June 26, 1903. J 



SCIENCE. 



1023 



A REPORT on technical high schools in Ger- 

 many by Dr. Frederick Hose, British Consul 

 in Stuttgart, has been issued by the British 

 Foreign Office. According to an abstract in 

 the London Times Dr. Rose begins by refer- 

 ring to his previous report on chemical in- 

 struction and the chemical industries in Ger- 

 many (No. 561 in the same series), in which 

 he demonstrated that by means of thorough 

 chemical education in the universities and 

 technical high schools Germany had in the 

 course of half a century risen to the front 

 rank in the nations of the world in chemical 

 industry, so that her chemical products are 

 now valued at about 50 millions sterling 

 yearly — a sum which is considered as the in- 

 terest accruing from the capital invested by 

 the country in chemical education. The 

 present report deals with the technical high 

 schools of the country generally, as their part 

 in the industrial progress of the country has 

 been very important. At present there are 

 nine of these institutions in Germany — at 

 Aix, Berlin, Brunswick, Darmstadt, Dresden, 

 Hanover, Karlsruhe, Munich and Stuttgart, 

 while one at Danzig is to be opened shortly, 

 and one at Breslau in the course of three 

 or four years. Most of them date from the 

 years succeeding the fall of Napoleon, when 

 they were founded as small trade or technical 

 schools; then they passed into the stage of 

 polytechnic schools, and during the last quar- 

 ter of a century into that of technical high 

 schools, while they now grant degrees and 

 rank with the older universities. They are 

 all in towns of 100,000 inhabitants and up- 

 wards, and their growth and progress are co- 

 incident with the transformation of Germany 

 from an agricultural to an industrial state. 

 The German universities have always taught 

 some branches of pure and applied science, 

 but they have always regarded the economic 

 application of science as inferior to research 

 in pure science; chemistry is an exception to 

 this rule, but the idea of technical education 

 has never been able to assert itself as equal 

 with the pursuit of knowledge and science, 

 and hence the necessity for the technical 

 schools. 



Water-Supply Paper No. 80, now in press. 

 United States Geological Survey, by Mr. 

 George W. Rafter, deals with the subject of 

 the relation of rainfall to run-off. Some of 

 the many conclusions of the paper are here 

 given. Mr. Rafter holds that there is no gen- 

 eral expression giving accurately the relation 

 of rainfall to run-off, every stream being, in 

 effect, a law unto itself. The cause of rain- 

 fall, beyond the cooling of the air below the 

 dew point, is not very well understood; and 

 it is uncertain whether rainfall is in any de- 

 gree increasing. Rainfall and run-off records 

 are conveniently divided into storage, grow- 

 ing, and replenishing periods, a large per- 

 centage of the total water supply running 

 off during the storage period. The run-off 

 of streams has been generally overestimated. 

 Evaporation is a persistently uniform ele- 

 ment, and streams with large evaporation are, 

 so far as known, always deforested. Ground 

 water must be taken into account in order to 

 understand all peculiarities of stream flow, 

 and a very important effect of forests is in 

 increasing the ground-water flow, so that it 

 may be said that the removal of forests notably 

 decreases minimum stream flow. It is un- 

 certain whether forests in any way influence, 

 the quantity of rainfall. As a broad proposi- 

 tion merely it may be said that catchment 

 areas from which municipal water supplies 

 are drawn should be heavily fores'ted. Never- 

 theless, Mr. Rafter thinks that it would not 

 be a good investment for the city of New 

 York to undertake to reforest the Croton 

 catchment area; and for this opinion he as- 

 signs the following reasons : To acquire the 

 entire watershed — a necessary prerequisite — 

 and to plant it in trees would cost, on a very 

 conservative basis of estimate, about $24,000,- 

 000. There would be some consequent in- 

 crease of water supply after about 30 years, 

 but 120 years would be needed to realize the 

 full effect of forestation and to produce the 

 estimated resulting additional supply of about 

 75,000,000 gallons per day. By the expiration 

 of the 120 years, however, the original cost 

 compounded at three per cent, interest would 



