under which the oxidation of ferrous salts may result in the deposition of copper are those which obtain in the circulation of underground waters. The theory of Pumpelly and others based on paragenetic relations is thus fully sustained by chemical evidence.

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO,
June 1901.

H. C. BIDDle.

EVIDENCE OF A LOCAL SUBSIDENCE IN THE

INTERIOR

In the spring of 1883, I made a survey to build a levee along the Wabash River on the west side of Parke county, Indiana, for a length of twelve miles. I took the levels with great care, and checked on the river water every half mile to guard against errors. The great flood of the preceding winter had left its high water mark very plain on the trees in the bottoms, and I checked on them also. I cut some sixty bench marks on the trees in running the levels, some of which are still intact. The lower end of the levee was built square across the narrow bottom to the bluff and crossed a bayou through which the flood water ran off of the bottoms into the river. We built an automatic floodgate across this bayou so as to shut out river, but let out inside water from breaks above. The gates were hung to heavy brick walls built on timber foundations three feet thick, and deeply bedded below the bottom of the bayou. A bench mark was cut on a bur oak tree near the walls, and the level of the walls was taken when built. I had charge of the maintenance and repair of this levee four years from its building, and had frequent occasion to run the level over the top to restore breaks, for it was built only twenty-one feet above low water, whereas the great floods rise twenty-eight feet. I set the grade stakes for the contractors to work to, and in doing so ran the level over the ground again. I speak of all this to show that my leveling was correct, as so many levelings would detect any error, and none were found to exceed a half inch. I can say positively that the levels were correct in 1883.

This spring (1901) the levee was to be raised three feet, making it twenty-four feet above low water, under a new law of the state, but including only the lower seven miles. I leveled the work again, and found bench marks again intact except the

lower (south) mile and a quarter, which showed a decline southward amounting to ten inches at the lower (south) end, as shown by the mark on the bur oak and top of the gate walls. I went back to the C. & E. I. railroad bridge at Clinton, two and a half miles above the south end, and started my level from a mark known to be in tally with the level of 1883, and ran carefully over the work again, and it varied from the one made just before only a quarter of an inch. And the bench mark on the bur oak and the top of the gate walls had gone down ten inches (3 of a foot). I was right in 1883 and I am right now. What caused this sink, or subsidence? I can think of nothing so likely to cause it as the Charleston earthquake. The wave of that earthquake somewhere south of us changed from westward and went northward along the Wabash.

ROCKVILLE, INDIANA,

July 20, 1901.

83

JOHN T. CAMPBELL.

EDITORIAL

WITH the death of Dr. Joseph Le Conte there has passed away perhaps the last distinguished American representative of the general geologist as typified during the past century. This passing type of the general geologist was a distinctive outgrowth and representative of a transitional stage of intellectual procedure-a passage from the former mode in which the generalizing and philosophical factors held precedence and the toilsome modes of scientific verification followed as their servitors, to the present or at least the coming method in which scientific determinations are the basal factors to which generalizations and philosophies are but dependent accessories. We owe much of

the transition itself to Dana and Le Conte, the two noblest American representatives of the passing type, for while they grew up under the influence of the older intellectual attitude, they grew out of it in spirit while they steadied and guided the transition. They were distinctively students of geology in the special sense in which that term implies the organized doctrine of the earth, rather than students of what might be termed geics, the immediate study of the earth itself in the field and the laboratory. They were preeminently students of the accumulated data and of the literature of the science, with generalization and philosophic inference as their dominant inspiration. Neither Dana nor Le Conte were eminently field students; much less were they specialists in a chosen field of the broad geological domain. Their point of view was that of the organizer and of the philosopher, and the contribution they made in their chosen sphere was indispensable and immeasurably valuable. How this necessary function is to be met in the future, with the increasing complexities and profundities into which every branch is rapidly growing, it is difficult to foresee, further than that it must in some way be intimately associated with extensive personal researches in the field and the laboratory, and must be guided

by a reversal of the old-time attitude of philosophy and science toward each other. The philosophical factor must be put into service as the active handmaid of scientific determination rather than as its guide and leader. It may indeed go before as scout to roughly reconnoiter the way, and it may come after to assemble and interpret the results, but it must ever be tentative and dependent on rigorous scientific determination. Deduction, inference, interpretation, theory, hypothesis, and the other philosophical factors must be merely initial steps and sequential steps attendant on rigorous science as the end. None the less, the philosophical factors and the philosophical point of view are indispensable if the science is to make its most wholesome progress, and we owe to Le Conte and to those he typifies an immeasurable debt, for they have kept us in fresh touch with the generalizations and the philosophy of the science, and have inspired us with their own contributions to the broader conceptions of geology and of its relations to kindred sciences. The writings of Le Conte are graced by the fruits of wide learning, a lucid style, a genial attitude, and a candor that has called forth universal love and admiration. T. C. C.

THE progress of opinion in regard to the origin of the solar system, and incidentally of the earth, is indicated by the following recent utterances of astronomers of high rank:

This simple hypothesis (Laplace's nebular hypothesis) has recently been severely attacked, and it is doubtful whether it will survive the blow. Indeed, we may be compelled to seek the origin of stellar systems in the spiral nebulae, which Keeler's photographic survey made just before his death showed to represent a true type form. It is evident that much remains to be done before the mystery which surrounds the genesis of stars can be cleared away. Professor GeoRGE E. HALE, Director Yerkes Observatory, in address to Visiting Committee, University Record, June 28, 1901, p. 141.

Though, without doubt, the system was evolved in some way from a primitive nebula, we may say with certainty that it did not follow the orderly course marked out for it by Laplace.- PROFESSOR C. L. DOOLITTLE, of the University of Pennsylvania, in annual address delivered before the University of Pennsylvania chapters of the Society of Sigma Xi, June 13, 1901, printed in Science, July 5, 1901, pp. 11-12.