December 9, 1887.] 



SCIENCE. 



287 



— The annual meeting of the American Society for Psychical 

 Research was held in Boston last week. After the opening re- 

 marks, Dr. Minot introduced Prof. H. P. Bowditch, who presented 

 the report of the committee on thought transferrence. " Among the 

 conditions possibly favorable to thought translerrence, supposing it 

 to be a genuine phenomenon, the effect of a sudden and unexpected 

 impression made on the mind of the agent seemed particularly 

 worthy of investigation. For this purpose experiments were made 

 in which a brilliantly illuminated figure or diagram could be sud- 

 denly displayed to the agent while sitting in a darkened room. The 

 chairman of this committee, Mr. Hodgson, and Dr. W. S. Bigelow 

 took part in these experiments, which were twenty or thirty in num- 

 ber, and conducted on different days in the month of July last. As 

 absolutely' no evidence of thought transferrence was obtained, the 

 details of the experiments may be omitted. The suggestion made 

 in the last report of this committee, that a drug might be discovered 

 which by its action on the cerebral centres might favor thought 

 transferrence, seemed also worth testing. For this purpose experi- 

 ments were tried, with Mr. Hodgson acting both as agent and per- 

 cipient while partially under the influence of ether, but the results 

 differed in no respect from those obtained when he was in the nor- 

 mal state." In some other experiments made by Mr. Hodgson, 

 Professor Bowditch added, there was a degree of success which 

 warranted a continuation of the investigation. " It will be evident 

 to those who have followed the work of the American Society thus 

 far, that the attempt to obtain evidence as to the reality of ' thought 

 transferrence ' has been attended with very meagre results. If 

 thought transferrence be a genuine psychological phenomenon, it is 

 evident that the conditions favorable to its manifestation are not 

 generally understood. Judging from our experience thus far, it 

 would seem that an inquiring attitude of mind is certainly not one 

 of these favoring circumstances." Other interesting reports to 

 which the audience listened were those of the committee on experi- 

 mental psychology, by Dr. Minot ; the committee on apparitions 

 and haunted houses, by Prof. Josiah Royce ; the committee on 

 hypnotic phenomena, by Mr. Charles B. Cory ; and the committee 

 on mediumistic phenomena, by Dr. W. N. BuUard, 



— The reports of M. Larrieu, late missionary in China, who 

 maintains that the great wall of China has never existed {La 

 Grande Muraille de Chine, Paris, 1887), has been widely spread 

 by the American daily papers. He claims that the wall consisted 

 merely of watch-towers, built of earth and bricks, about twenty-five 

 feet high and a thousand feet apart. In a few places they were 

 connected by an embankment. He also says that the wall north of 

 Peking and the palisades west of Sian-tung never existed. These 

 views cannot be correct, as numerous travellers have seen the wall 

 or its ruins. In regard to the palisades of Sian-tung, H. E. M. 

 James, who recently visited Manchuira, says that at the present day 

 they have disappeared entirely, though a mound or row of trees 

 occasionally marks the place where they stood. The gateways, 

 however, he found still maintained as customs-posts, at which tran- 

 sit duties are levied. Undoubtedly the wall consisted in many parts 

 of earth, but there is no reason to maintain that it never existed. 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 



•»* Correspondents are requested to tie as brief as possible. The writer's naine is 

 in all cases required as proof of ^ood faith. 



Twenty copies of the number containing his communication 7vill be furnished 

 free to any correspondent on request. 



The editor will be g-lad to publish any queries consonant with the character of 

 the journal. 



Rock Specimens from Cumberland Sound, Baffin Land. 



The following specimens were collected by Mr. W. Whiting of 

 the whaling-station of Messrs. Williams & Co., New London, Conn., 

 on Umanaktuak, an island on the south-west coast of Cumberland 

 Sound. The specimen No. lo was found by an Eskimo on a hunt- 

 ing excursion, and sold as a curiosity to Mr. Whiting, from whom 

 I received the specimens for examination. 



I. Bowlder from the Bed of a Torrent Umanaktuak. — Com- 

 pact limestone, almost black, and somewhat argillaceous. It 

 weathers dark gray, and shows on the surface slightly projecting, 

 fine, parallel lines of stratification from one-quarter to one-half an 

 inch apart. No trace of fossils can be detected, either by inspection 



or in microscopic sections. Under the microscope it is seen to con- 

 sist of gray, rounded, fine calcareous grains with a few black ones, 

 all apparently deposited from water. 



2. South-7ue$t Corner, Umaitaktiiak. — Graphite with rusty sur- 

 faces, and holding drusy white quartz. 



3. Same Locality. — A decomposing black crystalline rock, which, 

 on microscopic examination, proves to consist of graphite, with 

 hornblende, a triclinic felspar, and a little quartz. It Ijreaks intO' 

 angular fragments along thin layers of graphite, which are sliken- 

 sided, and give each one the appearance of a piece of this mineral 

 alone. 



4. Little Hill {Kaqodloaping), Umanaktuak. — Hornblendic 

 gneiss, of a rather coarse ' pepper-and-salt ' appearance, consist- 

 ing of about equal parts of quartz and felspar, forming the white 

 portion, and of black hornblende with smaller quantities of brown 

 mica, the dark. 



5. Big Hill, Umanaktuak, High Level. — Light gray gneiss of 

 medium texture, composed of about equal parts of orthoclase and 

 quartz, with a subordinate proportion of fine scales of black mica. 

 Occasional crystals of the felspar are much larger than the rest. 



6. Big Hill, Umanaktuak, Shore Line Eastward. — Gray 

 gneiss, consisting of layers of mixed orthoclase and quartz, alternat- 

 ing with others composed of scales of brown mica. 



7. Umanaktuak. — Rusty mica-schist of medium texture, the 

 quartz in small proportion. 



8. Vein in Umanaktuak. — Translucent white vitreous quartz 

 having exactly the appearance of alum. 



9. Umanaktuak. — White rather coarsely crystalline felspar and 

 quartz, with a few small scales of white mica, being a very light- 

 colored variety of granite, apparently from a small vein. 



10. About 40 Miles hiland, in a South- Westerly Direction from 

 Umanaktuak. — Foliated graphite with rusty surfaces and part- 

 ings. 



11. Umanaktuak. — Vitreous translucent gray quartz with thin 

 plates of brown mica traversing it in different directions. 



These specimens indicate the ordinary Laurentian system, and 

 are of much the same character as on the north side of Hudson 

 Strait, where the rocks appear to be allied to those of the lower 

 Ottawa valley, and to be somewhat nearer and more modified than 

 the great mass of the Laurentian in the Hudson Bay territories. 



Dr. Robert Bell, 

 Assistant Director Geological Survey of Canada. 

 Ottawa, Nov. 28, 



' Eskimo and the Indian.' 



I WISH to add my voice to emphasize Dr. Boas's criticism of the 

 method employed in Mr. Chamberlain's article with the above title. 

 Though I should be sorry to hurt Mr. Chamberlain's feelings, I 

 am obliged to say that there has been a great deal too much of the 

 same sort of work done, and erroneous comparisons of this kind 

 seem particularly alluring to those who attempt the study of the 

 comparative philology of American languages on a large scale. 



One reason for these errors is not far to seek. " They of course 

 are obliged to work with the published vocabularies of the Eskimo 

 language. Now, as they have no knowledge of this language (and 

 the number of those who have even an elementary knowledge of it, 

 outside of the Danish settlers in Greenland, might almost be 

 counted on the fingers), they are entirely unable to realize how bad 

 most of those vocabularies are phonetically. Even the best of these, 

 Dr. Rink's lately published comparative list of stem-words (see Dr. 

 Boas's article in Science, Ti^c. 2), is written in the modern Green- 

 landic alphabet, which, in my opinion, masks many important pho- 

 netic relations, and they seem to have a sort of fatal instinct forget- 

 ting hold of the oldest and least phonetic vocabularies. This is 

 specially evident in Mr. Chamberlain's list of words. Dr. Boas has 

 sufficiently disposed of the first table, but to show how misleading 

 such things are, I have taken the trouble to go through his second 

 list, taking such words as can be recognized as Eskimo words at all, 

 and showing how their resemblances to the Indian words are due to 

 a misapprehension of the real sound of the words. In expressing the 

 sounds phonetically, I have used the alphabet employed by the 

 Bureau of Ethnology in writing Indian languages, as the one with 

 which I am most familiar. I think it will be sufficiently intelligible. 



