156 



SCIElsrCE. 



[Vol. IX., No. 211 



— Captain Gates of the ship L. Schapp has re- 

 ported to the U. S. hydrographic oflEice that on 

 April 19, when off Cape Horn, on a voyage from 

 San Francisco to Liverpool, the temperature of 

 the water suddenly rose from 42" to 44°. Judging 

 from this that the vessel was too close inshore, he 

 hauled off three points, and, after standing on this 

 course for four hours, the temperature fell to 42°. 

 The captain stated that on a previous voyage he 

 had noticed this warm helt, and judges that it 

 does not extend more than ten miles offshore. He 

 believes he would have gone ashore if he had con- 

 tinued on his first course half an hour longer. He 

 had not seen the sun for twelve days. 



— The longest completed tunnel in the vsrorld is 

 at Schemnitz in Hungary, It is 10.27 miles in 

 length, with a cross-section of 9 feet 10 inches by 

 5 feet 3 inches, and is used for drainage purposes. 

 The new Croton aqueduct tunnel, now in course 

 of excavation near this city, will be much the 

 longest tunnel in the world. When completed, it 

 vrill be nearly 80 miles long, with a section much 

 larger than that of the Schemnitz tunnel, being 

 about 16 feet in diameter. Twenty-two miles have 

 already been excavated. 



— The International statistical institute vs^ill 

 hold a meeting in Rome early in April. 



' ' there are twenty thousand secondary teachers in 

 the United States " was a forced admission, but we 

 have never so regarded it. 



The Editob of The Academy. 

 Syracuse, N.Y., Jan. 22. 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOB. 



*t*CorresiJondents are requested to be as brief as possible. The 

 writer's name is in all oases required as proof of good faith. 



The natural method of teaching languages. 



Will you permit me to call attention to two mis- 

 statements in Mr. Stern's article on ' The natural 

 method of teaching languages,' which appears in 

 Science of Jan. 21 ? On p. 69 he says, " Why is it 

 that the old method . . . could be shaken in its very 

 foundation to such a degree that one of its warmest 

 defenders writes but lately, ' It is evident to me that 

 the old grammatical method cannot survive the as- 

 sault of the natural method ' ? " The writer referred 

 to as 'one of the warmest defenders' of the old 

 method has been conspicuous and outspoken in dis- 

 carding ' the old method,' both in theory and prac- 

 tice, for many years, and, had his name been quoted, 

 the absurdity of the above would have been at once 

 apparent. 



Farther on, Mr. Stern says, '' It would seem 

 strange . . . that an educational journal which is 

 not friendly [sic] inclined towards the method should 

 have recently been forced to admit that ' the subject 

 is now attracting great attention in the secondary 

 and higher schools.'" The exiDression ' forced to ad- 

 mit ' is misleading. Possibly it was intended to be 

 so. It would be interesting to learn the exact nature 

 of the forcing. By the same token it might be 

 claimed that any statement of fact is a forced admis- 

 sion. It was simply given as an excuse for intro- 

 ducing the matter as the subject of Interchange. 

 Perhaps Mr. Stern would claim that our statement that 



The submerged trees of the Columbia River. 



The phenomena which Capt. 0. E. Button has so 

 well described under the above heading in No. 208 

 of Science were observed by me in the autumn of 

 1870, when, in the course of preparations for a topo- 

 graphical and geological survey of Mount Eainier, I 

 made a trip from Portland to the Dalles and back,, 

 and later, on my return from Mount Kainier via the 

 Dalles to Portland, during the month of November 

 of the same year. The submerged trees excited my 

 vivid interest during these trips up and down 

 the river; and during an enforced stay at the 

 Cascades on one of these occasions, I made some 

 investigations in the vicinity, which, with in- 

 formation I obtained from old Hudson Bay 

 trappers and Indians, suggested to me an ex- 

 planation of the backing-up of the river different 

 from that offered by Captain Dutton. This explana- 

 tion, which was embodied in a somewhat popular 

 address delivered by me before the American geo- 

 graphical society in New York on March 13, 188T 

 (Bulletin No. 4, session 1876-77, p. 11), I venture to 

 repeat here, for the reason that Captain Dutton as- 

 sures me that he had not known of my publication 

 on the subject, and that the explanation had not 

 been suggested to him at the time of his investiga- 

 tions. It is briefly this : — 



1. The valley of the Columbia Eiver at the Cas- 

 cades is a cut, considerably broader than the actual 

 stream-bed, through over 3,000 feet of beds of basalt 

 and basaltic breccia, which here form the axis of 

 the Cascade range, and which rest on a loosely ag- 

 gregated bed of conglomerate carrying leaf -remains 

 and trunks of trees, sometimes petrified, sometimes 

 merely carbonized, aj)]parently of miocene age. This 

 bed of conglomerate is seen to outcrop about at the 

 river-level at the foot of the Cascades : therefore in 

 its cutting-down or corrasionthe Columbia Biver had 

 already reached this conglomerate bed below the 

 falls, and above was within thirty feet of it. 



2. The river at the Cascades is a narrow boil- 

 ing stream, rushing down over immense broken 

 masses of basalt, and between steeply cxxt banks of 

 basalt ; which banks are, if I recollect rightly, some- 

 what higher than the broad forest-covered stretches 

 of the valley which extend on either side of the 

 stream to the base of the steep bounding cliffs. In 

 this stretch on the north bank I observed an old 

 stream-bed filled with rounded pebbles, through 

 which at least a part of the stream once ran. 



3. The Indian tradition above referred to says that 

 there once existed a natural^bridge at the Cascades, 

 and that the ancestors of the present tribes (prob- 

 ably at no very distant period) used to cross the river 

 here dry-shod. The form of the banks at the head 

 of the stream lends i^robability to the truth of this 

 tradition, for they appear like the rude abutments 

 of such a bridge, which had been left after its 

 destruction. 



4. The submerged stumps of trees which line ir- 

 regularly the banks of the river above the Cascades 

 are of the same sjjecies, and generally about the same 

 size, as the older of those which clothe the steep 



