Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 63.djvu/576

572 agriculture, 207 as laborers, 18 in the fisheries and 3 as carpenters. Agriculture and out-of-door labor are the most healthful occupations, and would not affect the health of women, as do the sedentary occupations to which they are especially attracted. There are 15,830 female teachers, 11,357 bookkeepers, 6,412 clerks and copyists and 5,693 stenographers. There were in 1885 only 106 stenographers. Less than three per cent, of the teachers are married and about 5 per cent, of the clerks and bookkeepers.

The compilers of the report abstain from comments on the sociological significance of the figures they give, but they obviously have these in mind as statistics are added as to marriage, birth, death and divorce rates. In 1851, there were about 28 births per thousand of the population, about 23 marriages, and nearly 19 deaths. In 1901, the ratio of births fell to about 25, marriages to about 17, and deaths to nearly 17. There has been an extraordinary increase in the divorce rate, there having been one divorce to thirty-four marriages in 1882, one to twenty-seven in 1891 and one to eighteen in 1901. The decrease in the marriage and birth rates becomes much more significant when it is remembered that the proportion of native-born inhabitants has greatly decreased. In 1882, 55.74 per cent, of those married were native-born, in 1891, only 43.56 per cent. The foreign-born have much larger families, and the birth rate has decreased much more than three per thousand. How far the decrease is due to the increased employment of women in gainful occupations is a question that deserves serious consideration.

note with regret the deaths of Dr. Frederick Law Olmsted, the eminent landscape architect; of Dr. Emmanuel Munk, associate professor of physiology at Berlin, and of Dr. C. K. Hoffman, professor of zoology and comparative anatomy at Harlem.

honors conferred on American men of science by foreign institutions we notice that Dr. E. C. Pickering, director of the Harvard College Observatory, has been given the doctorate of science by the University of Heidelberg, and Dr. E. B. Wilson, professor of zoology at Columbia University, has been elected a foreign member of the Accademia dei Lincei of Rome.

instructor in bionomics at Stanford University, has been appointed chief botanist of the United States Philippine Commission.—Dr. William J. Holland, director of the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburg, has returned to the United States with the important paleontological collections of Baron de Briet, which the Carnegie Museum has recently acquired.—Dr. Emil Tietze, director of the Imperial Geological Institute of Austria, was chosen president of the Ninth International Geological Congress, which opened at Vienna on August 20.

ship Terra Nova has now sailed from England to relieve the Discovery. The British government, which has appropriated £45,000 for the expedition, is acting without the advice of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Society, which originally sent the expedition, assisted by a grant from the government.