December 23, 1892. J 



SCIENCE. 



359 



hundred and thirty miles from Austin, they lost the dog. "We 

 had travelled, in a general way, around two sides of a triangle, 

 and were now making the third when the dog got lost. A few 

 days ago, one month from the time he got lost, the dog came 

 back home, fat and foot-sore. 



Now it was utterly impossible for him to have taken the back 

 track and to have returned home by the way we wentout. How 

 did he find the way from Hillsboro to Austin, if be had no sen^e 

 of direction f for he had never been over a step of the way be- 

 tween the two places. W. F. Cummins, 



Texas Geological Survey, Austin, Texas, Dec 2. 



The Need for Popular Scientific Instruction on Oriental 

 Subjects. 



The prevailing fad for the uncanny and the remote, having 

 passed beyond the stages of spiritism and "Korashan science" 

 into those of Neo- Buddhism and " theosophy," is rapidly taking 

 shape as an eager curiosity for information regarding the religious 

 and philosophical ideas, the literature and the customs of the far- 

 east, coupled with a tendency to look there for a fuller light and 

 a more perfect practical direction to life than the religion and 

 science of Christendom can afford. They who look upon the 

 cultivators of this taste as grossly astray from the path of reason 

 and common sense must assign the source of the delusion to an 

 ignorance of the real character of that Oriental civilization to 

 whose meretricious fascmations they have succumbed. 



Those, on the other hand, who are more or less in sympathy 

 with the orientalizing movement will, if perfectly sincere, retort 

 that the contempt for Oriental ideas, or indifference to them, which 

 exists in various degrees among the greater pulilic, results from 

 the prevalence of gross misconceptions regarding them, and a 

 lack of familiarity with the literatures which express them and 

 the social conditions in which they are practically realized. 



The two parties are agreed, therefore, that more light needs to 

 be thrown upon the subject; that there is, in fact, a crying need 

 among the people at large for accurate information on Oriental 

 subjects. 



The same antithetical concord, if I may be permitted the ex- 

 pression, exists between the defenders and opponents of the his- 

 torical accuracy of the Hebrew Scriptures. Both urge the neces- 

 sity of a wider diffusion of the results of recent Egyptological 

 and Assyriological researches. 



The world is becoming so small since the apparition of steam 

 and electricity, in their protean applications, tha,t the thought and 

 life of one portion of it can no longer be a matter of indifference 

 to another, even the most remote; and a man can no longer be 

 considered cultured whose thought and sympathy are limited by 

 the boundaries of a nation, the shores of a continent, or the 

 formulae of a cult. No religion, and no social conditions, can be 

 ■considered otherwise than as anachronisms, which are unable or 

 unwilling to bear an impartial comparison with ail others of every 

 coun'ry and every age. 



And if a truly scientific conception of the history and needs and 

 destiny of humanity be the great desideratum, it is clear at the 

 first glance that it can never be attained until we cease to identify 

 humanity with the little ethnic, or geograjihic or religious group 

 to which we may chance to belong; and we can never cease to 

 do this until we have become far more familiar than we at present 

 are with those oldest and most powerful of civilizations which 

 have their seat upon the Asiatic continent. 



For the student of anthropology there are other and special 

 inducements for the fullest possible exploitation of the Oriental 

 lands and peoples. They alone have a known history of a suffi- 

 cient extent to be of any marked value in unravelling the numer- 

 ous problems connected with the history of progress and the 

 phenomena of retrogression. It is the East which has aflfoi'ded, 

 or must afford, the key to the chief enigmas of ethnology, of 

 philology, of archseology. and, above all, of hierology, or compar- 

 ative religion. In India we can follow the trend of philosophical 

 speculation, and the changes of religious thought and sentiment, 

 «ither internally elaborated or exteriorly impressed, for a period 



of not less than 3,200 yfars; the less intense and all-absorbing 

 religion of the Turanians can be traced backward through more 

 than six thousand years to the lowlands of Mesapotamia or the 

 plateau.s of the Altai'; and in relatively modern time? wc are per- 

 mitted to witness in the history of Buddhism the successive 

 metamorphoses of a great cult in the course of its transmigrations 

 from country to country, from continent to island, from lowland 

 to upland, from the monkhood to the people, from the Aryan to 

 the Turanian stock, from an agnostic or atheistic to a pantheistic, 

 a dualistic, a monotheistic or a polytheistic form. 



The wonderful richness of this field for the student of the his- 

 tory of religions would suggest that if a medium of popular in- 

 struction in Oriental lore could be established, it might well af- 

 ford expression at the same time to that fascinating and all- 

 important science. 



A recognition of the needs, some of which I have here roughly 

 outlined, has induced me to undertake the publication of a bi- 

 monthly magazine, whose object will be an impartial presenta- 

 tion, from every point of view, of all branches of Oriental science 

 and every aspect of the comparative history of religions. I shall 

 be glad to have the cooperation of all who are at all interested in 

 these subjects. Merwin-Maeie Snell. 



Washington, D.C., Office of the Oriental Review, 2,128 H Street, N.W. 



Algebraic Notation. 



In a communication to Nature, issue of Nov. 3, W. Cassie 

 points out the advantages of a proposed new notation for indicat- 

 ing algebraical operations. In addition to the oblique line for 

 division (now in use in some English scientific works), another 

 o'ilique line, from left to right downwards, is employed to denote 

 an exponential operator. Thus the quantity which follows this 

 sign is the exponent of that which precedes. In complex expres- 

 sions the lines also perform a bracketing function. Besides these 

 two marks the radical sign is used to denote evolution, and it is 

 this which the writer deems inexpedient. 



In algebra the employment of both radical signs and fractional 

 exponents adds unnecessary confusion to a subject rather difficult 

 in itself. There is no good reason — except that both are in use — 

 why both should be retained. The fractional exponent notation, 

 of course, must be kept, since it serves for all cases; and there is 

 certainly very little justification foV setting apart a special sym- 

 bol for indices whose numerators are unity. I tested all the radi- 

 cal expressions given in the letter referred to and found no diffi- 

 culty in writing them in the fractional exponent notation. In- 

 deed, the figure 1 in the numerator might be omitted, being 

 understood. The symbol resulting suggests the radical sign itself, 

 only that the quantity precedes and the exponent follows the sign. 

 A notation which avoids all special spacing and various sizes of 

 type, writing all expressions in ordinary letterpress has certainly 

 a worthy aim, and it would be a pity to burden it with an unnec- 

 essary symbol out of symmetry if not out of harmony with 

 another. JOSEPH V. COLLINS. 



Miami University, Oxford, O., Nov. 30. 



Electric Phenomena on Mountains. 



Two notes of great interest regarding this subject have ap- 

 peared in this journal for Sept. 23 and Dec. 3. The phenomena 

 of electric discharges from elevated points on the earth's surface 

 were first noted, so far as I know, by a savant on the great pyra- 

 mid in Egypt. . As he stood on the pyramid with a bottle held at 

 arm's length above his head, he heard the peculiar spitting and 

 sputtering produced by the electricity passing from the bottle. 

 The description by Mr. Stone is especially valuable, and shows 

 the extrem; importance of making careful observations. Close 

 attention is being paid by the Weather Bureau to all mauifesta- 

 tions of this kind on Pike's Peak. It is my impression that the 

 origin of the phenomenon is not an electric cloud passing over- 

 head hut a discharge from, or to, the earth under an electric strain 

 or change of potential. A mountain summit forms a point for 

 discharge of electricity like a point on the conductor of an elec- 

 tric mac'riine. On Mt. Washington this discharge frequently 



