SCIENCE. 



329 



. SCIENCE: 



A Weekly Record of Scienti.fic 

 Progress. 



JOHN MICHELS, Editor. 



Published at 

 TRIBUNE BUILDING, NEW YORK. 



P. O. Box 3838. 

 SATURDAY, JULY 16, 1881. 



We are indebted to Professor Edward S. Holden 

 for a series of seven interesting drawings of the re- 

 cently discovered Comet ; they are now being engraved 

 and will appear in " Science" next week. 



These drawings were made by Professor Holden 

 from observations made with the 1 5-inch equatorial of 

 the Washburn Observatory. 



We have received a copy of the instructions fur- 

 nished to the officers in command of the expedition- 

 ary force to Lady Franklin Bay, which appear to 

 have given general satisfaction, and probably suffice 

 for all the purposes of the expedition. Still we 

 regret to find that the services of a naturalist 

 have not been considered requisite, and that no pro- 

 vision appears to have been made' for collecting speci- 

 mens and information respecting the Fauna and 

 Flora of the Polar regions. A microscope is not even 

 added to the list of apparatus provided for the use of 

 the expedition. 



Mr. Alfred Russell Wallace in his last work, " Is- 

 land Life," observes that there is an enormous 

 waste of labor and money with comparatively scanty 

 and unimportant results to natural history, of most 

 of the great scientific voyages of the various civi- 

 lized governments during the present century. 

 All these expeditions combined have done far x 

 less than private collectors in making known the 

 products of remote lands and islands. They have 

 brought home, he asserts, fragmentary collections, 

 made in widely scattered localities and these have 

 been usually described in huge folios, whose value is 

 often in inverse proportion to their bulk and cost. 

 The same species have been collected again and 

 again, often described several times, and, not infre- 

 quently stated to be from places they never inhabited. 

 The result of this wretched system, says Mr. Wallace, 

 is, that the productions of some of the most frequently 

 visited and most interesting islands on the globe are 

 still very imperfectly known, while their native plants 



and animals are being yearly exterminated. The rem- 

 edy suggested by Mr. Wallace, is that resident nat- 

 uralists at a very small annual expense, should be ap- 

 pointed, who, he considers, would do more for the 

 advancement of knowledge in this direction, than all 

 the expensive expeditions which have again and again 

 circumnavigated the globe. 



We are of course aware that most of the many re- 

 cent expeditions to the polar regions have been 

 specially organized for the promotion of the physical 

 sciences, but the value of an expert naturalist on such 

 occasions should not be neglected, and wherever per- 

 manent stations are established the naturalist may be 

 expected to do good work, and even occasionally in- 

 terpret natural phenomena which are sometimes in- 

 explicable to the physicist. 



The comet has been observed here (with the excep- 

 tion of June 27 ) on every night since June 23, although 

 clouds have often considerably hindered the work. 



In addition to the measurements of position, the 

 light of different parts of the comet has been 

 photometrically determined. This work, very prob- 

 ably, has been undertaken only at this Observatory. 

 The instrument employed for the purpose is one which 

 has already been extensively used here for measuring 

 the light of nebulne. The results of these observa- 

 tions are expressed in stellar magnitudes on Pogson's 

 logarithmic scale, regarding the light of a star of the 

 given magnitude as diffused over a circle 1' in diameter, 

 the brightness of which would then be equal to that 

 of the observed portion of the nebula or comet. On 

 the first five nights of the present month, various parts 

 of the coma and tail have thus been observed. The 

 result, from a provisional reduction, is as follows: 



Coma, 0/5 south of nucleus, magnitude 6.9 



" 0/5 north of " " 7.8 



Tail, o.°5 " " " 9.6 



" i.°o " " " 10.3 



" 2.°o " " " 11.0 



" 3 o .< .< u JI2 



4.°o " " " 11.6 



I add the corresponding results, also from pro- 

 visional reductions, for some other comets and nebula? : 



Palisa's Comet, 1879 d magnitude 8 



Comet, 1880 d " 7 



Webb's Planetary Nebula, DM. + 4i°4004 " 4.7 

 Brightest part of great nebula in Orion (20 



points in which have been observed) " 8.0 



Nebula G. C. 4487, " 11.2 



" G. C. 4802, " 11,3 



On June 28th, and on Jury 1, 3, 5 and 6, the co- 

 ordinates of a number of points in the border of the 

 comet's tail were observed for the purpose of determin- 

 ing its form. 



Edward C. Pickering. 

 Harvard College Observatory, 



Cambridge, U. S., July 6th, 1881. 



