Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/476

456 Lindsay is carrying out a similar plan of sociological excursions at the university. Regular trips are made to the large business establishments, and to the various charitable and reformatory institutions, slum districts, etc. A thorough investigation of the condition of the colored population of Philadelphia is contemplated in the near future. An assistant in sociology is to be appointed for next year, whose special work will be an investigation of the negro, Italian, and other foreign population. The College Settlement Association of Philadelphia will co-operate with the university in this work, by furnishing an assistant in carrying on the proposed investigation.

An important contribution to science has recently been made by Dr. George E. Fisher and Dr. Isaac J. Schwatt, of the mathematical department of the university, in their translation into English of Durfège's Elements of the Theory of Functions. Dr. Schwatt has also written A Geometrical Treatment of Curves which are Isogonal Conjugate to a Straight Line. This work called forth the following commendation from the eminent French mathematician Vigarié: "The work has been admirably conceived, and in my belief it is the first essay of the kind that has ever been published."

As early as 1775 David Rittenhouse, sometime vice-provost, published an oration on astronomy, but wrought more than he wrote. The erection of an astronomical observatory as a department of the university has been an unfulfilled desire until the present. In 1876, Reese Wall Flower, of Delaware County, Pennsylvania, bequeathed to the university a large sum of money for the erection of an astronomical observatory. Among the assets turned in to the university as a part of this sum was the farm in Delaware County known as the Flower farm. It happily offered the most available site for the observatory, the erection of which is now under way. The observatory buildings, three in number, consist of the equatorial building, the meridian building, and the residence of the director. Prof. Charles L. Doolittle, late of the Lehigh University. The principal instruments comprising the equipment are an equatorial of eighteen-inch aperture, with spectroscope; a meridian circle and a zenith telescope; and a three-inch universal transit. Graduate students in astronomy will be instructed in the details of observatory practice, and will be expected to participate in the regular work. The outlined plan contemplates systematic observation of comets and small planets, investigation of various latitudes, and spectroscopy. A small observatory for the convenience of undergraduate students will also be erected in the Botanical Garden on the university grounds, thus making the large observatory free for advanced work.

The John Harrison Laboratory of Chemistry, recently added