August 15, 1884;] 



SCIENCE. 



137 



necessitate much reviewing were forbidden. It was 

 expressly ordered that the day and hour for test- 

 exercises " shall not be announced to students more 

 than twenty-four hours before they take place." 



The Saxon decrees dated March 4 and 10, 1882, 

 give particular directions as to the scope and methods 

 of instruction, leaving the matter of study-hours un- 

 touched. They set forth that instruction in the clas- 

 sical languages is carried to excess in the gymnasia, 

 being in many cases turned into teaching philology 

 as a profession instead of being conducted as a means 

 of general intellectual training. With reference to 

 the ' extemporalia ' that form a prominent exercise in 

 many of the Saxon gymnasia, the decrees are very 

 pronounced. These essays which the students are 

 required to translate and write down in a foreign 

 language from dictation, are often, it is asserted, 

 mere collections of questions in syntax, calculated to 

 produce in the student "a feeling of anxiety and 

 vexation instead of an agreeable consciousness of 

 knowledge." The result in the student is nervous 

 excitement and subsequent intellectual torpor, — 

 conditions from which the young should be carefully 

 guarded. 



The Baden ministry published an outline of a 

 decree, March 18, 1883, that had been prepared by the 

 board of health, in conference with a number of 

 teachers. Previous to this time, the different classes 

 of the gymnasia had thirty, thirty-one, thirty-two, 

 and thirty-four hours of study a week, without count- 

 ing elective studies and gymnastics. These are now 

 reduced to twenty-eight and thirty-two hours for the 

 two groups of classes below and above the secunda. 

 Before 1869 the total number of hours of study for 

 a Baden gymnasium of nine classes was 269 a week, 

 in 1869 it was raised to 286, and it is now 268. Each 

 study-hour is limited to fifty minutes. The amount 

 of home-study is also definitely fixed, and the course 

 of instruction modified somewhat. As an evidence of 

 the necessity of these changes, Professor Baumeister 

 points out that in the lowest class of a gymnasium 

 1,300 Latin words have to be learned the first quarter 

 of the year, and nearly as many the second, mak- 

 ing a daily average of about twenty words. These 

 words, he observes, are not met with in any authors 

 read by the boys till they reach the upper classes, 

 and are generally expressions of ancient life, of which 

 a nine-year old boy knows nothing. The intellectual 

 effort required to memorize these words, leads, he 

 holds, to injurious and lasting effects. 



The commission appointed by the stadtholder of 

 Alsace Lorraine recommended that the number of 

 study-hours should be restricted to twenty-six a week 

 for the lowest classes of the gymnasia, and to twenty- 

 eight and thirty-two for the higher; that the hours 

 of home-study should be eight, twelve, and eighteen 

 a week, progressing from the lowest class to the 

 highest; and that six hours a week should be devoted 

 to general physical exercise, including swimming, 

 open-air sports, skating, and excursions. While the 

 existing conditions will be somewhat ameliorated 

 by these decrees, they do not seem to have brought 

 about a final solution of the difficulty. Last year a 



petition upon the subject, signed by eminent teachers, 

 physicians, and other citizens, was addressed to the 

 Prussian chamber of deputies. After setting forth 

 the deplorable effects of the excessive strain upon 

 the nervous system of scholars, it appealed to the 

 patriotism of the deputies to put an end to the abuse 

 which, the petition asserts, " threatens little by little 

 to reduce the cultivated classes of society to a state of 

 moral weakness that shall render them incapable 

 of great and manly resolution." 



A PROPOSED NEW DEPARTURE IN 

 HYGROMETRY. 



In the Comptes rendus for June 30, Mr. Jamin, the 

 newly elected perpetual secretary of the French 

 Academie des sciences, proposes a new departure in 

 hygrometry. 



The present system of expressing the amount of 

 vapor of water in the atmosphere is to give the ratio 



f 



%r , of the observed elastic force /, to the maximum F, 



which the vapor would have at the same temperature 

 if the atmosphere were saturated with it, i.e., were 

 at the dew-point; and this is called the ' relative hu- 

 midity.' "Now, as this maximum F for the point of 

 saturation does not by any means correspond to a 

 constant ratio between the mass of the vapor of water 

 in the air and the mass of its other constituents, 

 but varies largely with the temperature, so that cold 

 air will not hold nearly so much vapor of water as 

 warm air, this system of expressing the amount of 

 this vapor as a percentage of another percentage 

 which is itself very variable, is, in the opinion of Mr. 

 Jamin, a vicious one, at least for many purposes of 

 meteorology. 



In its stead he proposes to substitute just what a 

 chemical analysis of the air in question would give; 

 viz., its 'hygrometric richness ' as given by the ratio 

 of the amount of vapor of water to that of the other 

 constituents, and as expressed in volume by the frac- 



f f 



tion rr__.f i or in. mass by 0.622 „■'__ .. , in which // 



is the total pressure of the atmosphere, and the de- 

 nominator consequently denotes that of dry air, or 

 of all the other constituents but water-vapor. 



Since observation does not give directly the relative 

 humidity, but this is derived from an auxiliary table, 

 Mr. Jamin shows that a table can be constructed 

 which will just as readily give the hygrometric rich- 

 ness, for which he proposes to adopt the voluine- 



f 

 measure jr'_ f ,' and he states that such a table 



will hereafter be published in the Annates du bureau 

 central meteorologique. 



While the present system has its advantages in 

 showing approximately the nearness to the dew-point, 

 and hence to cloud-formation and possible fall of rain 

 or snow, yet it would seem, that for the wider study 

 of total rainfall and evaporation, in fact of the gen- 

 eral diurnal and annual circulation of water between 



