634 



SCIENCE. 



lS.fi. Vol. W'lII. No. 40;i. 



four meters being the measured increase from 

 August 21 to 31. The eruption of September 

 2 caused a loss of thirty meters, and the suc- 

 ceeding five days saw thirteen meters of this 

 regained; a gain, however, which was only 

 temporary, fifteen meters being lost upon the 

 following day. During the remainder of the 

 month there was an irregular increase of 

 thirty-one meters, with a loss between the 15th 

 and 18th of five meters. The total increase 

 in height of the dome for the six weeks ending 

 the first of October was about one hundred 

 and twenty-seven metei's. 



The great spine which was such a wonder- 

 ful part of the mountain from November, 

 1902, to June, 1903, had practically disappeared 

 early in August when the main mass of the 

 cone, or the ' dome ' as it may well be called, 

 began to rise so rapidly. The first spine rose 

 from the northeastern quarter of the new cone. 

 On September 8, after four days in constant 

 cloud, the summit appeared and it was seen 

 that the dome culminated in a sharp tooth or 

 spine rising from its northwestern portion. 

 "Within a week this new spine was pushed up 

 twenty meters, but an eruption on September 

 lY destroyed it. At the end of the month 

 (September) the highest part of the dome was 

 at the south. 



During about six weeks in August and Sep- 

 tember the activity of the volcano was so great 

 as to cause serious fears of the recurrence of 

 great eruptions, and several warnings were 

 sent out by the geological commission to the 

 inhabitants of the northern and northeastern 

 parts of the island of Martinique. On Sep- 

 tember 12, at 2 P.M., there was an eruption, 

 the dust cloud of which covered the Lac des 

 Palmistes and rapidly descended the eastern 

 slopes of the mountain toward the village of 

 Mome Balai to the altitude of about seven 

 hundred meters; that is to say, it reached the 

 limit of the zone devastated by the eruptions 

 of May, 1902. A week later three such clouds 

 followed one another in quick succession 

 nearly to the same extent. On September 16 

 an eruption cloud rose vertically to the extra- 

 ordinary altitude of 7,000 meters. During the 

 latter part of September, however, the activity 

 diminished again, and is recorded as being 



very feeble on September 30. The bulletins 

 from October 1 to 19, the date of the latest 

 received, indicate only feeble activity of the 

 volcano, with occasional persistent luminosity 

 of the dome. The seismographs which were 

 installed in the observatory at Morne des 

 Cadets in the fall of 1902 had recorded no 

 earth tremor by April 1. Light earthquake 

 shocks made their imprint on these instru- 

 ments on July 23 and August 28, and others 

 have been noted by the observers at Assier. 

 Edmund Otis Hovey. 

 American Museum of Natural History, 

 November 3, 1903. 



THE HUXLEY MEMORIAL LECTURE." 

 The fourth annual Huxley memorial lec- 

 ture of the Anthropological Institute was de- 

 livered in the lecture theater of Burlington 

 House by Professor Karl Pearson, F.E.S. 

 The president of the institute, Mr. H. Bal- 

 four, occupied the chair. 



The lecturer's subject was ' Tlie Inheritance 

 in Man of Moral and Mental Characters,' a 

 subject to which he has devoted many years 

 of close and constant study, and the impor- 

 tance of which, as he observed, from a na- 

 tional point of view can hardly be exagger- 

 ated. It was a question of vital importance, 

 he observed, as to how far mental and moral 

 characters were inherited as compared with 

 physical characters. Few denied the inherit- 

 ance of physique in man, as in animals, but 

 few too applied the results of such acceptance 

 to their own conduct in life. We were agreed 

 that good homes and good schools were essen- 

 tial to national prosperity, but were apt to 

 overlook the possibility that the home stand- 

 ard was itself a product of parental stock, and 

 that the relative gain from education de- 

 pended to a surprising degree on the raw 

 material. Since the publication of Francis 

 Galton's epoch-making books it was impossible 

 to deny in toto the inheritance of mental 

 characters. But it was necessary to go a 

 stage further and ask for an exact quantita- 

 tive measure of the inheritance of such char- 

 acters and a comparison of such measure with 

 its value for the physical characters. Accord- 

 ingly he had some six or seven years ago set 

 * From the London Times. 



