630 



SCIENCE. 



FN. S. Vol. XVII. No. 433 



This shows that more than two thirds of 

 those present at the Washington meeting 

 avoided the larger hotels. But what is most 

 noticeable is that there were only about two 

 fifths as many registered at headquarters as 

 at anoiher hotel. The meetings of the council 

 were not held there, and not raore that half 

 a dozen members of the council made it their 

 stopping place. More than one person who 

 had gone to headquarters in the hope of meet- 

 ing friends soon went elsewhere. The an- 

 nouncement in the preliminary circular that 

 the Arlington would be headquarters proved 

 to be unfortunate. At Pittsburgh last sum- 

 mer local conditions caused 165 out of the 431 

 persons present, or about 38 per cent., to meet 

 the high charges imposed at headquarters. 



This statement of facts must not be inter- 

 preted as an implied criticism xipon the man- 

 agement of the local committee at Washing- 

 ton. The permanent secretary has been so 

 systematic, energetic and courteous, that it 

 would be hard to find any reasonable groimd 

 for criticism. All that is intended is to call 

 attention to the fact that, under the condi- 

 tions that appear now to exist, the custom of 

 specifying any place as headquarters seems 

 one ' more honored in the breach that the ob- 

 servance.' 



W. Le Conte Stevens. 



Lexington, Va., 

 January 14, 1903. 



PROCEEDINGS OP THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION. 



To THE Editor op Science: In your issue 

 of March 13 W. J. Beal makes a plea for the 

 publication in full of all the papers read at 

 the meetings of the American Association for 

 the Advancement of Science in the Proceed- 

 ings of the Association. I must enter a 

 protest against this. I should be entirely 

 unwilling to have my recent paper on 'Abelian 

 Functions and their Relation to the Specific 

 Gravity of Sirius ' buried in the Proceedings, 

 where it would never meet the gaze of most 

 of my astro-mathematical friends. Nor do I 

 care to wade through dozens of pages about 

 the ' Stero-isomerism of Azonium Derivatives,' 

 and the ' Ecology of the Dominican Thelo- 



phoracese ' in order to find a few pages of 

 interest to me on skew helicoids. 



'No, the Proceedings should contain merely 

 the titles of the papers read, with a reference 

 to where the original is to be published; a 

 brief abstract of every paper should appear in 

 Science; but the papers in full should be 

 published only in the special journals where 

 they belong and where they will meet the eyes 

 of those, and those alone, who are particularly 

 interested in them. Of course there are some 

 papers read in the sections which are of more 

 than technical interest. For such the col- 

 umns of Science are the fitting place, for here 

 they will reach the eye of every member of 

 the association. X. 



SHORTER ARTICLES. 

 ADDITIONAL SPECIMENS OF THE JAPANESE SHARK, 

 MITSUKURINA. , 



In a recent number of the Japan Daily Ad- 

 vertiser (Yokohama, March 4, 1903, page 5) 

 there is a notice, and it deserves record in 

 Science, of the capture of additional speci- 

 mens of the deep water shark, Mitsuhurina. 



Students of fishes will recall that in 1898 

 Dean Mitsukuri, on the occasion of his visit 

 to Washington as a delegate to the Inter- 

 national Fur Seal Conference, brought with 

 him a shark which caused considerable com- 

 ment. This specimen had been taken in deep 

 water off the Bay of Tokyo; then it came 

 into the hands of Mr. Alan Owston, a resident 

 naturalist of Yokohama, and by him it had been 

 presented to the Imperial University of Tokyo. 

 A detailed account of this new shark soon 

 appeared in the Proceedings of the California 

 Academy of Sciences, Ser. 3 Zoology, Vol I., 

 pp. 199-204, 1898, and it was here described 

 by President Jordan as Mitsuhurina oiostoni, 

 and regarded as the type of a distinct family 

 of lamoid sharks. The most prominent fea- 

 tures of the new form were the elongated and 

 spatulate snout, the great extent of the ven- 

 tral lobe of the tail and a general looseness 

 of make-up, notably in its protractile and 

 expansible jaws. The form was evidently 

 from deep water, and structurally it seemed 

 to be a close ally of Odontaspis, so close, 

 indeed, that we are still in doubt whether 



