580 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XL No. 276. 



lished by the same eminent aatliority in 

 1894. A new reduction of Taylor's 11,015 

 stars is expected soon to appear from the 

 Nautical Almanac Ofl&ce of England. Thus 

 the most important old catalogue which 

 needs to be newl3' reduced is Piazzi's : and 

 the object of my remarks has been to show 

 that at the present moment a vast amount 

 of the work incident thereto is already 

 accomplished. Thanks to the generositj' of 

 Miss CatharineW.Bruce,of New York City, 

 financial assistance was rendered for the 

 employment of computers between June, 

 1S9S, and January, 1900, whereby much of 

 this result was attained. But now the pos- 

 sibility of its completion rests not so much 

 in the faithful persistence of those engaged 

 in the computations as in the additional 

 generosity of other patrons of astronomy, 

 and in the continued encouragement which 

 so many Observatories and individual as- 

 tronomers have thus far seen fit to so kindly 

 bestow. 



Herman S. Davis. 

 Washington, D. C. 



SCIENTIFIC BOOKS. 

 Scientific Papers. By John William Steutt, 

 Baron Rayleigh, D.Sc, F.R.S. Vol. I., 

 1869-1881. Cambridge at the University 

 Press. 1899. Quarto, pp. i-xv., 1-562. New 

 York, The Macmillan Co. Price $5.00. 

 In endeavoring to review this first volume 

 (1869-1881) of the researches of an author Hke 

 Lord Rayleigh, who has contributed fundament- 

 ally to whatever he has undertaken, and who 

 speaks authoritatively on almost every topic in 

 physics; in whose work, iu other words, both 

 the qiiality and the quantity are in evidence, it 

 would be rash to attempt to give more than an 

 outline of the contents. The papers moreover, 

 are in general too severely difficult to be read 

 as a whole, and there are no figures or diagrams 

 (or almost none) to assist the imagination, no 

 italics to stimulate curiosity. Many of the 

 papers are theorems in pure mathematics, but 

 in few cases (contributions to the mathematical 

 tripos examinations, for instance) is the mathe- 



matical story left unadorned by the moral of an 

 application. Lord Rayleigh is pre-eminently a 

 physicist, and mathematics with him is good 

 means to a better end. 



The book opens (1869) with papers on the 

 applications of dynamics to electro-magnetic 

 phenomena, showing the influence of the in- 

 spiration of Maxwell and worked out along 

 Maxwell's lines. Thus the analogy between 

 the decomposition of water, produced or not 

 produced according as the circuit of a Daniell's 

 cell (alternately made through a shunt and 

 broken through the electrolyte) contains a coil 

 or not, and the action of an hydraulic, ram, the 

 analogy between the spark and the rupture of 

 the pipe, etc., are all in the spirit of an accentu- 

 ation of Maxwell's conception of electric inertia, 

 long before Lodge had popularized that doc- 

 trine. The investigation leads to a considera- 

 tion of circuits containing self induction and 

 capacity, and is carried through two long papers 

 largely experimental in character and similar 

 to Henry's researches on the magnetization pro- 

 duced by oscillatory currents. 



Then follow two papers on acoustics begin- 

 ning a subject destined to culminate in 1877 in 

 the well known work on sound, which like de 

 St. Venant's elastics, has remained without a 

 compeer. The shorter paper completes Sond- 

 hauss's theory on the influence of the size and 

 the form of flasks on the sounds produced 

 when a current of air is blown across their 

 mouths, with the aid of Helmholtz's famous 

 research on the vibration of open organ pipes. 

 The longer is the great paper on the theory of 

 resonance, published in three parts in the 

 Philosophical Transactions of 1870. Rayleigh 

 here also begins with Helmholtz's results for 

 ' Hohlriiume,' using a parallel but thoroughly 

 different mathematical treatment. Part I. 

 contains the general dynamics for resonators of 

 small dimensions compared with wave length, 

 and communicating with the air by any num- 

 ber of holes or necks, usually along an infinite 

 plane, and a final application to the open organ 

 pipe is sketched out. Part II. is devoted to 

 the special problems relating to necks, etc., 

 suggested in Part I. The neck is here consid- 

 ered relative to its ' resistance' to vibration, 

 and the pertinent electrical analogj' is used 



