report of the president, that in terrestrial magnetism deserves special notice this year, in view of the fact that it is being provided with a permanent laboratory. As the director of the department, Dr. L. A. Bauer, points out, work on terrestrial magnetism and atmospheric electricity has been mainly observational. Magnetic and electric surveys have been extended to nearly all parts of the earth, and observatories have been conducted at a number of points at which are registered the variations to which the magnetic and electrical elements are subject with time and with varying planetary and solar conditions. But hitherto there has been no laboratory for the investigation of these phenomena of terrestrial and cosmical physics similar to the laboratories of astrophysics, to which are due such remarkable progress in that science.
The Carnegie Institution, which in the establishment of the solar observatory at Mount Wilson has contributed very greatly to the advance of astrophysics, has now undertaken to construct for its work in terrestrial magnetism the building of which views are here reproduced. It is being erected on a tract of land of about seven acres in Washington, about a mile north of the Bureau of Standards and the Geophysical Laboratory. The grounds are sufficiently removed from disturbing influences, so that the testing and comparisons of magnetic instruments and work in atmospheric electricity may be successfully carried on. The building, which is now nearly completed, consists of a basement, two stories, and an observation-roof, the size being 51 by 102 feet.
In addition to the work done in Washington, magnetic surveys of land areas have been made in various parts of the earth, including the Sahara Desert, Canada, west of Hudson Bay, northeastern South America and Australia. The accompanying map shows how extensive have been these surveys, including the two cruises of the non-magnetic ship Carnegie, which has now traversed a distance of about one hundred thousand miles, preceded by cruises of some sixty thousand miles by the chartered ship Galilee.
The Carnegie Institution has, in addition to this new laboratory and its administration building in Washington, erected buildings for its departments, each with their equipment, valued as follows: The Solar Observatory on Mount Wilson and at Pasadena, $754,000; the Geophysical Laboratory in Washington, $198,000; the Desert Laboratory at Tucson, Arizona, $48,000; the department of Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, $70,000; the Nutrition Laboratory, adjacent to the Harvard Medical School in Boston, $129,000, and the Department of Marine Biology at the Tortugas, $47,000. This last laboratory it is now proposed to remove to Jamaica.
SCIENTIFIC ITEMS
We record with regret the death of Dr. Robert Kennedy Duncan, director of the Mellon Institute for Industrial Research in the University of Pittsburgh; of Professor William Whitman Bailey, professor emeritus of botany at Brown University; of Dr. Roswell Park, professor of surgery at the University of Buffalo; of Edward Singleton Holden, librarian of the U. S. Military Academy, formerly director of the Lick Observatory; of Dr. Albert Gunther, late keeper of zoology in the British Museum, and of Sir John Murray, the distinguished oceanographer.
Sir Francis Darwin delivered the first Galton anniversary lecture on February 16 in London. The subject of the lecture was Francis Galton—Professor R. W. Wood, of the Johns Hopkins University, gave in London, on February 27, the first Guthrie lecture of the Physical Society, his subject being "Radiation of Gas Molecules Excited by Light."
