the U. S. Lake Survey, a volume of about one thousand quarto pages devoted chiefly to a discussion of the geodetic work of the Survey done during the forty years of its existence. He is the author of several of the Bulletins of the U. S. Geological Survey, and of a memoir on the Iced Bar and Long Tape Base Apparatus of the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. These forms of apparatus, devised and perfected by him, involve many novel features and secure a much higher precision at a much smaller cost than apparatus previously used. He prepared for the Smithsonian Institution a volume entitled 'Geographical Tables,' being a manual for astronomers, geographers, engineers and cartographers, published in 1894. Several of his most important mathematical papers relate to geophysics, especially those bearing on the secular cooling and cubical contraction of the earth, on the form and position of the sea surface, and on the profoundly difficult problem presented by the recently discovered phenomenon of the variation of terrestrial latitudes. Although most of his publications are necessarily of a highly technical character, his semi-popular addresses and reviews have been widely read and appreciated. Professor Woodward was an associate editor of the 'Annals of Mathematics' from 1889 to 1899 and has been an associate editor of 'Science' since 1894. He has taken an active part in the work of the scientific societies with which he is connected, and in addition to the official positions he holds in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, he has been honored by election to the presidency of the American Mathematical Society and to the presidency of the New York Academy of Sciences. Professor Woodward represents the highest type of the man of science. Eminent for his original contributions to science, a teacher of great intellectual and moral influence, an administrator with unfailing tact and unerring judgment, he confers an honor on the Association which has elected him to its highest office.
President Low welcomed the American Association to New York and to Columbia University in an address which recounted the increased recognition given to science by the city since the Association met there thirteen years ago and the great progress of science itself. He concluded with the following words: "I am especially glad to welcome you because you are an Association for the Advancement of Science. That, after all, is what ought to make you feel at home in the atmosphere of this university: for a university that does not assist the advancement of science has hardly a right to call itself by that great name. I heard Phillips Brooks say, in a sermon that I heard him preach in Boston when this Association met there twenty years ago, that you can get no idea of eternity, by adding century to century or by piling aeon upon aeon; but that, if you will remember how little you knew when you sat at your mother's knee to learn the alphabet, and how with every acquisition of knowledge which has marked the intervening years you have come to feel, not how much more you know, but how much more there is to be known, all can get some idea of how long eternity can be, because all can understand that there never can be time enough to enable any one to learn all that there is to know. There is so much to be known, that even the great advances of the last generation do not make us feel that everything is discovered, but they appeal to new aspirations and awaken renewed energy in order to make fresh discoveries in a region that teems with so much that is worthy of knowledge. I congratulate you upon your success, and I bid you welcome to Columbia."
In the course of his reply, the president of the Association, Professor Woodward, said: "But surprising and gratifying as have been the achieve-
