EDITOR'S TABLE. 



843 



unselfish labor. Prof. S. W. Robinson, 

 addressing the Mechanical Section on 

 the education of the engineer, made 

 incidental reference to invention as an 

 aim in class work. Admitting that in- 

 genuity of the highest order rests upon 

 an incommunicable somewhat, he ar- 

 gued that inventiveness of a valuable 

 kind was quite within the scope of 

 teaching. In the department of ma- 

 chine design he believed lay a field for 

 eliciting the originality of students ; the 

 several parts of a machine could be 

 studied with a view to their improve- 

 ment, and then the machine as a whole 

 could be redesigned. Time was when 

 it was considered artistic to give a ma- 

 chine or engineering structure the out- 

 lines of the Greek orders; to-day a 

 design which is seen to be strong, rigid, 

 and economical is found to lend itself 

 to a beauty of form impossible to bor- 

 rowed lines, however graceful in them- 

 selves. 



Prof. C. A. Walcott, in his discourse 

 on geological time as indicated by the 

 sedimentary rocks of North America, 

 prepared the hearer for the address of 

 Prof. Joseph Le Conte, as retiring presi- 

 dent, on the origin of mountain ranges. 

 This address in matter and spirit was 

 a master's lesson in scientific method. 

 Without the waste of a word Prof. Le 

 Conte lucidly explained the theory of 

 mountain birth which science owes to 

 him and to Prof. J. D. Dana. That sea 

 margins have everywhere been the seat 

 of mountain emergence was declared to 

 be a fact of observation ; that the phys- 

 ical cause for this fact is mainly the 

 shrinking of a cooling and practically 

 viscous planet, seeking equilibrium, was 

 argued with a judicious weighing of the 

 objections urged by T. Mellard Reade 

 and other critics. For all the natural 

 affection that a thinker must bear the 

 child of his brain, Prof. Le Conte claimed 

 no more than that the probabilities were 

 in its favor, leaving the last and unap- 

 pealable verdict to be uttered only when 

 all the evidence has been discovered and 



passed upon. Contrasted with the sci- 

 entific erudition of this address was Dr. 

 D. G. Brinton's popular introduction to 

 The Earliest Men on the following even- 

 ing at the public session. Choosing apt 

 and simple illustrations, he showed how 

 the anthropologist, from remains which 

 seem rather scanty, is able to piece 

 together a picture of primitive men. 

 That they had compassion and skill 

 enough among them to nurse the helpless 

 for months together was, for example, 

 proved by adducing the bones of a man 

 who had suffered a compound, commi- 

 nuted fracture, and survived the mis- 

 fortune several years. 



One of the liveliest sectional discus- 

 sions arose among the botanists on the 

 reading of Prof. C. R. Barnes's paper on 

 The Food of Green Plants, in which pa- 

 per it was maintained that the proto- 

 plasm of plants and animals is identical. 

 Prof. N". L. Britton could not see how 

 the profound divergences between ani- 

 mals and plants, in their highest forms, 

 could have arisen, except through ele- 

 mental differences in protoplasm. Prof. 

 C. MacMillan also demurred to the dic- 

 tum of Prof. Bai'nes : animals are ana- 

 lytic, energy-producing; plants are syn- 

 thetic, energy-absorbing ; that plants 

 have a certain superiority over animals 

 comes out, he argued, in their compara- 

 tive superabundance. In this section 

 Prof. C. MacMillan also read a brief 

 paper, proving how seriously botany is 

 neglected as a study in American col- 

 leges and universities, many biological 

 laboratories being devoted chiefly to in- 

 struction in zoology. The section voted 

 that through the proper official channels 

 the Department of Agriculture, at Wash- 

 ington, be requested to print and circu- 

 late Prof. MacMillan's paper. 



To the chemists Prof. E. W. Morley 

 detailed the refined methods by which 

 he assigns to oxygen a specific gravity 

 of 15-8S2, as a result of twenty recent 

 determinations. An apparatus for as- 

 certaining expansions was exhibited by 

 Prof. Morley, its inventor, and Prof. 



