 



The proof that the work which Mr. Smith 

 claims to have done in January of this year 

 was all originally done in the summer of last 

 year by the working party of the U. S. Public 

 Health and Marine-Hospital Service is so 

 clear that it is difficult to see how Mr. Smith 

 could set up such a claim. The letter of Dr. 

 Pothier which he prints in his article is con- 

 tradictory of his claim. 



Mr. Smith was consulted in January of 

 this year and corroborated the work already 

 performed. Eatification by a man of his 

 undoubted high scientific knowledge was 

 valuable. Professor Beyer has willingly 

 counseled giving Mr. Smith all due acknowl- 

 edgment, and has never sought to withhold all 

 that he was entitled to, that is, due recogni- 

 tion of his assistance in demonstrating the 

 life cycle of the parasite. 



Mr. Smith has never published any inter- 

 pretation of the eoccidium difierent from the 

 working party's. It is hard to see, therefore, 

 how he was the first correctly to interpret the 

 discovery when his interpretation was the 

 same as that made by the working party 

 months before. 



I ask that you publish this refutation of 



Mr. Smith's claims in the same manner as 

 his article. This request is made with no 

 wish to provoke a controversy, but solely with 

 a view to correcting an injustice. 



I also suggest that a warning note be issued 

 by you against a too hasty conclusion that the 

 animal parasite discovered in infected Stego- 

 myia fasciata be accepted as the cause of yel- 

 low fever. The working party's report makes 

 no such claim. Surgeon-General Wyman re- 

 cently issued a letter pointing out that this 

 claim is not made. The value of the dis- 

 covery of the eoccidium lay in the fact that 

 it pointed out a path for future investigation. 

 H. W. Robinson. 



New Orleans, 



November 28, 1903. 



SHORTER ARTICLES. 



THE NEW COSMICAL METEOROLOGY. 



With every fresh outburst of large spots on 

 the surface of the sun there is likely to be a 

 sympathetic disturbance in the terrestrial 

 magnetic and electrical fields, a change in the 

 weather conditions of the world, and a recru- 

 descence of popular interest in the subject. 

 Speculation as to the causal connection be- 

 tween this solar action and the terrestrial ef- 

 fect is apt to become extravagant, even going 

 to the length of seeking to identify particular 

 spots on the sun with individual storms on the 

 earth. This procedure overlooks some facts 

 in the chain of events which in reality bind 

 the two phenomena together, and it is the 

 purpose of this paper to present in a some- 

 what orderly form the sequence as at present 

 understood. 



It has been found necessary to include both 

 the sun and the earth in our meteorological 

 research, and properly so, because the atmos- 

 phere of the sun is at work in sending energy, 

 and the atmosphere of the earth is receiving 

 energy, each through its process of convec- 

 tion and radiation. By these agencies, a 

 special circulation is sustained in the atmos- 

 phere of the sun, and another in that of the 

 earth, and the energy of one passing into the 

 other binds the two together in a single cos- 

 mical thermal engine. Solar physics and 

 astrophysics are evidently only other names 

 for meteorology, which embraces all atmos- 



