Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 66.djvu/29

Rh state geologist, acting as secretary, was notable for its excellent address by Dr. A. Smith Woodward. F.R.S., the eminent systematic paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, and Professor Henry F. Osborn, of Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History, together with the discussion which followed, of unusual interest, not only to paleontologists, but to geologists as well. Students of petrology and mineralogy heard Zirkel, of Leipzig, while those of physiography listened to Penck, of Vienna. The section of oceanography, manned by Rear-Admiral John E. Bartlett, U. S. X., in the chair, had the course of its deliberations directed by no less distinguished an explorer of the deep sea than Sir John Murray, K.C.B. . of Edinburgh, aided by the eminent Professor K. Mitsukuri, of Tokio. a zoologist celebrated for his embryological researches and his knowledge of marine life in eastern waters.

The section of cosmical physics was another remarkable for the ideals of synthesis and the spirit of cooperation which pervaded it. In an address as bold as it was original Arrhenius proposed a theory of the possible connection between phenomena the most diverse and separated by exceedingly great distances, thus, e. g., raising meteorology to the dignity of a cosmic science. Negatively charged electric corpuscles pass off from the sun and penetrate our atmosphere, producing its negative electricity, forming nuclei for the condensation of moisture, and so on. in intricate detail! Such students of meteorology and terrestrial magnetism as Drs. Rotch and Clayton, of the Blue Hill Observatory, and Dr. L. A. Bauer, of Washington, participated.

The biological sections were addressed by such, eminent botanists from abroad as De Tries, of Amsterdam; Bower of Glasgow; Goebel, of Munich; Wiesner, of Vienna; and Drude, of Dresden; and by such representative zoologists as Giard, of Paris; Oskar Hertwig, of Berlin, recently made rector magnificus of the university; Delage, of Paris; Waldeyer, of Berlin; and Verworn, of Göttingen. Among the Americans who took part either as chairmen or speakers were Trelease and Bessey, Whitman. Brooks and Davenport, Meltzer, Howell and Theobald Smith. The section around which most interest centered was naturally that of phytogeny, presided over by T. H. Morgan, of Columbia, and addressed by De Vries and Whitman, one a botanist, the other a zoologist, both in the true sense biologists, who have directly investigated the problems of phylogeny and evolution by observation and experiment. De Tries, who has been in America since last spring, is professor in the University and director of the botanical gardens at Amsterdam, and eminent for a remarkable series of researches, experimental and theoretical, touching problems in physical chemistry and plant physiology, in the theory of heredity, and especially in the new experimental science of evolution. In the last named field De Tries has accomplished results which will make an epoch, at once demonstrating the fundamental thesis of Darwin, and supplementing the principles of Darwinism.