teachers of schools of every grade throughout the country, urging adoption of measures in their several spheres for diffusing information as to the present state of the world's metrology and recent progress in its reform, and specially for instructing the rising generation in these matters, to the end that our people may be early and fully prepared to act intelligently on the important questions connected with weights and

measures.

2. By invoking the aid and coöperation of bodies organized to consider questions of scientific or social interest, boards of trade, chambers of commerce, societies of engineers, industrial associations, professions and trades, in this country and elsewhere. 3. By specially urging scientific bodies to open communications with similar bodies in other countries, with a view to general agreement on values to be henceforth uniformly given to units of measure and points of reference which particularly concern them. i. e., to the so-called constants of sci

ence.

4. By memorializing Congress in favor of laws requiring the use, in certain departments of the public service, of metric weights and measures, wherever such legislation may tend to relieve commerce of some of its burdens, to facilitate international communication, to promote international jurisprudence, and to familiarize our own people with the benefits of that system of metrology, with the least interference with their ordinary habits of thought or daily business.

5. By direct appeals to the people through the public press, and by circulating, so far as means allow, books and documents informing the public of the defects of the common system of weights and measures, the means most proper for its amendment, and the great advantages which the acceptance of a universal system would insure to all mankind. J. K. R.

THE INTERNATIONAL MATHEMATICAL

CONGRESS.

PROFESSOR A. VASILIEV, President of the Physico-mathematical Society of Kasan, Russia, has sent me a document prepared by him for the Minister of Public Instruction, with a request that I translate such part of it from the Russian as bears on the founding of an International Mathematical Congress, and make it known in America. This is in substance as follows:

After recapitulating the action of the French Association for the Advancement of Science at Caen (August 14, 1894) [already translated by me and published on pp. 21-22 of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, October, 1894], he gives the resolution offered by me that very same day, August 14, 1894, for their signatures to all the members of the American Mathematical Society present at the Brooklyn meeting, and signed unanimously, which was as follows: "The undersigned members of the American Mathematical Society present at its summer meeting, 1894, take this method of expressing their cordial approval of a series of International Congresses of Mathematicians to take place from time to time, as suggested by A. Vasiliev and C. A. Laisant." The names of the signers may be found on page 290 of Vol. I., of the American Mathematical Monthly. I explained the plan as contemplating a réunion préparatoire at Kasan in 1896, a congrès constituant in Belgium or Switzerland in 1897, which perhaps might fix the First International Congress at Paris in 1900.

Professor Vasiliev then goes on to state the decisive step taken by the deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung in a reunion at Vienna, September, 1894. It was there unanimously resolved to take part in the organizing Congress. The action was as follows:

"Concerning future International Congresses, the Mathematiker-Vereinigung decides in principle to participate, and charges

its bureau to take in regard to this subject the measures that appear necessary. In particular, it leaves to each of its members entire freedom, considering alone as essential that the Society, on this important occasion, may be assured of having the place due it."

Professor Vasiliev expects that the inauguration of the Lobachevsky monument at Kasan will take place in August or September, 1896, and counts on having there a large number of eminent mathematicians, and will profit by the occasion to propose definitely the organization of the International Congress, and then official calls will be issued to meet for the purpose of final organization in 1897 at a city of Belgium or Switzerland.

AUSTIN, TEXAS.

GEORGE BRUCE HALSTED.

CURRENT NOTES ON PHYSIOGRAPHY (V.).

THE EXTINCT LAKE PASSAIC.

THE annual report of the Geological Survey of New Jersey for 1893 contains a long report on surface geology, in which there is an interesting chapter on Lake Passaic, an extinct glacial lake, by R. D. Salisbury and H. B. Kümmel. First mentioned by Professor Cook in his annual report for 1880, Lake Passaic is now carefully traced by its shore lines and the deltas built in it by streams. Its basin was limited on the west by the slope of the crystalline highlands; on the south and east by one of the curved trap ridges of the Watchung or Orange mountains; while on the north it was enclosed by ice. Most remarkable of all the shore deposits in the lake waters is the great morainic embankment that was built across the basin from Morristown to Madison during the furthest advance of the ice sheet into the lake waters; the lobate front of this bank standing up with great distinctness north of a marshy plain, which now represents part of the lake bottom.

The outlet of the lake was, for a time at least, by a notch in the trap ridge near its southern end, at a height of 331 feet above sea level. Twenty-five miles to the north, the records of the lake level now stand sixty-seven feet above the lowest shore line at the southern end of the basin. Many details of interest are considered in the report; none more surprising than the depth of the drift-filling in the notch of one of the trap ridges at Summit (where the Morris and Essex Railroad crosses the ridge), from which a preglacial discharge of the inner valley at this point is fairly inferred. An excellent map accompanies the report.

LOCAL DISPLACEMENT OF THE MISSISSIPPI.

THE annual report of the Iowa geological survey for 1893, just issued, contains a chapter by C. H. Gordon on a former channel of the Mississippi, now filled with drift. The modern river has cut a narrow rockbound gorge, five miles to the east of the former valley, and about ten miles long; its lower end being at Keokuk, where the Des Moines river comes in from the west. A general study of the surface and the records of a deep well indicate that the earlier valley was about three times as broad and twice as deep as the new gorge. The gorge being hardly more than in its youth, the earlier valley was certainly not advanced beyond its early adolescence. It therefore clearly indicates that during only a comparatively short preglacial time did the region stand as high as or a little higher than now; most of its preglacial history must have been passed at a less elevation above baselevel. To speak of the preglacial channel as a measure of vast denudation' (p. 250) therefore seems somewhat inappropriate; it was only the beginning of a denudation that could in a geographical sense be called vast. The vast denudation is more really shown in the stripping of an unknown thickness of strata

CURRENT NOTES ON ANTHROPOLOGY (VII.). RUNIC INSCRIPTIONS IN EASTERN AMERICA.

It is well known that venturous Norwegian navigators in the eleventh century visited at divers times the eastern coast of North America. The ancient sagas of Iceland which narrate the events of these voyages are provokingly meager and obscure; so that it has been quite impossible to decide how often such voyages were made, or how far south the explorers advanced. Of course, it is to be supposed that of some such expeditions we have no account whatever.

The late Professor E. N. Horsford persistently maintained that positive evidence of a pre-Columbian European settlement on the Charles river, Mass., had been discovered by him. The testimony he presented did not convince many, and his daughter, Miss Cornelia Horsford, has done well to pursue and extend the lines of investigation which her father began. The results are said to be confirmatory of his theory, but the only one which has as yet been made public is a neatly illustrated, privately printed pamphlet, of 22 pages, entitled 'An Inscribed

Stone,' By Cornelia Horsford (Cambridge, 1895).

The stone referred to was discovered at Weston, Mass., in an uncultivated field, and came under Miss Horsford's notice merely by accident. One of its sides bore a partly obliterated series of lines which Mr. J. B. Woodsworth, of the U. S. Geological Survey, pronounces to be of artificial origin. They are arranged after the manner of a runic futhorc, and simulate certain forms of such writing. Miss Horsford does not offer an interpretation.

A second inscribed stone near New York city is depicted, the runes on which Miss Horsford both transliterates and provisionally translates as referring to a census of the inhabitants by the church officials.

On a loose sheet a large number of runic and ogham inscriptions from Great Britain, the north of Europe and Greenland are given for the purpose of comparison.

The publication is one well worthy the attention of historians.

WHERE WAS THE GARDEN OF EDEN ?

WE have not yet done with seeking on the earthly plane the pristine Paradise, Eden, the land of joy'.

The latest explorer of its whereabouts is the distinguished Professor Paul Haupt, of the Johns Hopkins University, in an article, 'Wo Lag das Paradies?" in the 'Ueber Land und Meer,' No. 15, 1895. He differs from Friedrich Delitsch, who, in his work with the same title, asserted that the description of the locality in Genesis applied directly to the canal and river system of Babylonia; he differs from himself in his opinion as expressed in a paper published last year in the proceedings of the American Oriental Society, and concludes that the four rivers mentioned in the Hebrew record, the Pison, the Gihon, the Hiddekel and the Euphrates, are, reversing the order, the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Karun and the

Kercha. The two latter are small streams flowing, one into the Persian Gulf, and one into the Schott el Arab, near the ancient mouth of the Tigris, both east of it.

Though Professor Haupt supports his opinion with his customary depth of erudition, I doubt if it will be adopted. That part of Genesis was written by the Hebrew author about 650 B. C., and at that period he certainly knew what he was talking about when he mentioned the Gihon and identified it with the river Nile. Professor Haupt's former theory, which recognized this, seems much more plausible.

But all such theories do not touch the kernel of the question. The myth of the Paradise, watered by its four streams, is found in native American mythologies as prominently as in those of the Old World; and no explanation is valid which does not apply to both continents.

The true interpretation is that the four streams refer to the four cardinal points and the four winds, the rain bringers. They are the cosmic and celestial causes of the weather and its changes, and hence of fertility and growth. It were easy to prove this by abundant examples. The Hebrew realist merely endeavored to transport the ancient myth into terrestial geography. D. G. BRINTON.

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA.

JAMES D. DANA.

WE cannot pay a tribute to the memory of Dana more appropriate than the letter addressed to him by a number of his older colleagues on his eightieth birthday and communicated by Prof. George P. Fisher to the Evening Post.

NEW HAVEN, February 12, 1893. Dear Prof. DANA: Having had the privilege for many years, of being associated with you as colleagues at Yale, we wish to bring you our cordial congratulations on the occasion of your eightieth birthday.

It gives great pleasure to your friends that after so extended a period of incessant and most faithful activity you are still able with unimpaired mental vigor to carry forward the studies which have contributed so much to the advancement of science and have conferred so great distinction, not on yourself alone, but equally on the University and on the country.

We recall the circumstance that it was only four years after your graduation, in 1833, that the first edition of your work on mineralogy, a work which has remained a classic to this day, was issued. Two years later you embarked on the voyage of discovery, undertaken under the auspices of the government by the American Exploring Expedition, and during four industrious years collected the materials for the subsequent reports on geology, mineralogy, corals and crustacea, which established your reputation at home and abroad as a scientific man of distinguished ability.

It is now well-nigh half a century since you entered upon your labors as an editor of the American Journal of Science, your name having first appeared on the title-page of the journal in 1846. The long series of volumes of this periodical are a noble monument of the extent and thoroughness of your labors as a naturalist.

It is in truth surprising that in connection with this continuous employment and with your work as professor you have been able to send forth from the press, in successive editions, the elaborate text-books and other writings, the solid excellence of which is everywhere recognized.

We cannot revert without admiration to the universally broad field of scientific investigation in which you have maintained your place as an acknowledged master.

It would be a signal achievement for any man to hold this position as regards geology, and the branches of zoölogy connected with it; but when, as in your case, the sci

ence of mineralogy is added to the list, the eminence which you have attained is quite exceptional.

It is gratifying to know that your services to the cause of science have obtained full recognition from teachers and students of science and from learned bodies in all civilized countries. None will question that the honors which have thus been so abundantly bestowed and so modestly received are well deserved. The consciousness that the motive of your researches has been an unalloyed love of truth and an unselfish desire to enlarge the bounds of human knowledge must give to these testimonials all the value that such marks of honor can ever possess. We congratulate you that your academic relations both with fellow-professors and with pupils have been so uniformly pleasant. The classes which, in long succession, have listened to your instructions, could their voices be heard,, would unite in expressions of sincere respect both for the qualities of character and for the talents and learning of their revered instructor. But it is no part of our purpose to enter into a detailed statement of the reasons which render it peculiarly agreeable for us, your old friends and neighbors, to offer to you to-day our heartfelt congratulations. Had it been thought worth while to extend the list of subscribers to this letter, no doubt all the members of the teaching body in the University would gladly have added their

names.

But our communication is simply intended as an expression, from a few of your older associates, of interest in this anniversary and of our earnest hope that the blessing of a kind Providence may continue to be with you and with the members of your family.

Very sincerely yours,

TIMOTHY DWIGHT, GEORGE E. DAY, GEORGE P. FISHER, GEORGE J. BRUSH, WILLIAM H. BREWER, O. C. MARSH, FRANK

LIN B. DEXTER, EDWARD E. SALISBURY, WILLIAM D. WHITNEY, HUBERT A. NEWTON, SAMUEL W. JOHNSON, DANIEL C. EATON, A. E. VERRILL, ADDISON VAN NAME, SIDNEY I. SMITH.

CORRESPONDENCE.

THE DISTRIBUTION OF SLEDGES, ETC. DID anybody ever read or hear of sledges, snowshoes or goggles for the eyes in aboriginal South America? I have traced the skee entirely across Asia, the netted snow shoe from the Amur around to Klamath river, Cal., with extension throughout Canada, New England and our northern tier of States. The ice creeper for the foot covers the region of my migration track from southern Kamchatka around to the Yukon. The built-up sledge is everywhere in the Hyperborean area of two hemispheres, the form depending on the exigencies of timber growth. The great broad skee or snow shoe of the Amur is the flat toboggan of the Dominion of Canada.

OTIS T. MASON.

U. S. NATIONAL MUSEUM, April 20.

SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE.

Memoir of Sir Andrew Crombie Ramsay. By SIR ARCHIBALD GEIKIE, Director of the Geol. Surv. of Great Britain and Ireland. London and New York, Macmillan & Co. 1895. Pp. x + 397.

This is really a charming book and ought to be read not only by every geologist, but by every one interested in the story of a noble life. Indeed, the memoir of such a man as Ramsay by such a writer as Geikie could hardly be otherwise than deeply interesting.

Ramsay's career overlaps on the one hand with the old heroic days of the founders of English Geology-Lyell, Buckland, Sedgwick, Murchison, De la Beche, etc., and on the other with modern times and modern methods. He shared with the former the