United States Commissioner of Fish and Fisheries. Report to June 30, 1898. Washington. Pp. 350.
Woodman, J. Edmund. Studies in the Gold-bearing Slates of Nova Scotia. Boston Society of Natural History. Pp. 42, with 3 plates.
Fragments of Science.
The New Zealand Experiment in Woman Suffrage.—The right of suffrage was given to all the women of New Zealand in 1893 without any concerted action or aggressive demonstrations on their part by the free, almost unsolicited, vote of the men. The general election took place in November of the same year, and is described in the Saturday Review as having been a warm contest, with several questions on which public opinion was sharply divided; but "on the whole, the women took matters wonderfully coolly. They flocked in thousands to the public meetings, where, by common consent, the front seats were given up to them." Contrary to expectation, they displayed little emotion, and even had to be "coached" to make a pretense of enthusiasm. "Polling day was awaited with dread by the electioneering agents and returning officers, with doubt by veteran politicians, and with pleasurable excitement by the women." They all voted, and "what did it all lead to?" "It left things very much as they were.... Gradually but irresistibly the conviction forced itself upon the New Zealand mind that the women knowing little and caring as little about political details, had voted almost always with the men of their family and class. Sharing to the full the prejudices, hopes, and interests of their fathers, brothers, husbands, and lovers, they had cheerfully doubled the voting power of these. Where, as in the case of schoolmistresses and factory girls, they had some special bond of union other than domestic they had voted very much as schoolmasters and male trade-unionists had voted.... With one accord colonists ceased to be afraid of what the suffrage might do, and began instead to complain of it for not doing more. Only here and there careful observers note that groups of women are studying politics, and foresee that, as years go by, these will supply a new and intelligent force with distinct and logically reasoned aims of its own."
The Metric System (a Letter to the London Times).—Sir: I see that on Wednesday next, the 22d inst., the President of the Board of Trade is to receive a deputation from the Decimal Associations and others to urge on the Government, not merely the adoption of the decimal system of notation, but the compulsory application within two years of the metric system of weights and measures in its entirety. I have been hoping to see a letter in the Times from some person of importance calling attention to this deputation. I fervently trusted I should notice one from your correspondent, Mr. Herbert Spencer, who, a year or so back, contributed a series of thoroughly well-thought-out and logical articles, exposing the fallacy of the metric system; but if any such letter has appeared I have, unfortunately, missed it. I believe this agitation to be largely due to scientific professors who have been brought up on foreign books, and have found it too much trouble to convert foreign measurements into English; further, due to the promptings of a number of foreign merchants, forming (happily, or unhappily) now so large a portion of our traders-men who, also, do not wish to take the trouble of converting foreign weights and measures into English. As regards the suggestion, made time after time, that the metric system is one giving the greatest simplicity to calculations, I say unhesitatingly, from very considerable experience, that it is one absolutely subversive of mental arithmetic, and I appeal to anybody who has ever had the misfortune to wait at the guichet of a French railway station while the clerk inside has been calculating the total amount to be paid for two first-class and one second-class from "A" to "B" with a piece of chalk, or pencil and paper, to compare the speed and the certainty of this process with the answer that he would get at Euston, or at any such station in Great Britain, and say which system shows by results the advantages in point of time and in accuracy. The French themselves, as has been pointed out on more than one occasion, find the metric system too irksome, and they evade it. According to the metric system, one of its great merits is that you can state every required quantity by multiples or submultiples of ten—metre, 1; decimetre, 0.1; centimetre, 0.01; millimetre, 0.001. But no Frenchman thinks of expressing himself in this way. Instead of 0.01, he says cm. 1. For a millimetre, he says mm. 1. When he comes to large weights, does he not commonly abjure the 1,000 kilos and write one tonne? When he comes to domestic weights the kilogramme is found too large; the half of this, the practical equivalent of the pound, is wanted. He ought to write 500 grammes. He does not. He abjures his decimals, and writes one half kilo. But I feel I must not take up your space by multiplying instances, so well known to many who have studied the subject, of the unbearable burden of the decimal plus metrical system compulsorily carried out. I well know the value of decimals, and the indispensable need of their use in many circumstances; but I object to being compelled to use them when they are not needed and are in the way. I find it easier to state seven eighths, and to deal with it mentally, than to put it into the form of .875. I do not wish to be restricted by law in the use of my tools. What would be thought of the law which compelled a shipwright on all occasions to use a chisel, and never to employ the adze. I, with, I believe, every upholder of English weights and measures, and of the use of fractions, am quite willing that the metric system should be made legal in its entirety throughout Great Britain; but we are not willing that the useful weights and measures which we can employ with so great facility and accuracy should be made illegal. Let the two exist together, and experience will prove which is the one preferred by the community. I am, sir, your obedient servant,
Frederick Bramwell.
5 Great George Street, Westminster, S. W.,
March 18, 1899.
P. S.—Very probably the old stalking-horses will be trotted out on Wednesday, and the President of the Board of Trade will be told of the confusion created by the existence of mere local weights and measures. I believe that if those who cite these anomalies were asked to give instances at various dates it would be found that these local weights and measures were dying out. In any event they are illegal, and are not obligatory upon anybody. Every man can claim to deal according to the standards of length, of weights, and of capacity. Most certainly the introduction of the metric system would largely add to the use of illegal weights and measures, not only locally, but generally. If the inquiry were made in France, even no farther off than Boulogne, it would be found that, in the markets there, dealings are frequently carried out on a local system unconnected with the metric.—F. B.
Variations in African Religious Ideas.—Miss Kingsley observes, in her West African Studies, that when you are traveling from district to district you can not fail to be struck by the difference in character of the native religions you are studying, and that no wandering student of the subject in western Africa can avoid recognizing the existence of at least four distinct forms of development of the fetich idea. They have every one of them the same underlying idea, and yet they differ. "And I believe," Miss Kingsley says, "much of the confusion which is supposed to exist in African religious ideas is a confusion only existing in the minds of cabinet ethnologists from a want of recognition of the fact of the existence of these schools. For example, suppose you take a few facts from Ellis and a few from Bastian and mix, and call the mixture West African religion. You do much the same sort of thing as if you took bits from Mr. Spurgeon's works and from those of some eminent Jesuit and of a sound Greek churchman and mixed them, and labeled it European religion. The bits would be all right by themselves, but the mixture would be a quaint affair." Of the four main schools of fetich predicated by Miss Kingsley, the Tshi and Ewe school (Ellis's school) is mainly concerned with the preservation of life; the Calabar school with attempting to enable the soul successfully to pass through death; the Mpongwe school with the attainment of material prosperity; and the school of Nkissi with the worship of the mystery of the power of evil.
A Natural History Society as a School.—Among the agencies employed by the Boston Society of Natural History for making itself a vehicle of instruction to the public has been the employment of an educated man and teacher as guide to the museum, who should also give lectures there. The salary of this officer has heretofore been provided by the bounty of Miss Harriet E. Freeman, but she has been obliged to discontinue her contribution, and the curator is now seeking other means of maintaining a suitably qualified assistant. The "guide," Mr. A. W. Grabau, delivered a course of lectures in April and May, 1897, on "The Surface of the Earth: Its Rocks, Soil, and Scenery," in which special attention was given to the scenery in New England; and, whenever it was practicable, excursions were made to localities which could be used as illustrations. A similar course, delivered in 1896, resulted in the formation during the summer of the same year of a class of thirty persons, summer residents of Kennebunkport, Maine, who were under Mr. Grabau's daily instruction for two weeks. The awakening of interest in local scenery further led to his giving lectures in Belmont and Arlington, and he thereby became instrumental in a movement intended to preserve the local frontal bowlder moraine on Arlington Heights—a valuable geological movement. A course of lectures on the Animals of the Shores of New England was given by Mr. Grabau to a class of from forty to seventy-five persons, in the Teachers' School of Science, with excursions on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons. In a similar fall course attention was given specially to the study of animals in their various habitats. A course by Mr. Grabau on the use of the microscope and the preparation of specimens was followed by ten days' laboratory work in Limekilns Bay, Maine. One of the results of a winter course on zoölogy, to a class of twenty teachers, was the formation of the Hale House Natural History Club, in connection with which field meetings are held, classes for children are formed, and papers upon elementary subjects are read and discussed. Other courses of lectures are mentioned in the report of the curator of the society—the field lessons in geology, by Professor Barton, with a winter course in historical geology; the course of Dr. R. W. Greenleaf, on the elementary structure and function of the parts of flowering plants; the course of the curator (Alpheus Hyatt), on elementary zoölogy; and the lectures on geography, by Prof. W. M. Davis.