April 7, 1916] 



SCIENCE 



483 



At the meeting of the American Astro- 

 nomical Society to which reference has just 

 been made, two other observatories reported 

 upon their stellar parallax work. Lee and 

 Joy of the Yerkes Observatory reported 

 the parallaxes of nine stars with a maxi- 

 mum probable error of 0".014 and an aver- 

 age probable error of 0".010, and Mitchell, 

 of Leander McCormick Observatory, re- 

 ported the parallaxes of eleven stars with 

 a maximum probable error of 0".012 and 

 an average probable error of 0".009. 



The progress made in the accuracy of 

 parallax results is shown at a glance in the 

 following table. 



THE ACCXJKACT OP STELLAR PARALLAX DETEKMINA- 

 TIONS 



at least a few thousand stars whose par- 

 allaxes are known where our present ones 

 contain but a few hundred. 



"W. S. ElCHELBERGER 



U. 6. Naval Obseevatoey 



From these results it appears that any 

 star whose parallax is as much as 0".02, i. e., 

 whose distance from the earth is less than 

 ten million times that from the earth to the 

 sun, should give a positive result when sub- 

 jected to the treatment now employed in 

 parallax investigations, and as eight or ten 

 observatories are devoting their energies to 

 stellar parallax work at present, the com- 

 bined programs containing over 1,000 dif- 

 ferent stars, we ought to have soon lists of 



METHODS OF TEACHING ELECTRICAL 

 ENGINEERING! 



In the American engineering schools 

 must be recognized professional schools of 

 distinctly advanced grade corresponding to 

 the schools of the more ancient professions 

 of medicine, law and theology. "With 

 marked sympathy for artisanship in its 

 most useful forms, their practises and ideals 

 are fully distinct from schools of skilled 

 artisanship such as are in certain countries 

 known as engineering schools ; and the pre- 

 paratory studies required to make students 

 eligible to enter their courses of instruction 

 definitely contain much work in mathe- 

 matics and the sciences, in addition to an 

 optional range of studies in the modern 

 languages, economics and civics, history 

 and the classics. That is, the American 

 engineering schools are professional schools 

 of university order, as the term university 

 is known internationally. This form of the 

 engineering schools in America is the result 

 of experience and development, which has 

 brought them to educational characteristics 

 much resembling those of the Ecole des 

 Fonts et Chaussees and the Ecole Foly- 

 technique of Faris. 



Originating with the third decade of the 

 nineteenth century, the earlier American 

 engineering schools first treated of what we 

 now term "civil engineering," and "me- 

 chanical engineering" and "mining engi- 

 neering" were later joined to the fixed 

 curricula. It was not until 1882 that a 

 formal course of "electrical engineering" 

 was established, and curiously enough, this 

 was done independently and almost 



1 Pan-American Scientific Congress, Washington, 

 D. C, January 4, 1916. 



