362 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. XIII. No. 327 



SCIENCE 



A WEEKLY NEWSPAPEti OF ALL THE ARTS AND SCIENCES, 

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PUBLISHED BY 



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 communications of our correspondents. 



NEW YORK, May io, i8 



No. 327. 



CONTENTS: 



The Western Electric Incandes- 

 cent Lighting System 351 



The Westinghouse Compound En- 



Notes AND News 357 



Editorial 362 



The Spread of Measles. 



The American Dialect Society 362 



Rustless Iron 



E Bower-Ba 

 Processes . 



363 



Ethnology. 



Notes from British Columbia 364 



X)eformation of Heads in British 

 Columbia 365 



Electrical News. 



A New Alternating-Current Elec- 

 tro-Motor 365 



-Relation between Density of Acid 

 .-and Capacity in Secondary Bat- 

 teries 366 



jA New Arc-Lamp , 366 



Quartz as an Insulator. . .7. 366 



Health Matters. 



Ventilation . - 366 



Cholera Treatment 367 



Yellow-Fever in Florida 367 



Insomnia 367 



Tobacco-Smoking 367 



Action of Electric Light on the 

 Eyes 367 



Book-Reviews. 

 Physiological Notes on Primary Ed- 

 ucation and the Study of Lan- 

 guage 367 



Among the Publishers 367 



Letters to the Editor. 

 A New Mountain of the Bell 



H. Carrington Bolton 368 

 Rainfall and Latent Heat 



H. A . Hazen 369 

 Alphabetic Law and World-English 



A . Melville Bell 369 

 Ayrton and Perry's Secohmmeter 



Ju G. MacGregor 369 

 Clintonite, or Seybertite ? 



Albert H. Chester 370 



The FOLLOWING INSTANCE is reported to have occurred in 

 Glasgow, and shows how easily measles may be spread. During 

 the month of January, forty-two persons belonging to the congre- 

 gation of a Gaelic church were taken ill with measles. Taking 

 Jtwelve to fourteen days as the recognized period of incubation, Dr. 

 fRussell, the health-officer, connects two serious groups of cases 

 •with the attendance at the church of two girls on Dec. 30 and Jan. 

 il3 respectively. One of these girls, it is ascertained, had come 

 (from an infected house, while the other had actually taken the 

 'disease two days before. Two other girls who usually worshipped 

 ■elsewhere, but were in this particular church on the 13th, became 

 ill on the 26th, and other circumstances pointing in the same direc- 

 tion are noted. Dr. Russell considers, that, unless something like 

 perfect isolation and disinfec tion can be guaranteed to a person 

 «vho is suffering from infectious disease in a house, all healthy 

 traembers of the household should be debarred from attendance at 

 school, church, or other place of concourse. 



THE AMERICAN DIALECT SOCIETY. 



"In substance, the plan of this society is to collect and publish 

 'dialect material through an executive committee, with assistants in 

 various places. The district secretaries will doubtless, after some 

 ■experience, become more and more acquainted with the conditions 

 and needs of their respective districts, and will thus be able to ad- 



vise the executive committee with more confidence. The members 

 of the executive committee will naturally assist in the direction of 

 active members in their own States. Further, Professor Gustaf 

 Karsten, Bloomington, Ind., will act as secretary for Indiana ; Pro- 

 fessor E. L. Walter, Ann Arbor, Mich., for Michigan ; Professor 

 Alc^e Fortier, Tulane University, New Orleans, for Louisiana ; 

 Dr. James W. Bright, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, for 

 Maryland ; Mr. W. D. Armes, University of Calfornia, Berkeley, 

 Cal., for California. 



The conditions of membership have been made very easy in 

 order to attract many members, for it is believed that the number 

 of those who can contribute material in large or small amounts is 

 very great. All who feel an interest in the plan of the society are 

 invited to join it, even if they do not feel sure of contributing any 

 thing but a membership fee. Without a large membership, the 

 expense of printing will render publication only possible in small 

 quantities or at long intervals. With a large membership, it will 

 be possible to publish oftener, and to send the publications to every 

 member without additional charge. 



At the annual meetings it is not intended to have papers read. 

 They are to be strictly business meetings, the work of publication 

 being done through the executive committee and the editing com- 

 mittee. No regular issues can yet be announced, but it is hoped 

 that it will be possible later to publish at stated intervals. 



Some of the dialect variations indicated below are doubtless sur- 

 vivals of dialects spoken in England ; others naay be due to the 

 influence of other European languages spoken in the United States 

 and Canada, as French, German, Dutch, Spanish ; while still 

 others are probably independent developments in America. All 

 are worth noting, and will have an attraction for linguistic stu- 

 dents, perhaps all the greater when they appear to show the be- 

 ginnings of dialectal divergence. The materials thus collected are 

 not only interesting in themselves : they may be utilized in many 

 ways, as in the construction of dialect maps to show how far each 

 peculiarity extends, in comparisons with dialects in England and 

 on the continent of Europe, in the preparation of a complete list of 

 Americanisms, in assisting the work of lexicographers, and other- 

 wise contributing to the history of the English language in Amer- 

 ica. 



In order to give somewhat more in detail the purposes of the 

 society, and the method of work planned by it, the dialect varia- 

 tions considered may be divided into two classes ; — 



I. Vocabulary. — Strange, uncommon, or antiquated words, 

 or uses of words, really current in any community. Such are 

 deedies (" young fowls "), gall (" assurance, effrontery "), to play 

 hookey or to hook off (" to play truant "), to stump or to banter (" to 

 challenge "), /t'/ the old cat die {nseA of letting a swing come to 

 rest gradually instead of stopping it), slew {" a great quantity "), 



fool (as an adjective), he up atzd did it. he took and hit him, he's 

 been and gone atid done it, dim or cliini (clomb), housen (as plural 

 of house), the nagent (for " the agent "), sandy Pete (for " centi- 

 pede "), io cut or to cut a?td rii?i, to leg it, to buzz a person (to 

 talk with him), buckle (" to bend," used of ice under one's weight) ; 

 likewise local names of fishes and plants, exclamations, and words 

 used in games ; also lack of common words or phrases which one 

 would expect to find everywhere. It is the natural unstudied 

 speech of different localities that is of interest. Many school- 

 teachers might contribute lists of words and phrases which they 

 perhaps have to teach their pupils not to use. Any person of edu- 

 cation, especially if living in a difTerent place from that where his 

 childhood was passed, may also be able to make contributions. 

 Even one such peculiarity found in common use where it has not 

 already been noted has a value for the purposes of the society. 

 Many such words and phrases have already been published in the 

 collections of Americanisms, but much yet remains to be done in 

 noting unrecorded usages, and in defining limits of use geographi- 

 cally and otherwise. 



II. Pronunciation. — For example, the different pronuncia- 

 tions of r in words like hard, turn, cord, mother; of a in park, 

 calm, past; of 00 and u in room, rude, pzit; of in stone, hot; 

 such forms as git, ketch, shet for shut, sech or sich, he ken or kin 

 for can, deestrict, holt for hold (noun), sneck for snake, hahmer for 

 hammer, etc. It is often possible to tell by a person's pronuncia- 



