204 



SCIENCE, 



[Vol. VL, No. 136. 



THE RESOLUTIONS CONCERNING THE 

 COAST-SURVEY. 



The following are the resolutions referred to in our 

 leading article, and unanimously passed by the asso- 

 ciation at its general session of Aug. 28 : — 



Whereas, The attention of this association has 

 been called to articles in the public press, purport- 

 ing to give — and presumably by authority — an 

 official report of a commission appointed by the 

 Treasury department to investigate the condition of 

 the TJ. S. coast-survey office, in which report the 

 value of a certain scientific work is designated as 

 ' meagre ; ' 



And whereas. This association desires to express 

 a hope that the decision, as to the utility of such scien- 

 tific work, may be referred to scientific men, — 



Resolved, That the American association for the 

 advancement of science is in earnest sympathy with 

 the government in its every intent to secure the great- 

 est possible efficiency of the public service. 



Resolved, That the value of the scientific work 

 performed in the various departments of the govern- 

 ment can be best judged by scientific men. 



Resolved, That this association desires to express 

 its earnest approval of the extent and high character 

 of the work performed by the U. S. coast-survey, — 

 especially as illustrated by the gravity determinations 

 now in progress, — and to express the hope that such 

 valuable work may not be interrupted. 



Resolved, That this association expresses, also, 

 the hope that the government will not allow any 

 technical rule to be established that shall necessarily 

 confine its scientific work to its own employees. 



Resolved, That in the opinion of the American 

 association for the advancement of science, the head 

 of the coast-survey should be appointed by the pres- 

 ident, by and with the advice and consent of the 

 senate, should have the highest possible standing 

 among scientific men, and should command their 

 entire confidence. 



Resolved, That copies of these resolutions shall 

 be prepared by the general secretary, and certified by 

 the president of the association and by the perma- 

 nent secretary, and shall be forwarded to the pres- 

 ident of the United States, and the secretary of the 

 treasury, and given to the press. 



PROCEEDINGS OF THE SECTION OF 

 ASTRONOMY AND MATHEMATICS. 



Perhaps the small number of members in attend- 

 ance, especially in section A, and the consequent 

 dearth of papers, may have been, in the minds of the 

 sectional committee, a sufficient excuse for the appear- 

 ance of the first two numbers upon the programme; 

 but it would certainly be far better to reduce the 

 number of meetings of the section in such a case, 

 and thus grant its members more opportunity for 

 hearing valuable papers in others, than to occupy its 

 time, and detract from its dignity, by the serious con- 



sideration of such material as that first offered to the 

 section of mathematics and astronomy. The first of 

 these choice contributions was by Mr. Thomas Bass- 

 nett of Jacksonville, Fla., entitled 'Intimate connec- 

 tion between gravitation and the solar parallax.' The 

 only important truth stated in the paper, the one set 

 forth as a new and important discovery, and the prin- 

 cipal feature of the matter, was simply another way 

 of stating Kepler's third law, and offers no method 

 whatever of determining the solar parallax. The rest 

 of the paper was principally nonsense. The next 

 paper by Mr. S. S. Haight upon ' Rapidity of calcula- 

 tion,' etc., was only a resume of some short cuts, 

 principally in cross-multiplication, which are given 

 in many elementary arithmetics, and are familiar, or 

 would suggest themselves, to any one having occasion 

 to make any extended computations in that man- 

 ner; while the speaker's remarks about the use of 

 logarithms only served to show his ignorance of the 

 whole matter. 



The section then settled down to the consideration 

 of serious business in listening to a paper by Prof. H. 

 A. i*^ewton of Yale college, upon ' The effect of small 

 bodies passing near a planet upon the planet's velo- 

 city.' The former researches of Professor Newton, 

 upon meteors, are recognized among astronomers as 

 our principal source of knowledge about the char- 

 acter, distribution, and motion of these minute bodies 

 with which the solar system is filled, especially those 

 which strike our atmosphere, and are burned up as 

 meteors. The possible effect of these upon the rota- 

 tion of the earth, and the revolution of the earth and 

 moon in their orbits, has been subjected to elaborate 

 investigation at the hands of several mathematical 

 astronomers. The recent publications of Mr. Den- 

 ning of Bristol, Eng., claiming the fixity of long-con- 

 tinuing radiant points of meteor streams, have raised 

 the question of the existence of broad streams of 

 meteoroids moving swiftly through stellar space out- 

 side of solar attraction; and any new investigation 

 bearing upon any of these points is more than usually 

 timely. In this paper Professor Newton has discussed 

 the effect upon the earth's motion of those bodies 

 which do not pass near enough to the earth to be 

 drawn into its atmosphere, but still near enough to 

 be drawn out of their course, and swung for a time 

 in hyperbolic orbits round it. He began by saying 

 that the results of the investigation might perhaps be 

 considered negative as far as measurable quantities 

 in the solar system are concerned, but that they had 

 a mathematical interest, and might possibly have a 

 bearing upon somewhat similar questions in molec- 

 ular physics, like the kinetic theory of gases. The 

 mathematician and astronomer must be referred to 

 the paper itself, but the results of popular interest 

 may be briefly summarized as follows : Considering, 

 first, the case of a cylindrical stream of small bodies 

 evenly distributed, and all moving in the same direc- 

 tion with a common velocity past the earth supposed 

 to be in the axis of the cylinder, it is shown that 

 they will communicate to the earth in each unit of 

 time a velocity along the axis : 1°, that is proportional 

 to the density of the group; 2°, that decreases as the 



