THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCE- 

 MENT OF SCIENCE 



The forty-eighth annual meeting of the American Association 

 for the Advancement of Science was held in Columbus, August 

 19-26. While naturally not attended by as large numbers as 

 was the jubilee meeting in Boston the preceding year, the work 

 accomplished yielded even better results, as the more effectual 

 organization and the limited number of papers read permitted 

 the free discussion of nearly every subject presented. The 

 purpose and work of the Association, and at the same time the 

 achievements of modern science, are admirably reviewed in 

 the following paragraphs from the opening address of the dis- 

 tinguished President, Dr Edward Orton : 



"Alfred R. Wallace has recently made a careful inventory of the 

 discoveries and inventions to which the progress of the race is 

 mainly due, and he divides them into two groups, the first em- 

 bracing all the epoch-making advances achieved by man previous 

 to the present century, and the second taking in the discoveries 

 and advances of equal value that have had their origin in the 

 nineteenth century. In the first list he finds but fifteen items of 

 the highest rank, and the claims of some even of this number to 

 a separate place are not beyond question. They may not really 

 be of epoch-making character. But he puts into the list the fol- 

 lowing, viz. : Alphabetical writing and Arabic notation, which 

 have always been the two great engines of knowledge and dis- 

 covery. Their inventors are unknown, lost in the dim twilight 

 of prehistoric times. 



" Coming, after a vast interval, to the fourteenth century, A. D., 

 we find the mariners' compass, and in the fifteenth century the 

 printing-press, both of which, beyond question, are of the same 

 character and rank as alphabetic writing. From the sixteenth 

 century we get no physical invention or discovery, but it wit- 

 nessed an amazing movement of the human mind, which in good 

 time gave rise to the great catalogue of advances of the seven- 

 teenth century, the most prolific of all the centuries antecedent 

 to our own. To it we credit the invention of the telescope and, 

 though not of equal rank, the barometer and thermometer, and 

 in still another field the invention of differential calculus, the 



