February io, 1888.] 



SCIENCE. 



65 



paddles at from half a mile to one mile from the shore. In order to 

 pass the bowldery reefs, which extend from the shore north of the 

 Albany, we were obliged to go so far out from the land that the 

 tops of the trees were barely visible at the highest places. 



"A careful track-survey of the Albany was made from its mouth 

 to The Forks, which, with that of the upper part, also made during 

 this season, when plotted, will enable me to map the whole course of 

 this river, an actual survey of the intermediate portion having been 

 made by myself in 1870. This river possesses additional impor- 

 tance from the fact of its constituting part of the northern boundary 

 of the Province of Ontario." 



Dr. Bell's assistants, Messrs. Macmillan and Murray, made a 

 track- survey of part of the Albany River, leaving Bell's party at the 

 lowest point reached by him on the Albany River. 



E. Coste completed, with the assistance of J. White, a map of the 

 Madoc and Marmora region, Ontario. We can only mention the 

 surveys of R. W. Ells in the Eastern Townships, near the bound- 

 ary of Maine, and L. W. Bailey's and R. Chalmers's work in New 

 Brunswick. 



Of no less importance are the surveys of the technical branch of 

 the Department of the Interior, under the direction of the surveyor- 

 g-eneral, Capt. E. Deville. A number of surveys were made near 

 the Canadian Pacific Railway. Otto J. Klotz was put in charge of 

 the survey of the Canadian Pacific Railway from the summit of the 

 Rocky Mountains to Revelstokeon the Columbia River. In his re- 

 port will be found an interesting table of elevations of mountain- 

 peaks and a description of the country adjacent to that part of the 

 railway. William Ogilvie was engaged in astronomical observa- 

 tions for determining the longitude of Kamloops. J. J. McArthur 

 made an important topographical survey of those regions adjacent 

 to the Pacific Railway which were not e.xplored by Dr. G. M. Daw- 

 son on his reconnaissances of the Rocky Mountains. Fred. W. Wil- 

 kins was put in charge of an exploratory survey of Lake Winnipeg, of 

 which he made a complete circuit. He gives the length of the lake 

 as two hundred and seventy miles, its width ranging from two to 

 sixty miles. He describes the lake as shallow, rough, and stormy, 

 and navigation as extremely difficult and dangerous. The east 

 coast is studded with reefs, rocks, and rocky shoals. The west 

 coast, though having deep water in some places, is also very shal- 

 low, but its coasts are sandy and muddy. Besides this, numerous 

 township and road surveys were made. 



In 1885 the country adjacent to the Banff Hot Springs on the 

 Pacific Railway was reserved for public use, and during the last 

 year it has been surveyed, and roads are constructing which will 

 make accessible the numerous sights of this Canadian National 

 Park. In addition to the reservations at Banff, four mountain parks 

 were reserved in 1886, — Mount Stephen and its environment, 

 Mount Sir Donald, taking in the famous loop of the railway. Eagle 

 Pass, and the amphitheatre at the summit of the Selkirk Mountains. 



The Department of Marine was not less active' in exploring the 

 little-known parts of the Dominion. We reported on the third 

 Hudson Bay expedition, under Lieut. A. Gordon, in No. 252 of 

 Science. Commander J. G. Boulton was actively engaged in car- 

 rying on his surveys in Georgian Bay and North Channel, the re- 

 sults of which are published in charts of the British Admiralty, and 

 in the ' Georgian Bay and North Channel Pilot,' which contains 

 much interesting information on those waters. 



The Indian Department was engaged in surveying and laying 

 out reserves for various tribes, but principally for those of British 

 Columbia ; and the descriptions of the reserve commissioners are 

 of some interest. 



The provincial government were busily engaged in extending the 

 surveys of the crown lands. The reports and descriptions of the 

 provincial land surveyors abound with information on the town- 

 ships they surveyed and divided, and we can only point out a few 

 of the more important reconnaissances of outlying regions. In the 

 Province of Ontario, A. Niven surveyed the outlines of seven town- 

 ships adjacent to Lake Temiscamingue, in the Nipissing district. 

 He found nearly the whole of the outline to be good farming land, 

 the country level and free from stone. Another reconnaissance was 

 made between Rainy Lake and the 49th parallel, from which it 

 appears that most of the country is rough and broken, with occa- 

 sional valleys of good land. 



In the Province of Quebec, W. A. Ashe made a survey of the 

 Temiscamingue region, and his report on this country agrees with 

 that of A, Niven, who surveyed those parts belonging to Ontario. 

 C. E. Forgues visited the numerous streams emptying on the north- 

 ern coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and found that they yield a 

 considerable amount of salmon. 



The exploration and colonization of the outlying districts, which 

 were considered of no value whatever a short time ago, are progress- 

 ing rapidly. Railways and colonization roads are being built and 

 pushed forward in all parts of the country, and the newly opened 

 districts becoming rapidly settled. 



As our knowledge of Canada makes rapid progress, so the sci- 

 ence of geography has been gaining many friends, and geographi- 

 cal problems are discussed by many societies. It is the subject of 

 many papers read before the Royal Society of Canada ; and among 

 them, Capt. E. Deville's paper on the best projection for maps of the 

 Dominion of Canada takes a prominent place. The Geographical 

 Society of Quebec publishes in its Transactions a considerable 

 amount of interesting information, and the associations of the 

 Dominion Land Surveyors and those of the Provincial Land Sur- 

 veyors of Ontario discuss many matters of geographical interest in 

 their annual reports. Dr. F. Boas. 



MENTAL SCIENCE. 

 ■What the Will Effects. 



Under this head Professor James {Scribner s Magazi7ie, Febru- 

 ary, 1888) discusses the processes of voluntary action from the 

 point of view of the ' new psychology.' The discussion is in so 

 many respects characteristic of the rejuvenating interest with which 

 this point of view invests the topics that have always occupied the 

 thoughts of reflecting people, that a somewhat full account of the 

 article will be given below, in the hope of inducing those interested 

 in this science to read the original. 



The point of advance in the 'new psychology ' of the will that 

 Professor James regards as of most value is its reference of all ac- 

 tivity to the type of reflex action. The steps between the applica- 

 tion of the stimulus and the accompUshment of the re-action may 

 be short and simple, or they may be long and intricate. I may 

 wink instantaneously at a threatened blow, or I may take a long 

 time in deliberating how to act upon the receipt of a momentous 

 letter. In either case the psychic process, which in the most highly 

 developed form becomes conscious thought, is regarded as a means 

 towards an end, — the action, the conduct. Life is an adjust- 

 ment to the environment, and the new environment is ever develop- 

 ing in complexity and variability of the adjustments that it makes 

 necessary. A certain kind of these adjustments are usually singled 

 out for separate treatment under the term ' voluntary actions ; ' but 

 the doctrine now generally accepted is that this class of acts has 

 been evolved from the involuntary acts. The distinction is one of 

 degree of complexity and other characteristics, important among 

 which is the characteristic that in the voluntary action the act is 

 foreseen, the idea precedes its execution, while in the involuntary 

 mode of action the act, though perhaps foreseen as a result of re- 

 membered experience, takes place not in obedience to this foresight, 

 but " we know what we are going to do only after we have done it." 

 From this it follows that no act can be voluntary the first time it is 

 performed. " Until we have done it at least once, we can have no 

 idea of what sort of a thing it is like, and do not know in what 

 direction to set our will to bring it about." If one attempts to 

 move his ear, the great difficulty is to know what sort of an effort 

 to make, and what is lacking is the remembrance of the feeling of a 

 moving ear. This is the mental material out of which the motion 

 is generated, and the way to proceed is to move the ear passively 

 until we have a tolerably clear idea of the feeling of the ear when 

 it moves, and then attempt to reproduce this feeling. We teach 

 children to write by holding their hands in the proper position, until 

 they know how it feels ; and so, in general, unless we have a guide 

 to direct v^s in the kind of effort we ought to make to secure the 

 desired end, we must more or less trust to a chance success. There 

 is no abstract willing into the void, and without a memory there 

 could be no will. All our most elaborate a,cts of will depend for 

 their execution on certain physiological co-ordinations, which, in 



