Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/92

88 could the stream effects be distinguished. I am certain, however, that they were there and that the direction was upwards towards this anti-helial (?) position everywhere.

The appearances noted, were highly suggestive of luminous matter of some sort streaming past the earth on all sides with tremendous velocity in a direction away from the sun—the parallel streams being rendered apparently convergent by perspective.

The aurora, however, is believed to be a strictly terrestrial phenomenon in the nature of an electrical discharge in the higher regions of the atmosphere; although good grounds exist for supposing that there is some intimate connection between great auroral displays on the earth and disturbances going on in the sun.

In this connection it would be interesting to know where Borelli's comet was at the time. It was then rapidly nearing its closest approach to the sun.


 * Owing to my absence in Europe, Mr. O. F. Cook's article, published under the above title in the July number of the, has only now come to my attention. Mr. Cook's somewhat drastic criticism of the suggestion regarding Mendelian inheritance, made in my article in the issue of Science for December 19, 1902, takes a prominent place in his essay and relates to a question of wide biological interest. I, therefore, ask space to point out that he failed to grasp the nature of the suggestion; and unfortunately the confusion was worse confounded by his misquotation, of course unintentional, of my own statement in such a way as to make me seem to commit the very error that is the object of his criticism, though I myself had expressly warned against such an error in a paper read before the Washington meeting of the American Association last December!

Mr. Cook's objection to the suggestion, as he understood it and as he quoted it, is perfectly correct, and the man of straw thus set up by his own hand is properly overthrown. Assuredly, to maintain that the reducing division in the maturation of the germ-cells 'leads to the separation of paternal and maternal elements and their ultimate isolation' as 'separate germ-cells' (this as quoted by Mr. Cook, italics mine) involves, as he points out, the reductio ad absurdum that the individual could not show characters individually traceable to more than two grandparents; for this form of statement implies that purely paternal or maternal groups of chromosomes are separated by the division, to be isolated as such in the gametes, the latter being thus rendered pure in respect to parentage. But this, of course, was not my meaning, nor was it what I said. Mr. Cook failed to perceive that my statement referred, not to the parental groups, but to the members of the individual pairs of paternal and maternal chromosomes. What I said was the isolation of the paternal and maternal elements, not 'as' but 'in' separate germ-cells; and the elements thus separated from each other were specifically designated as 'the members of each pair.' I regret that Mr. Cook did not read with greater attention; for my phraseology was carefully chosen, the untenability of the view which is erroneously ascribed to me having been clearly pointed out by Mr. Sutton when he first brought his suggestion to my attention, and since fully considered by him in an article on 'The Chromosomes in Heredity' published in the Biological Bulletin for last April. It is only fair to add that since Mr. Cook accuses me, as he does Mr. Cannon, of a failure to understand the Mendelian