Miscellaneous Intelligence. 481 



Washington, 1918. — Even the Carnegie Institution has felt dur- 

 ing the past year the pressure due to the conditions brought on 

 by the war in Europe. It is gratifying to read the assurance by 

 Dr. Woodward as to the general situation. This he expresses 

 as follows : 



"While public attention is properly engrossed in the exigen- 

 cies of national and international affairs, it is well to recall that 

 periods like the present have not been less fruitful in discoveries 

 and advances of permanent value to our race than the periods 

 of more peaceful activities. The course of human evolution has 

 not run smoothly, and it does not appear to be destined to become 

 Motionless in the near future. Neither has the general trend 

 upward of mankind been unaccompanied by depressing rever- 

 sions to the instincts of barbarism. But these sinister facts, so 

 painfully verified in contemporary history, are mitigated by 

 other facts which show that the essentials of progress will be 

 the last to disappear in any possible reversion and that they 

 may even survive and flourish amid the ruins of empires. Thus, 

 while the ideas of Alexander and Caasar and the long line of 

 Greek and Roman statesmen, philosophers, and poets are still 

 properly held to be highly worthy of critical study, it is plain 

 that they are of a far less permanent character than the ideas, 

 for example, of the Alexandrian school of scientists, whose con- 

 tributions to knowledge relate to principles coextensive with the 

 universe at large as well as with that small part of it wherein 

 we happen temporarily to reside. Similarly, it is now equally 

 plain that the ideas of the chemist Berthollet and the mathe- 

 matician Fourier who, about a century ago, stood with Napoleon 

 before the pyramids while the centuries looked down upon them, 

 have proved incomparably more worthy of preservation and 

 development than the ideas of that autocrat. He and his state- 

 craft perished, but the savants of his day, conspicuously typified 

 by Lagrange, Laplace, and Lavoisier, have won increasing and 

 world-wide regard with the lapse of time." 



The department of the Institution which has felt the war pres- 

 sure most is probably the Geophysical Laboratory, which has 

 been called upon to exert all its energies to provide the govern- 

 ment with an adequate amount of optical glass. Dr. Day 

 accounts here, in detail, his vigorous efforts in this direction 

 and in concluding remarks that: "it has proved possible, in 

 rather less than six months, to produce optical glass from 

 American materials in all the required varieties and at a rate 

 sufficient to meet the current requirements. The quality is also 

 adequate for the present emergency. Of the limitations which 

 still confront us, none at the moment appears insurmountable, 

 though the productions of melting-pots suitable for optical glass 

 is a serious problem which may require considerable time for 

 its solution. It is our present purpose, with the approval of 

 the Trustees of the Institution, to continue the investigation 



