988 
in the Carib dialects, as the latter never ap- 
proached nearer than the south of Cuba. 
In the Zeitschrift fiir Ethnologie 1897, Heft 
II., Dr. Paul Ehrenreich contributes new 
materials to the tongues spoken on Purus 
river by the Paumari, Ipurina, Araua and 
Yamamadi tribes, showing that these are 
branches of this widespread stock. He 
remarks : ‘‘ From the islands of the Antilles 
far south to the sources of the Paraguay 
and Madeira rivers, one can now follow an 
almost unbroken line of Arawack dialects, 
in which, in spite of the great distance of 
more than thirty degrees of latitude, it is 
easy to show a complete grammatical iden- 
tity.” 
This is another example of the general 
fact that the extension of accurate research 
is rapidly diminishing the number of South 
American linguistic stocks. 
THE ALLEGED SUMMERIAN LANGUAGE. 
Tur Summerians, so-called, inhabited 
southern Babylonia about 5,000 years B. C. 
Their northern branch are known as ‘ Ak- 
kads.’ Some say that they spoke a tongue 
allied to the Semitic stock, while other au- 
thorities have maintained that the suffi- 
ciently abundant remains of thisvery ancient 
idiom show marked analogies to the Ural- 
Altaic tongues. The latest advocate of 
this opinion is Dr. K. A. Hermann, of Dor- 
pat, who, at the tenth Russian Archzeolog- 
ical Congress, urged strongly that the Sum- 
merian had the same construction, vocal 
harmony and phonetics as the Finnish- 
Ugrian branch of the Ural-Altaic stock. 
In his paper, as reported in the Central- 
blatt fiir Anthropologie, Dr. Hermann fails to 
note the objections urged by the eminent 
Ural-Altaic scholar, Dr. Hugo Winkler to 
the supposed similarities of Summerian to 
Ugro-Finnic tongues. These objections are 
so cogent that they must be held conclusive 
for the negative. The Summerian, if it 
was not Semitic, which is still possible, may 
SCIENCE. 
[N. S. Vou. VI. No. 157. 
have been Dravidian, or even a very primi- 
tive Aryan idiom. Hither of these is more 
likely than the Ural-Altaic hypothesis. 
D. G. Brinton. 
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. 
SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS. 
THE WINTER MEETINGS OF THE SCIENTIFIC 
SOCIETIES. 
THE societies meeting at Ithaca as we go to 
press represent perhaps the most important at- 
tempt to bring the sciences into fruitful relations. 
now existing in America. The National Acad- 
emy of Sciences and the American Association 
for the Advancement of Science are more im- 
portant organizations. They have done more 
for science in the past, and it may be that they 
will do more in the future. The National 
Academy, however, at the present time does. 
not exert a great influence. At a recent session 
there was only one person present in addition 
to about twenty members, and each of the 
papers presented was only of interest to two or 
three of the members. There was not a line 
regarding this session in the daily papers of the 
city in which the Academy met, and it was, 
perhaps, referred to nowhere except in this - 
JouRNAL. The American Association has dur- 
ing the past ten years had at its annual meet- 
ings an average attendance of only about four 
hundred members with a tendency to decrease. 
These have by no means been exclusively the: 
four hundred most competent men of science 
in America, and the total work of the Associa- 
tion has been disappointing. We may hope for 
much from the anniversary meeting at Boston 
next year, but it must be acknowledged that at 
present the Association is in a position to need 
help from scientific men rather than to give help. 
to them. 
The associations devoted to a single science 
meeting during the Christmas holidays—the 
Mathematical Society, the Geological Society 
the Chemical Society and the affiliated societies 
concerned with the biological sciences conven— 
ing at Ithaca—are doing their work with thor- 
oughness and with fruitful results. We miss a 
physical society, but otherwise each of the 
leading sciences is represented by a well or- 
