the star places of to-day are a little better than those of seventy-five years ago, but even yet there is great room for improvement. One of the commonest applications of these star places is to the determination of latitude, but it is very doubtful if there is any point on the face of the earth whose latitude is known certainly within one tenth of a second. Looking at the question from another point of view, it is notorious that the contact observations of the transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769 were so discordant that from the same observations Encke and E. J. Stone got respectively for the solar parallax 8·59 seconds and 8·91 seconds. In 1870 no one thought it possible that there could be any such difficulty with the contact observations of the then approaching transits of 1874 and 1882, but we have found from sad experience that our vaunted modern instruments gave very little better results for the last pair of transits than our predecessors obtained with much cruder appliances in 1761 and 1769.
Women in the Higher Education.—The facts presented in a special report on women's education, given in the University Convocation Proceedings for 1893, show that women are gaining in every educational field. The secondary schools of the State returned in that year 23,556 girls of academic grade to 18,243 boys; and of 438 honor credentials issued, 298, or more than two thirds, were to girls. The number of women in colleges had risen to 2,923, of whom 2,078 were in the eight specifically women's colleges, besides 880 in subfreshmen classes. The professional and technical schools returned 4,043 women, and the special schools 3,308. The number of girls entering college from regents' schools was eighty-four per cent greater than the year before, and the increase promised to continue in the current year. Of the teachers in the New York common schools 28,869 were women. In the United States there were in 1890, 125,525 men and 238,397 women teachers. Two years later the number of men had decreased 3,974, and the number of women had increased 14,383. Women are more and more employed as teachers in the grammar and higher schools and in colleges and the university; more of the graduates from women's colleges are entering the medical profession; progress is making in the legal education of women; and opportunities are now offered them to take a theological course.
An Old Book of the Weather.—The first of a series of reproductions of old books on meteorology and terrestrial magnetism undertaken by Dr. D. Hellmann, of Berlin, is the Wetterbüchlein, or Little Book of the Weather, of L. Reyman, the oldest German book on meteorology. It was published at Augsburg in 1505, and passed through seventeen editions in thirty-four years. It has also been translated into English. It is essentially an elementary manual for foretelling the weather from the rudimentary data which the science of the time possessed. The barometer and thermometer were not known, and the principal rules found in Reyman's book are drawn from the appearance of the sky and clouds, the optical phenomena of the atmosphere, the direction of the wind, the phases of the moon, and other like signs. Most of them were known to the ancients and the Arabs, from whose writings the author has derived them—expressing them always concisely and intelligibly to the public. The book is much superior in scientific character to the weather-predicting almanacs of our time; for, instead of pretending to foretell the weather a year in advance, as they do, it has simply given the signs by which its course may be foreseen a short time in advance.
Play and Study.—In a paper on Child Study in Summer Schools, President G. Stanley Hall observes that practically we have to act as if there were no such thing as pure thought. Children have no thought without motion. Motion and thought go together, and if you make them sit still they can not think. Their minds will not move unless their bodies move along with them. We weaken thought if we try to eliminate motion. In the child study at the summer school one thousand children's games were selected and studied, then arithmetic games and geography games, and those that gave strength to the shoulders and hips, "and we had everything that was taught in the whole grammar course without any exception and a good deal more. We cut down these games to one hun-
