538 



SCIENCE. 



[Vol. VI., No. 150. 



infancy by legislative restrictions. Under the 

 rules of the electric lighting act of 1882, no com- 

 mercial company could light a district successfully, 

 in a financial sense. In the new parliament, this, 

 among other matters, calls for urgent notice and 

 remedy. Meantime the Anglo-American Brush 

 corporation is endeavoring to induce small groups 

 of house-holders, four, six, or more, to unite in a 

 joint local installation, at an initial cost of about 

 $500 for an average-sized house. The plant pro- 

 posed for such a group is either a steam or gas 

 engine, dynamo, and secondary batteries, whose 

 great use in domestic lighting has been repeatedly 

 demonstrated by Mr. Preece, Mr. S wa n, and many 

 others interested in the matter. 



At the recent ojDening of the session of the So- 

 ciety of arts, the president, Sir Frederick Abel, 

 F.R.S., directed attention to machinery and ap- 

 pliances used in mines, and, contrary to general 

 expectation, showed that explosions were not the 

 greatest cause of loss of hfe in coal-mines. In 

 the ten years 1875-1884, out of 11,165 deaths 

 from accidents of all kinds in coal-mines, only 

 2,562, or roughly one-fourth, were due to fire-damp 

 explosions ; the remainder being caused in about 

 equal shares by, 1°, falling in of roof and sides, and, 

 2°, other causes. The address, which is replete 

 with interest, and can be read in full in the 

 journal of the society for Nov. 20, concludes with 

 some strong comments upon the part taken by the 

 Times in regard to the delay in the report of the 

 royal commission (of which the speaker was a 

 member) upon the whole subject. 



Two other presidential addresses lately deliv- 

 ered need a word of notice. The Marquis of 

 Lome (late governor-general of Canada), the presi- 

 dent of the Royal geographical society, referred in 

 some detail to the discoveries made in the basin of 

 the river Kongo, in Africa, by Rev. G. Grenfell (a 

 Baptist missionary) and Lieutenant Wissmann, as 

 well as by Portuguese travellers. He then called 

 attention to the recent endeavors of the society to 

 improve geographical education in English schools 

 and colleges, and to the exhibition, shortly to be 

 held, of appliances and methods of teaching it, 

 collected by the society's special commissioner, 

 IVIr. J. S. Keltic, in a recent continental tour. 



During November a meeting was held in Lon- 

 don to celebrate the granting of a royal charter to 

 the Institute of chemistry, a body which has been 

 at work for some years, with the avowed object of 

 raising tlie status of analytical chemists, and do- 

 ing for them what the College of surgeons, the 

 old guilds, and the modern trades-unions, do for 

 their respective professions and trades. An ad- 

 dress was delivered on the occasion by Professor 

 Odling, the president, who holds the chemical 



chair in the University of Oxford. He began 

 with a history of the movement, and the increas- 

 ing need of ' professional services,' and then con- 

 sidered the position of ' experts ' as witnesses in the 

 law-courts. The part of his address, however, 

 most criticised, is that in which he dealt with the 

 vexed question of the endowment of research 

 and the pursuit of research, on the one hand, for 

 its own sake alone ; on the other, for the pecuniary 

 rewards which are sometimes the result of it. 

 Nature concludes a long article upon it in the 

 words, ' ' We wish it to be known, therefore, that 

 the spirit it (Professor Odling's address) breathes 

 is an alien spirit, repugnant to students of pure 

 science in this country." W. 



London, Dec. 1. 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 



♦** Correspondents are requested to he as brief as possible. The 

 writer's name is in all cases required as proof of good faith. 



Newcomb's * Political economy.' 



Mr. James has quite misunderstood my remark 

 about bimetallism. I admitted that the word assume 

 did not correctly convey Professor Newcomb's idea ; 

 and I thought I sufficiently indicated that Professor 

 Newcomb's sole intention, in the passage in question, 

 evidently was to tell the student what was meant by 

 a system of unlimited bimetallism. In other words, 

 his sentence (which I admitted was unfortunately 

 worded) was simply meant to state that the govern- 

 ment chose a fixed ratio of values in their system of 

 coinage. Newcomb says nothing: at this point in the 

 way of discussion ; in a later part of the work he de- 

 votes a considerable amount of space to an examina- 

 tion of the arguments on both sides, and does not find 

 that we can positively declare either that the bimetal- 

 hsts are wrong, or that they are right. Under these 

 circumstances, I leave it to the reader to decide 

 whether Professor James has dealt fairly with his 

 author in insinuating that he caricatured the views 

 of bimetallists. 



As to the rest of Professor James's reply, I shall 

 permit myself only one remark. He, in common 

 with many of his school, seems to identify English 

 political economy with laissez-faire, and persistently 

 confuses the question of scientific method with that 

 of practical conclusions. This is illustrated by what 

 he says about Sidgwick. He does not deny — what 

 is obvious to every reader, and what Sidgwick ex- 

 pressly asserts — that Sidgwick's method is essentially 

 that of the earlier English economists ; and this was 

 the only relevant question. Of course, Sidgwick's 

 book shows marks of his indebtedness to German 

 writers, when he explicitly acknowledges (as I men- 

 tioned) his special obligations to Held and Wagner ; 

 but this does not in the least modify the fact that his 

 method of investigation (or ' style of reasoning,' to 

 quote Professor James) is quite unaffected by these 

 writers ; and this was the only point at issue. But 

 with a writer who sees no distinction between an ad- 

 herence to the methods of Mill (which was what I 

 spoke of) and an adherence to his ' methods and sys- 

 tem ' (whatever that may be), it is hardly profitable 

 to carry on a controversy. Fabian Franklin. 



Baltimore, Dec. 11. 



