Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/99

Rh Berlin); once to France, to Sweden, to Denmark and to Russia.

The Independent raises the question as to-whether America has been neglected, and asks for a vote for five Americans who deserve the prize next year. It must unfortunately be acknowledged that no American deserves the prizes in science on the lines followed by the administrators of the trust. Nobel himself laid special stress on an invention benefiting mankind, and Dr. Bell and Mr. Edison are here preeminent. In pure science Willard Gibbs deserved the prize, but we have now no physicist, chemist or physiologist as eminent as Europeans who could be named. We stand better in some other sciences, and we may hope in work being carried forward by men who may ultimately attain international eminence.

president of the American Museum of Natural History, provided in 1897 means for a thorough ethnological exploration of the northern coast of North America and Asia from British Columbia to the Amur River. The expedition has resulted in valuable accessions to the American Museum and in important ethnological, archeological, linguistic and anthropometric studies, which are now in course of publication in twelve volumes under the editorship of Dr. Franz Boas, of the American Museum and Columbia University. Investigations along the northern coast have been carried out by Messrs. Boas. Farrand, Smith and Teit, and on the Asiatic side by Messrs. Laufer, Fowke, Jochelson and Bogoras.

The memoir last published is an account of the material culture of the Chukchee. the tribes inhabiting the extreme northeastern corner of Siberia, of special interest consequently to those who speculate on the past peopling of the Americas by way of Bering Strait or the future construction of telegraphs and railways through these regions. It also has an adventitious interest just now in view of a possible change in sovereignty. It appears, indeed, that this territory has not been completely