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away, and liberated, returned in five days, although it is believed that they flew along shore and not by an air line, which would make the distance at least a thousand and eighty-one miles.

A number of other sojourners at Tortugas station have found out various things which they have set forth at length in the publications of the Carnegie Institution, not one of which has yet appeared in the list of the six best sellers. However, what the publications of the Carnegie Institution lack in popularity they more than make up in quantity. Although the Institution was organized only nine years ago its publications in book form already aggregate 167 volumes, having more than forty thousand pages, or upwards of twenty million words of printed matter, while twentyfive volumes more are already in press, not to mention some twelve hundred articles a year contributed to scientific periodicals.

In the presence of such an inky deluge it does seem as if the wilderness of interrogation marks in which mankind has been wandering since the other deluge must inevitably be swept away. No

doubt it will be, unless the truth itself should also be submerged.

But anyhow the spectacular quest of knowledge so prodigally endowed by Andrew Carnegie is worth the watching, for there was never anything like it in the history of the world. Until last January when the founder added $10,000,000 to his previous endowment of $15,000,000 the Carnegie Institution had an income of more than six hundred thousand dollars a year. Its permanent plant already includes a handsome administration building in Washington and fifty-eight other buildings, including two astronomical observatories and five laboratories, thirteen parcels of land and a fleet of ten vessels. Upwards of twelve hundred individuals have contributed in one way or another to the promotion of the researches and the publications undertaken by the Institution, while during each of the past five years about five hundred individuals have thus collaborated. With such an outfit and such an army of workers investigations have been carried on during the past year in more than thirty different fields of research, extending to more than forty dif

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A SHIP BUILT WITHOUT A SINGLE SCRAP OF IRON.

The Carnegie, used in the magnetic survey. Copper and brass were the only metals employed in her construction.

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THE DOME FOR THE 60-INCH REFLECTOR, MOUNT WILSON SOLAR OBSERVATORY,

PASADENA, CALIFORNIA.

Dr. Hale, the director of this observatory, has found ways to reveal 60.000 new worlds.

ferent countries scattered over every continent, not to mention the oceans and interstellar space.

Ten independent departments of research, together with divisions of administration and publication, each with its staff and assistants, have been organized and established within the Institution itself. In addition to these larger departments of work, numerous special researches, in aid of which upwards of seven hundred grants of money have been made, have been carried on by research associates and other individual investigators.

It is not to be understood from the

foregoing that the Carnegie Institution. is in a hurry to find out all there is to know; for President Woodward has suggested that in estimating the work of departments the decade instead of the year should be the unit of time. Indeed, the peculiar worth of the Institution lies in its ability to pursue with absolute thoroughness, regardless of time or expense, whatever it undertakes. Yet while working for posterity quite as much as for the present generation the Carnegie Institution is accomplishing practical results of immediate importance.

For example, the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism was organized to

find, if possible, the answer to the questions, what is magnetism, and why is the earth magnetic? This is a pretty big contract, for the carrying out of which the largest, most comprehensive, and perhaps most expensive investigation ever undertaken in the name of science was begun. The first step was to organize a magnetic survey of the whole world, by sea and by land. This survey has been going on ever since 1905. While its ultimate object is the solution of a scientific problem problem X the practical benefits of which can better be determined after it has

THE NUTRITION LABORATORY, AT BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS.

XI

longitude 156 degrees east. A straight line drawn through the earth from one magnetic pole to the other would pass about seven hundred and fifty miles to one side of the center. It would be bad enough if the compass varied from place to place; but, not satisfied with that, it must also vary from time to time. Just when you think you have the compass it is most likely that you haven't, as many an unfortunate mariner has found too late to keep his ship off the rocks. In order to make such an eccentric instrument available for navigation it is amount of variation at any given point should be known so that any given compass reading may be corrected to give the true direction. Compass variations are checked up from time to time by magnetic surveys made by various governments, the results of which are plotted on charts for the guidance of the navigator.

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IN THIS BUILDING SCIENTISTS ARE TRYING TO FIND OUT HOW THE WORLD WAS MADE. Geophysical Laboratory, Washington, D. C.

been accomplished, results of the utmost immediate importance are being achieved while the work goes on.

Frequent magnetic surveys are necessary to keep tab on the compass, which is the main reliance of the navigator. The compass is popularly supposed to point straight to the place where Dr. Cook didn't go, with an unfaltering fidelity that has become proverbial; but as a matter of fact the compass is as flighty and uncertain as a girl with two beaux. For instance, the compass on a liner leaving New York for Europe points ten degrees west of north; in mid-ocean the needle yaws thirty degrees west of where it should be, while at Southampton it is only seventeen degrees west of its proper place.

The north magnetic pole, by the way, is a different thing from the geographic north pole, for it is situated in latitude seventy degrees north and longitude ninety-seven degrees west, while the south magnetic pole is approximately in latitude seventy-three degrees south and

necessary that the

The Carnegie Institution began its magnetic survey of the Pacific Ocean in August, 1905, with the Galilee, a wooden brigantine of six hundred tons, from which as much iron and steel as possible had been removed to render the vessel as nearly non-magnetic as practicable. The Galilee covered sixty-five thousand miles of salt water in a course which, as plotted on the chart, looks as if it might have been laid out by a beetle with the blind staggers, for the Galilee crossed her own trail whenever practicable to check up observations. The results were important, for errors of one to three degrees were found on existing charts between San Francisco and Honolulu

and errors of from three to five degrees elsewhere.

In order to attain a still greater degree of accuracy a non-magnetic ship which was christened the Carnegie was launched in June, 1909, at a cost of $115,000, to be used in the magnetic survey. On the very first voyage from Long Island Sound by way of St. Johns to Falmouth, England, errors of importance to navigators were found. In one instance the amount of compass variation at a certain spot in the ocean was given differently by each of the three standard charts published by the British Admiralty, the German Admiralty and the United States Hydrographic Office, and the Carnegie proved that all of them were wrong. Along the track followed by the Atlantic liners from England to a point off Newfoundland the present magnetic charts show too large a westerly declination by nearly a degree. From there to Long Island the charts give too small a westerly declination by about a degree and a half. The effect of these errors is always to set a vessel toward Sable Island or Newfoundland, where the facilities for a first-class shipwreck are unequaled. Cruising around the

Azores the Carnegie gathered proof that the Slavonia, which was wrecked on a reef in 1909, though the four hundred persons on board were rescued through the help of the wireless telegraph, was in her proper course according to the Admiralty charts, but that there was an error in the charts of between two and three degrees or about a hundred and fifty miles.

The Carnegie is now at sea on a three years' cruise that will take her around the world. While the ocean survey is going on, field parties are busy with the magnetic survey in British North America, Central America, West Indies, Colombia, Ecuador, British, French, and Dutch Guiana, Africa, Persia, Turkey, Asia Minor, Southern Asiatic Russia, and China. All these parties send their observations to headquarters at Washington where they are reduced and prepared for publication.

No Chicago packer works up his byproducts more carefully than the Carnegie Institution. The main purpose of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, as already indicated, is a magnetic survey of the earth. But it has been found that with a very small additional

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WINGLESS CHICKENS HAVE BEEN PRODUCED HERE.

This is not done as a pastime, but as a most serious effort to peep into the mysteries of the Darwinian theory.

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expenditure of effort a by-product investigation of the relation between solar and terrestrial magnetism can be prosecuted. It has already been found that an increase in solar activity is apparently associated with an effect on the earth's magnetism equivalent to a decrease in the mean intensity of magnetism. To reduce this discovery to every-day terms it means that having learned how the activity of sun-spots, which are great electric vortices sweeping across the face of the sun, affect the earth's atmosphere, present theories may be so revised as to make weather predictions an exact science.

Two separate departments are studying the heavens. One of these, the Department of Meridian Astrometry, is established in observatories at Albany, N. Y., and San Luis, Argentina, on the eastern plateau of the Andes. The observers at San Luis are hard at work making accurate measurements of the position of the fixed stars visible in the southern hemisphere to be compared with corresponding measurements in the northern hemisphere, in the preparation of a complete catalogue of precision of all stars from the highest down to those of the seventh magnitude, inclusive, for the entire celestial sphere. The San Luis observatory is breaking all records in

stellar studies, having attained a score of fifty-six thousand observations in a year.

The solar observatory on the summit of Mount Wilson, near Pasadena, California, has a most elaborate equipment for studying the sun. This includes the Snow horizontal reflecting telescope purchased from the Yerkes observatory, a tower vertical telescope one hundred and fifty feet high, and another sixty feet high, and a reflecting telescope sixty inches in diameter mounted equatorially. These telescopes are supplied with various spectographic, photographic and other devices for studying the sun and stars. In Dr. George Ellery Hale, Director of the Observatory, the Institution has found one of the geniuses it was created to discover. By introducing entirely new processes in photography and in other details Dr. Hale has been able to reveal sixty thousand new worlds, never before seen by man, some of which are ten times as large as our sun. Most of the work, though, consists in studying the sun, photos of which are made every clear day, and the spectra of the stars, the results being added to those accomplished by other observatories in working out various problems.

But to get back to earth again; the Geophysical Laboratory, which is lo

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