But in order to attain this desirable ["royalty" thus levied would no doubt

increase the price of seal-skin jackets. But seal-skin jackets are not a necessary luxury, and an additional pound added to their cost would not be of material consequence to the ladies who wear them. As a naturalist, therefore, I think that the fur-seal should be considered in the light of a domestic animal, and that all "pelagic sealing" should be stopped, while the owners of the sealeries should at the same time pay to the other nations interested a reason. able compensation for the valuable privileges thus obtained.

P. L. SCLATER.

Secretary of the Zoological Society.

object our American friends will have to come to terms with other nations. Without going into the diplomatic question of what rights passed to the United States by the cession of Alaska, I have sufficient confidence in the common sense of the arbitrators now sitting at Paris to believe that they will never give in to the argument that Behring's Sea is a mare clausum, and that America, by the cession of Alaska, has acquired the right to keep all other nations out of it. This is a position that can hardly be maintained in the face of the British evidence to the contrary. The absolute prohibition of "pelagic " sealing which is demanded by the Americans, and which ought to be carried out P.S. Since this article was written in order to ensure the continued exist- I have been able to consult the "Apence of the fur-seals, can only be ob- pendix" to the "United States Case" tained by mutual arrangement among on the Behring's Sea Arbitration Questhe parties interested. The fur-seal of tion, which for some reason has not Alaska (practically now the only re- been reprinted in the series of bluemaining member of the group of fur-books presented to Parliament, although seals) should be declared to be, to all it contains the documents and evidence intents and purposes, a domestic animal, and its capture absolutely prohibited except in its home on the Pribilof Islands. Looking to the great value of who have been consulted on the subthe privilege thus obtained, America might well consent to pay to Great Britain and her colonists some compensation for the loss of the right of "pelagic" sealing; the amount of this compensation would be fairly based upon the number of fur-seals annually killed on the Pribilof Islands. The

on which the "Case" is based. I find, with great satisfaction, that some of the most distinguished zoologists of Europe

ject (M. A. Milne-Edwards of Paris, Dr. G. Hartlaub of Bremen, Dr. R. Collett of Christiania, Professor Lilljeborg of Stockholm, Dr. A. T. von Middendorf of Dorpat, Count T. Salvadori of Turin, and Dr. Giglioli of Florence) agree nearly with me in the views put forward in this paper. — P. L. S.

THE COLORATION of PreservED FOODS. -The time-honored method of imparting a beautiful green color to preserved foods consists in treating the articles to be colored with a solution of copper sulphate, which is quickly poured off and the last traces removed by repeatedly washing with water; the preserved articles are then boiled and the vessels containing them are soldered up. The coloration results from the formation of the copper salt of an acid derived from phyllocyanin. This body is very inert, is insoluble in water, hydrochloric acid, and acetic acid, soluble in alcohol, and indifferent to the action of light. As the quan

tity is quite small, only a few milligrammes in a hundred grammes, the author is disposed to tolerate the practice. The green coloring matter of leaves, etc., is extremely sensitive both to light and to acids of every kind. In order to hinder its decolorization, sodium carbonate is commonly added to green vegetables before cooking, by which treatment free acids are neutralized, and also such salts as potassium acid oxalate. Not only is the action of the acids upon the chlorophyl thus prevented, but a relatively stable sodium salt, green in color, is formed, enhancing the effect.

Scientific American.

For EIGHT DOLLARS remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually for-

warded for a year, free of postage.

Remittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If

neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are

obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks, and money-orders should be made

payable to the order of LITTELL & CO.

Single copies of the LIVING AGE, 18 cents.

To flush their tips, till, to the warmer And some day when we sleep, her root will

Her voice brought memories of tears and Knee deep in the strand the paddock-pipes

From The Fortnightly Review.
THE INTERSTELLAR ETHER.

BY PROFESSOR OLIVER LODGE, F.R.S.

THERE is, I believe, a general tendency to underrate the certainty of some of the convictions to which natural philosophers have gradually, in the course of their study of nature, been impelled; more especially when those convictions have reference to something intangible and occult. The existence of a continuous space-filling medium, for instance, is probably regarded by most educated people as a more or less fanciful hypothesis, a figment of the scientific imagination, a mode of collating and welding together a certain number of observed facts, but not as in any physical sense a reality, as water and air are realities.

in terms of the more known, but motion and force are postulated in physics as the completely known, and no attempt is made to press the terms of an explanation further than that: a dynamical theory is recognized as being at once necessary and sufficient.

Now, it must be admitted at once that of very few things have we at present such a dynamical explanation. We have no such explanation of matter, for instance, or of gravitation, or of electricity, or ether, or light. It is always conceivable that of some things' no purely dynamical explanation will ever be forthcoming, because something more than motion and force may perhaps be essentially involved. Still, physics is bound to push the search for such an explanation to its furthest limI am speaking purely physically. its; and so long as it does not hoodThere may be another point of view wink itself by vagueness and mere from which all material reality can be phrases - - a feebleness against which denied, but with these questions physics its leaders are mightily and sometimes proper has nothing to do; it accepts cruelly on their guard, preferring to the evidence of the senses, regarding risk the rejection of worthy ideas rather them as the tools or instruments where- than permit a semi-acceptance of anywith man may hope to understand one thing fanciful and obscure so long as definite aspect of the universe, and it it vigorously probes all phenomena leaves to philosophers equipped from a within its reach, seeking to reduce the different armory the other aspects physical aspect of them to terms of which the material universe may nay, motion and force, so long it must be must possess. upon a safe track; and, by its failure to deal with certain phenomena, it will learn it already begins to suspect, its leaders must have long surmised - the existence of some third, as yet unknown, category, by incorporating which the physics of the future may rise to higher flights and an enlarged scope.

By a physical "explanation" is meant a clear statement of a fact or law in terms of something with which daily life has made us familiar. We are all chiefly familiar, from our youth up, with two apparently simple things, motion and force. We have a direct sense for both these things. We do not understand them in any deep way, prob- I have said that the things of which ably we do not understand them at all, we are permanently conscious are mobut we are accustomed to them. Mo- tion and force, but there is a third thing tion and force are our primary objects which we have likewise been all our of experience and consciousness, and in lives in contact with, and which we terms of them all other less familiar know even more primarily, though peroccurrences may conceivably be stated haps we are so immersed in it that our and grasped; and whenever a thing knowledge realizes itself later, — viz., can be so clearly and definitely stated, life and mind. I do not pretend to deit is said to be explained or understood; we are said to have "a dynamical theory" of it. Anything short of this may be a provisional or partial theory, an explanation of the less known

fine these terms, or to speculate as to whether the things they connote are essentially one and not two. They exist, in the sense in which we permit ourselves to use that word, and they are

not yet incorporated into physics. Till | anything simpler than itself have hiththey are, they must remain more or less erto only resulted in confusion. By vague; but how or when they can be "force " is meant primarily muscular incorporated is not for me even to con- action not accompanied by motion. Our jecture. sense of this teaches us that space, though roomy, is not empty; it gives us our second scientific inference what we call "matter."

Again we do not stop at this bare in

Still, it is open to a physicist to state how the universe appears to him, in its broad character and physical aspect. If I were to make the attempt I should find it necessary for the sake of clear-ference. ness to begin with the simplest and most fundamental ideas, in order to illustrate by facts and notions in universal knowledge the kind of process which essentially occurs in connection with the formation of higher and less familiar conceptions, in regions where the common information of the race is so slight as to be useless. Beginning with our most fundamental sense I should sketch the matter thus:

By another sense, that of pain, or mere sensation, we discriminate between masses of matter in apparently intimate relation with ourselves, and other or foreign lumps of matter; and we use the first portion as a measure of the extent of the second. We proceed also to subdivide our idea of matter, according to the varieties of resistance with which it appeals to our muscular sense, into four different states, or "elements" as the ancients called them: viz., the solid, the liquid, the gaseous, and the ethereal. The resistance experienced when we encounter one or other of these forms of material existence varies from something very impressive the solid, through something nearly impalpable

We have muscles and we can move. I cannot analyze motion, I doubt if the attempt is wise, it is a simple immediate act of perception, a direct sense of free unresisted motion. We may, indeed, move without feeling it, and that teaches us nothing, but we may move so as to feel it, and this teaches us the gaseous, up to something entirely much, and leads to our first scientific inference, viz., space; that is, simply, room to move about. We might have had a sense of being jammed into a full or tight-packed universe; but we have not; we feel it to be a spacious

one.

Of course we do not stop at this baldness of inference; our educated faculty leads us to realize the existence of space far beyond the possibility of direct sen..sation; and, further, by means of the appreciation of speed in connection with motion, of uniform and variable speed, we become able to formulate the idea of "time," or uniformity of sequence and other more complex notions - acceleration and the like- upon a consideration of which we need not now enter.

. But our muscular sense is not limited to the perception of free motion; we constantly find it restricted or forcibly resisted. This muscular action im..peded is another direct sense, that of

force," and attempts to analyze it into

imaginative, fanciful, or inferential, viz., the ether. The ether does not in any way affect our sense of touch (i.e., of force); it does not resist motion in the slightest degree. Not only can our bodies move through it, but much larger bodies, planets and comets, can rush through it at what we are pleased to call a prodigious speed (being far greater than that of an athlete) without showing the least sign of friction. I myself, indeed, have lately been trying delicate experiments to see whether a whirling mass of iron could to the smallest extent grip the ether and carry it round, with so much as a thousandth part of its own velocity. The answer is, no;

I cannot find a trace of mechanical connection between matter and ether, of the kind known as viscosity or friction.

Why, then, if it is so impalpable, should we assert its existence? May it not be a mere fanciful speculation, to be extruded from physics as soon as possible? If we were limited for our