580 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XXIII. No. 589. 



W. Marquette : ' Polar Organization in the 

 Cells of Isoetes.' 



E. W. Olive : ' Cell and Nuclear Division in 



J. B. Overton : ' On the Permanence of the 

 Chromosomes in the Calla Lily and the Elm.' 



A. H. CiiRlSTMAN : ' Spore Formation in the 

 Primary Uredo.' 



B. M. Allen: 'The Origin of the Sex Cells of 

 Chryseniys.' 



Hon. John W. Hoyt and C. Dwight Marsh, 

 both of Washington, D. C, were elected dele- 

 gates to attend the celebration of the two- 

 hundredth anniversary of the birth of Benja- 

 min Franklin at the University of Pennsyl- 

 vania, April lY-20, 1906, and Dr. Ernest R. 

 Buckley, of Rolla, Mo., was chosen to repre- 

 sent the academy at the dinner commemora- 

 ting the fiftieth anniversary of the founding 

 of the St. Louis Academy of Science at St. 

 Louis, March 10, 1906. 



The following officers were elected by the 

 academy for the ensuing three years: 



President — Louis Kahlenberg, Madison. 



Vice Presidents — Charles H. Chandler, Eipon; 

 Henry E. Legler, Madison; E. C. Case, Milwaukee. 



Secretary — Charles E. Allen, Madison. 



Treasurer — Eollin H. Denniston, Madison. 



Librarian — Walter M. Smith, Madison. 



Curatoi — Charles E. Brown, Milwaukee. 



Publication Committee — The president and the 

 secretary ex officio, E. B. Skinner. 



Library Committee — The librarian ex officio, 

 Herbert J. Farley, George W. Peckham, Hiram D. 

 Densmore, George Wagner. 



Committee on Membership — The secretary ex 

 officio, E. H. Halsey, Miss Harriet B. Merrill, D. 

 C. Munro, L. A. Youtz. 



Charles E. Allen, 



Secretary. 



THE PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY OP WASHINGTON. 



The 614th meeting was held February 24, 

 1906. 



Professor J. H. Gore gave a new "demonstra- 

 tion that o/o is indeterminate, using the 

 formula for the straight line through two 

 points and making the points coincident. 



The problem presented at the last meeting 

 by President Abbe regarding the sound from 

 a meteor was called up by Mr. Buckingham, 



who pointed out that the wavefront is ap- 

 proximately conical and the sound appears to 

 reach the observer from a direction normal 

 to this front. Mr. Nutting showed that with 

 the assumed velocities by Doppler's principle, 

 the intensity of the sound before and after 

 passing the observer would be about 700 to 1. 



Mr. E. E. Frisby then spoke on ' The Prog- 

 ress of the Coast Survey Work in the Philip- 

 pines.' This is carried on at the joint ex- 

 pense of the United States and Insular 

 governments. The problem is unique since 

 there are 3,146 islands in the 115,000 square 

 miles; a third of them have areas of less than 

 one tenth of a square mile. Owing to com- 

 mercial needs, the astronomical position of a 

 number of points was first determined and then 

 harbor surveys were made, coast survey and 

 triangulation being postponed. Plumb-line 

 deflections are found to follow the topograph- 

 ical indications. The work was done by four 

 or five parties in five ships. The early and 

 smaller charts were printed in Manila. 



Mr. F. H. Bigelow then discussed ' The 

 Formation of Cyclones and Anticyclones,' in 

 the light of the information furnished by the 

 European and American kite and balloon as- 

 censions made during the past ten years. A 

 historical summary of early efforts to solve 

 this problem showed that Ferrel's cyclone, as 

 well as the type of vortex employed by Guld- 

 berg and Mohn, or Oberbeck, depended upon 

 a symmetrical distribution of the temperature 

 around a central axis. On the other hand, 

 the modern observations show that the tem- 

 perature distribution is asymmetric, one half 

 of the respective areas being warm and the 

 other half cold. Diagrams of the pressure, 

 temperature and velocity in the several levels 

 from the surface to 10,000 meters give the 

 changes in passing from one level to another, 

 the systems being the same in each hemi- 

 sphere. Especially the temperature-gradients, 

 or temperature-falls per 1,000 meters, were 

 worked out for the anticyclone and cyclone 

 as a whole, also, in each quadrant of these 

 separately, the result being that there is a wide 

 departure from the adiabatic law, and that there 

 is a remarkable variation in each quadrant. 



