38 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. X. No. 233 



created as they are needed, that we have the opportunity of wit- 

 nessing the phenomena of perennial growth." 



Tuesday evening, a well-attended public meeting was held in the 

 chapel of the University, when Prof. J. H. Wright, the Secretary, 

 read President Merriam's address on a ' Review of the Greek In- 

 scriptions PubUshed During the Past Year.' It is to the monu- 

 ments, which the soil of Greece has preserved in such large num- 

 bers, that we have to look for an increase of our knowledge of 

 Greek history and civilization, and for a solution of the many prob- 

 lems still unsolved. Already the results of the explorations, which 

 have been going on busily for some time, are beginning to make 

 themselves felt, and it is not too much to say that Greek history 

 will yet have to be rewritten in the new light shed upon events by 

 the testimony of the stones. The past year has been, on the whole, 

 an important and fruitful one. Greek inscriptions of particular 

 value have been found in Naukratis, under the auspices of the 

 Egypt exploration fund, at Sigle in Crete, at Epidauros, and near 

 the Peirffius, the harbor of Athens. It is within the domain of the 

 history of the Greek alphabet that the most valuable results of the 

 last year's work are to be sought. The rest of the address was 

 devoted to an elucidation of these results. 



At the session on Wednesday morning. Prof. F. A. March read 

 a paper — that may in many respects be called remarkable — on 

 ' Standard English.' He claimed, in opposition to the ' new phonet- 

 ists,' that there is such a thing as standard English, defining it as 

 the ' heir of all ages recorded in grammars and dictionaries.' 

 Standard English, meaning by that both the proper use of words 

 and their proper pronunciation, is an authoritative institution, — a 

 stronghold of the unity and power of the Anglo-Saxon race. While 

 it is true that speech in its simplest form is without reflective pur- 

 pose, yet, when a higher state of civilization is reached, its growth 

 proceeds under the guidance of reason. The development which 

 the English language has taken since the days of Milton and 

 Shakspeare is a proof of this. We are, therefore, not only justified 

 in guarding jealously our standard English from contamination 

 through impure influences, but it becomes, also, the duty of scholars 

 and cultured people in general to superintend its growth. Students 

 of language have it as their specialty to preserve and perfect the 

 records of the language. The paper, which was thoroughly sug- 

 gestive throughout, gave rise to a long, and at times animated, dis- 

 cussion, in which a large number of the members participated. 



Professor Seymour of Yale College gave a report of the doings 

 and needs of the American School at Athens. It will be remem- 

 bered that some months ago the permanent Directorship of the 

 school was offered to Dr. Charles Waldstein, who accepted the 

 same, subject to the condition that an endowment fund of $100,000 

 be raised in order to place the institution on a sound financial 

 basis. Up to date, $10,000 of this sum have been subscribed, — 

 which, it must be confessed, is not a very encouraging showing. 

 Still, there is a fair prospect that before the expiration of the time 

 assigned by Dr. Waldstein, — October, 1888, — the remaining ninety 

 thousand will be forthcoming. With the aid and encouragement 

 which the school has received from the Greek government, such as 

 the recent gift of a suitable site for a building, — which, it is pleas- 

 ant to record, is in process of erection, — it would be indeed lament- 

 able to see so important and valuable an undertaking maimed by 

 our own indifference to its fortunes. 



Prof. W. F. Allen had an interesting paper on ' The Monetary 

 Crisis at Rome in 33, A.D.' The crisis in this year, which was so 

 severe that it required the intervention of the Emperor Tiberius to 

 restore credit by advancing, from the Treasury, a sum equivalent to 

 four million dollars, in the form of loans without interest, was the 

 necessary outcome of the conditions prevailing in ancient Rome, 

 which made money-lending a curse and the money-lender an evil. At 

 the present time, the legitimate business of bankers consists in ad- 

 vancing funds to be employed for productive purposes : the banker 

 is therefore a highly useful intermediary between those who have 

 money which they do not understand how to use productively, and 

 those who are engaged in industrial occupations in which they 

 can use to advantage more capital than they themselves possess. 

 But there was no such thing as productive industry, on a large 

 scale, in Rome. When money was borrowed, it was merely for pur- 

 poses of future consumption, or to pay for past consumption. Money 



was borrowed in order to pay a debt incurred, and therefore carried 

 with it the incurrence of a new debt. The consequence of this 

 state of things was, that a large body was growing deeper and 

 deeper into debt, while a few — the money-lenders — reaped bene- 

 fits out of all proportion to the services rendered by them. 

 Already in Csesar's time the attempt was made to counteract this 

 threatening evil by the passage of a law for the regulation of loans 

 and of debts. It aimed, as far as we are able to trace it, on the 

 one hand, to prevent a scarcity in the money-market, by limiting 

 the amount of cash an individual could have on hand, and obliging 

 him to invest what he had above this sum in real-estate, and, on 

 the other hand, made provision for the payment of outstanding 

 debts, by an extension of time and by compelling creditors to take 

 real-estate as payment. The law, however, remained a dead-letter 

 until the days of Tiberius, who made an attempt to revive it. The 

 attempt failed, and the much-feared crisis broke out. But it is a 

 testimony to the wisdom of Tiberius that he foresaw its coming, and 

 endeavored to prevent it by all means in his power. In order to 

 relieve the debtors of their embarrassment, he issued the loans as 

 above set forth, which was of course only a temporary relief, not a 

 remedy for the evil. 



Professor Greenough of Harvard University had some suggestive 

 Latin etymologies to offer, among others, that of elementum. He 

 favored the explanation, common in former days, but latterly super- 

 seded by other views, according to which it was an artificially 

 coined word composed of the three letters /, m, n. The / was due to 

 the force of analogy, so as to make the word conform with such 

 forms as riidimentitm, alimentum. Dr. H. Weir Smyth of Johns 

 Hopkins University had an elaborate treatise on the Arcado- 

 Cyprian dialect, which endeavored to cover the entire field of the 

 famous Cypriote inscriptions, of which the Metropolitan Museum in 

 New York has such a rich collection, and, by a minute examination, 

 to make clear the relation in which the Cyprian stood to the other 

 Greek dialects. Professor Hale of Cornell had two papers, one 

 proposing a new terminology for the Latin tenses, the other on the 

 ' 0^;«-constructions in Latin ; Their History and their Functions.' 

 Dr. Cyrus Adler of Johns Hopkins, in a review of the article 

 ' Semitic Languages,' in the ' Encyclopedia Britannica,' took grounds 

 against the writer. Professor N'lldeke of Strassburg, for the sub- 

 ordinate rank which he assigns to the Assyrian among the Semitic 

 languages. Dr. Adler claimed, that, in consequence of this, the arti- 

 cle was not up to the mark of our present science. Professors 

 Jastrow and Hall made some remarks in reply. Other papers were 

 as follows : ' Conditional Sentences in ^schylus,' by Professor 

 Clapp of Illinois College ; ' Long- Vowels in Old Germanic,' by Dr. 

 Wells of Providence, R. I. ; ' Delitzsch's Assyrian Dictionary, Part 

 i,' by Prof. Morris Jastrow, Jun., of the University of Pennsylvania. 

 On Wednesday evening the Association was entertained by Dr. 

 and Mrs. Sears, and on Thursday, after the closing meeting, an ex- 

 cursion was taken to the Au Sable Chasm. 



Before adjourning, the following officers were elected : President, 

 I. H. Hall of the Metropolitan Museum, N. Y. ; Vice-Presidents, 

 Professors Seymour of Yale and Lanman of Harvard ; Secretary 

 and Treasurer, Prof. J. H. Wright of Harvard ; Executive Com- 

 mittee, Professors Whitney, Gildersleeve, Perrin, and March. The 

 next meeting of the Association will take place at Amherst in the 

 second week of July, 1888. 



IS CONSUMPTION CURABLE? 



The discovery by Koch in 1882, of the tubercle bacillus, gave a 

 new impetus to the treatment of consumption. The investigations 

 of Toussaint and others had made it more than probable that 

 tuberculosis was an infectious disease, but the discovery of the 

 actual germ which caused the disease seemed to open up to the 

 victims of phthisis a means of escape from a fate which up to that 

 time had seemed inevitable. That the hope thus aroused has not 

 yet been realized is not due to any lack of enthusiasm on the part 

 of the medical profession ; for, ever since the nature of tuberculosis 

 was established, search has been made for some means by which its 

 germs or their products might be destroyed, and thus the disease 

 arrested. 



We have recently had occasion to mention two methods of treat- 



