Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 84.djvu/488

484 under nine catagoriescategories [sic], as indicated in the following list, where the approximate number of words and percentage of total space allotedallotted [sic] to material of each class is also given.

About twenty-six per cent, of the space of the text was given to a more or less formal record of the proceedings of the congress, its general sessions, and the sessions of its various sections. A large part of this space was given to the reporting of the addresses of welcome by the government officials and of the replies to these addresses. In the preparation of copy of this kind the reportorial staffs of our large dailies are trained experts and this part of the work was well performed. Not so with the reporting of the professional papers and discussions! Some of the reporters wisely inserted merely the titles of the papers which were read, and the names of the authors.

It is evident that many of these papers were such that reporting even their title seems to have been quite purposeless in a daily paper. The giving of an intelligent statement of their contents by anybody but a specialist would have been impossible. It may have been useless to attempt reporting the papers with such titles as "A physico-chemical contribution to the study of dolomitization"; "On regional granitization"; "Fractional crystallization, the prime factor in the differentiation of rock magmas," and some others. How utterly hopeless it is for the reporter, in journalistic haste, to present to the general reader a comprehensible abstract of a scientific paper, is evident from one report made of a paper on some explorations in South America, by an American geologist. The author is mentioned as attributing the presence of great interior basins to the unequal warping of the earth in the process of elevation. To illustrate this point the reporter then quotes the gentleman as follows:

It might seem strange to you to live 5,000 miles above the sea, but we think of it as a flat plane. First, there is the plateau sloping at the coast toward the ocean, then the pre-Andean depression and again the depression and again the mountains, which are on the average 70 miles across. The streams that flow west through the Andes, causing international disputes between the Argentine and Chili as to boundaries can probably be attributed to glacial erasion.