later asked that commissioners be appointed to make a careful survey of the Potomac and James rivers to their respective sources, and that a complete map of the country intervening between the seaboard, the Ohio waters and the Great Lakes be presented to the people. "These things being done," he says, "I shall be mistaken if prejudice does not yield to facts, jealousy to candor and finally, if reason and nature, thus aided, do not dictate what is right and proper to be done."
He introduced his plan to the notice of Congress, thus making the first suggestion to that body of the policy of national improvements which the present generation is carrying on, as well as of the policy of exploration and national surveys to which our Government so firmly adheres. To-day the Government is carrying forward surveying work by means of the largest and most thoroughly equipped organizations in existence, and thus is Washington honored.
The scientific men of to-day owe to Washington profound respect and gratitude for the scientific spirit he cultivated in his work. The Government once established on so high a plane, it necessarily followed that all true science should be encouraged and be enlisted in the development of the citizen and of the material resources of the nation.
| Charles D. Walcott, |
| U. S. Geological Survey, |
| Washington, D. C. |
SCIENCE AND FICTION.
The leading article of the June number of the Century Magazine is entitled "The Problem of increasing Human Energy," and is written by Nikola Tesla. Mr. Tesla offers the reader some naive verbal analogies between the causes of human progress and the 'energy' of theoretical physics, and a eulogy of a number of inventions which he expects to make. He intersperses these with sundry remarkable statements such as, "our own earth will be a lump of ice;" "Though this movement is not of a translatory character, yet the general laws of mechanical movement are applicable to it;" "That we can send a message to a planet is certain, that we can get an answer is probable;" "It is highly probable that if there are intelligent beings on Mars they have long ago realized this very idea [the transmission of electrical energy for industrial purposes without wires], which would explain the changes on its surface noted by astronomers." (The italics are our own.)
Mr. Tesla's doctrine of human energy is in some ways as original as the inventions and discoveries which he expects to make. Each of us is, he says, a part of a unitary whole, 'man.' "This one human being lives on and on. . . . . Therein. . . . is to be found the partial explanation of many of those marvelous phenomena of heredity which are the result of countless centuries of feeble but persistent influence." Now we may "assume that human energy is measured by half the product of man's mass with the square of a certain hypothetical velocity. . the great problem of
science is, and always will be, to increase the energy thus defined. . . . This mass is impelled in one direction by a force F, which is resisted by another partly frictional and partly negative force R, acting in a direction exactly opposite, and retarding the movement of the mass."
Unhappily Mr. Tesla in his enthusiasm to progress to recommendations of religion, vegetarianism, the old regime for women and the artificial preparation of nitrogen compounds, neglects to state which direction is the proper one for the human mass to follow, north, south, east, west, toward the moon or Sirius or to Dante's Satan in the centre of the earth. Nor does he explain how 'enlightenment' makes the mass of human bodies go in an exactly opposite direction to that toward which 'visionariness' impels them, nor reveal why, if his account be true, he and a 'visionary' can walk in the same di-
