June 30, 1911] 



sciengm: 



987 



It is of great interest to consider the dif- 

 ference between the emphasis placed on 

 various subjects by different countries. A 

 comprehensive study of this difference be- 

 comes, hovrever, quite difficult in view of the 

 fact that the different countries vary widely 

 as regards the line of division between their 

 university courses and those treated earlier. 

 It is, however, not difficult to establish certain 

 decided differences. A slight study reveals 

 the fact that American universities are un- 

 usually weak, on an average, with respect to 

 courses on elliptic functions, general mathe- 

 matics and theory of numbers ; while the rela- 

 tive number of our courses in the theory of 

 groups, theory of functions, and differential 

 geometry is above the average. These results 

 are deduced from a fairly extensive tabulation 

 of the courses in mathematics which Professor 

 J. B. Shaw recently presented before the 

 Mathematical Club of the University of Illi- 

 nois. In particular, Professor Shaw listed 

 the courses of all German universities for a 

 period of six years and found that during this 

 period the number of lecture hours devoted to 

 courses in the three great fields of pure mathe- 

 matics — algebra, analysis and geometry — 

 were in the proportion 193, 259 and 200, re- 

 spectively. 



G. A. Miller 



University of Illinois 



WILLIAMINA FAWN FLEMING 

 Mrs. Williamina P. Fleming, curator of 

 astronomical photographs at the Harvard Col- 

 lege Observatory, was born in Dundee, Scot- 

 land, on May 15, 185Y, and came to this 

 country soon after her marriage in early 

 womanhood. She soon drifted into the work 

 which was destined to occupy her life, by 

 undertaking some simple astronomical calcu- 

 lations at the Harvard Observatory, where, 

 upon her death on May 21, 1911, she had just 

 completed thirty years of service. These 

 thirty years have covered a period of remark- 

 able changes in the methods of attacking as- 

 tronomical problems. The prism has revealed 

 to us something of the nature of the heavenly 

 bodies, and the photographic plate has made 



a permanent record of the condition of the 

 sky, which may be studied at any time. 

 Celestial photography was systematically 

 undertaken at Harvard in 1882, by Professor 

 E. C. Pickering, the present director. The 

 work was placed on a firm basis by the liber- 

 ality of Mrs. Draper in establishing the 

 Henry Draper Memorial, and in a short time, 

 photographs were being taken in large num- 

 bers. The Harvard photographic library now 

 contains over 200,000 plates. 



Mrs. Fleming's duties were to qualify these 

 plates, superintend their care, examine them 

 for peculiar objects, and make investigations 

 by means of them. Each plate must be so 

 ifidexed that it can be found at any time, and 

 must be carefully handled and stored, being 

 of fragile glass, and without a duplicate. 

 With a naturally clear and brilliant mind, 

 Mrs. Fleming at once evinced special aptitude 

 for this photographic investigation, which was 

 so novel that precedents could not be found 

 for its execution, and, in return, the photo- 

 graphs proved to be veritable mines of wealth 

 for the extraction of information concerning 

 the sidereal universe. Most of Mrs. Flem- 

 ing's discoveries were made from the spec- 

 trum plates which are taken by means of a 

 prism placed before the object glass of the 

 telescope, and which often show the spectra of 

 several hundred stars. She examined with a 

 magnifying glass, all these plates taken at 

 Cambridge and at the Harvard southern sta- 

 tion in Arequipa, Peru, and marked all ob- 

 jects showing any peculiarities in their 

 spectra. In this way, she found ten new 

 stars and more than three hundred variable 

 stars, because of the presence of bright lines 

 in their spectra. She classified the spectra 

 of 10,351 stars, which were published in 1890 

 in a volume of the Harvard Annals, called the 

 " Draper Catalogue of Stellar Spectra." 

 When stricken with the fatal illness, she was 

 at work on a Memoir on Peculiar Spectra, 

 which will give useful tables and much addi- 

 tional information concerning many interest- 

 ing celestial objects. Much of her time was 

 always occupied by tedious work upon the 

 proof of the numerous volumes of the Annals 



