Geographical Notes

Abstract

AN amusing instance of newspaper science occurred in a morning paper last week. A note on the salinity of the North Pacific, published in this column (vol. xlvii. p. 590), was reproduced without acknowledgment, but with annotations. After the quotation, “a tongue of considerably fresher water stretches nearly across the ocean about 10° N.” came the interpolation, “caused no doubt by the dilution of the sea by the melting snow and ice of the northern regions,” a far-fetched hypothesis, which ignores the rainy belt of calms. A worse error was to say that the curves of equal salinity “run through Behring Strait,” when the original said Bering Sea. The use of a map would probably have prevented the blunders.