Roebling had given her husband during the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge, which he characterizes as "honorable to the individual woman, to the energetic nation to which she belongs, and to the better half of the human race." In the Statistical Section was presented the final report of the Anthropometric Committee, which has been for several years engaged in collecting evidence as to the stature and other physical characteristics of the inhabitants of the British Isles. The evening lectures were on "Recent Researches on the Distance of the Sun," by Professor R. S. Ball; "Galvani and Animal Electricity," by Professor McKendrick, of Glasgow; and "Telephones," by Sir F. Bramwell. The next meeting of the Association will be held in Montreal, and the meeting for 1885 in Aberdeen.
The Study of our Sidereal System.—In his address before the American Association, on "The German Survey of the Northern Heavens," Professor William A. Rogers defined the present condition of knowledge regarding the proper motions of the stars and of the solar system in space. Struve concluded several years ago that the solar system was moving in a direction toward a point in the constellation Hercules, and Mädler has indicated Alcyone in the Pleiades as the probable center of the greater system of which it forms a part; but, "Biot in 1812, Bessel in 1818, and Airy in 1860, reached the conclusion that the certainty of the movement of the solar system toward a given point in the heavens could not be affirmed. . . . It must always be kept in mind that the quantities with which we must deal in this investigation are exceedingly minute, and that the accidental errors of observation are at any time liable to lead to illusory results. . . . It can not be affirmed that there is a sidereal system in the sense in which we speak of the solar system. . . . Admitting that the solar system is moving through space, can we at the present moment even determine whether that motion is rectilinear or curved, to say nothing of the laws which govern it?" The questions connected with these points, if solved at all, must be solved by a critical study of observations of precision accumulated at widely separated epochs of time. The first step in the solution has been taken in the systematic survey of the northern heavens undertaken by the [Astronomische] Gesellschaft, and in the survey of the southern heavens at Cordova by Dr. Gould. "The year 1875 is the epoch about which are grouped the data which, combined with similar data for an epoch not earlier than 1950, will go far toward clearing up the doubts which now rest upon the question of the direction and the amount of the solar motion in space; and it can not be doubted that our knowledge of the laws which connect the sidereal with the solar system will be largely increased through this investigation."
Ideas about Fossils.—Professor August Quenstedt gives in his "Petrefacten Kunde" a review of the hypotheses that have been advanced at different times concerning the nature and origin of fossils, and of the slow processes by which the true theory of the subject has been reached. The views of the ancients were crude enough, but among them were some more intelligent and nearer to the truth than any that were held during the middle ages. The crude speculations of the latter period survived down to an age of greater scientific enlightenment; and the time is not extremely remote when belemnites were regarded as thunderbolts, and other fossils were looked upon as sports of Nature, or as efforts of Nature to prepare in the bosom of the earth the material forms of bodies preliminary to their receiving the breath of life. At a later period the belief arose that the fossils were once actually living creatures, and had been destroyed by the flood; and, as recently as 1828, Buckland supported such a view in his "Reliquae Diluvianæ." This author was one of the earliest cave-hunters, and believed that the bones found in the caves were those which had been washed into them by the Noachian deluge. With such views having held a footing in our own century, we have little right to be amused at those who, in the age of Scheuchzer and Leibnitz, thought the bones of the gigantic salamander (Salamandra gigantea) were the remains of an old human sinner destroyed in the flood. Even Leibnitz had no doubt that the remains of a mammoth which were found
