Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 31.djvu/127

Rh. One of his first acts was the request for co-operation on the part of the National Academy of Sciences. He improved the opportunity to help Professor Langley in the determination of the absorbing power of the atmosphere; he accepted Professor King's offer to carry observers on his balloon-voyages; he heartily furthered Lieutenant Greely's efforts to maintain an international polar station, and joined with the Coast Survey in establishing a similar station, under Lieutenant Ray, at the northern point of Alaska; he co-operated with the Bureau of Navigation in securing weather reports from the ocean; he powerfully assisted the Metrological Society in its labors for the reformation of our complicated system of local times, the result of which was the adoption by the country of the present simple system of standard meridians one hour apart.

Equally successful was he in his efforts to co-operate in various methods of disseminating and utilizing the knowledge obtained by the Weather Bureau for the benefit of the business interests of the country. With the telegraph companies he published the daily telegraph bulletin. Through the railroad companies he displayed the railroad train-signals visible to every farmer along the railroads. With local boards of trade and other business interests he elaborated our system of flood-warnings in the river-valleys.

General Hazen was especially clear in his views as to the importance of giving personal credit to each man for his own personal work. Routine work was credited to the assistants in charge and not to the impersonal office; having assigned a special work to the best man available, he took pains to give him the credit and make him personally responsible for its success, thus securing more enthusiasm in the work.

This notice of a few prominent features in the intense activity of General Hazen's life seems eulogistic rather than historical; but to the contrary, the fact is that military life rarely offers a position that requires the promotion of any special science, and still more rarely do official or military circles present an officer who so thoroughly desired, as far as allowable, to relax stringent military law and liberally interpret cumbersome official regulations, so that scientific men might successfully promote their special work.

has propounded a theory that coal was originally a liquid generated by the decomposition of inferior vegetation in an atmosphere highly charged with carbonic acid. The carbon of the jelly-like mass thus formed, after passing through various transformations into asphalt, petroleum, bitumen, etc., finally assumed the form of coal. The author cites various facts connected with the occurrence of coal, which, he thinks, are better explained on his theory than by the usual one.