tion in the interests of the community of labor troubles. This problem deserves the earnest support of all citizens in its solution. The present laws not only involve cruel delay in the way of relief to the unfortunate sufferers from industrial accidents, but result in the diversion of the greater part of the relief fund provided by the employers into the hands of those not the injured parties. Our laws on this subject are obsolete and are far behind European practice."

A representation of the work now being carried on by the commission appointed by the Governor of Massachusetts, was given by Hon. JOHN A. LOWELL, its chairman, who so ably presented the situation to this Association at the afternoon meeting yesterday.

During all the sessions there was an agreement to the following: That the industrial workers of this country are without adequate protection and insurance at their daily tasks, and a unanimity as to a general remedy, the immediate passage of some laws, state and national, placing the burden of the risks in industrial injuries upon the industry and hence upon the

consumers.

The foregoing extracts of the remarks of the speakers are brief owing to the length of this report and much has been omitted and many speakers not quoted.

Full printed reports of the various meetings are to be printed as the subject is one of national interest at present and made more so by the three or four serious accidents of recent date which has awakened great interest throughout the country.

The members of this Association who are interested may obtain copy of the proceedings at Philadelphia by applying to the Academy of Political and Social Science, West Philadelphia, P. O., Philadelphia, Penn.

I commend to your attention the obtaining of this full printed report of the Transactions and your becoming versed in the various arguments presented by the speakers many of whom have national fame.

The PRESIDENT. The question of moisture in cotton and wool is one quite familiar to us all who are engaged in textile manufacturing. We have today at paper entitled Laws of Regain in Cotton and Worsted, by one admitted to be the greatest student of that subject in this country and I take great pleasure in presenting Ex-president WILLIAM D. HARTSHORNE.

Mr. WILLIAM D. HARTSHORNE. I am not so sure, gentlemen, but what in glancing over this paper and seeing what it deals with, that the nomenclature might lead you to think that I was going to discuss schedule K of the tariff, but of course that is not on the programme. As a matter of fact, this paper is really an appendix to one written in 1905 which itself had an appendix, and perhaps you might call it a case of appendicitis, if so, you can cut it out. These figures are a revision of those given in the paper referred to and are, I believe, more accurate than those given there. Possibly I can put them before you a little better by reading than explaining further.

(

THE LAWS OF REGAIN IN COTTON AND WORSTED. WILLIAM D. HARTSHORNE, Lawrence, Mass.

"Introduction; analogy; assumptions founded on facts aud unceasingly rectified by additional observations: a genial form of tact, inborn, but strengthening itself by making numerous comparisons between its indications and the results of experiment; such are the principal means of arriving at the truth."- Laplace, Des Divers Moyens d'approcher de la Certitude.

In part, at least, the above caption which I find to a paper on the Venturi Meter,* by CLEMENS HERSCHEL, must be my apology for attempting to add to the work of SCHLOESING and others, as well as to the efforts of Mr. IDDINGS and myself to arrive at the laws of regain, as brought out in a paper read before this Association at the Atlantic City Meeting in 1905. At the close of that paper attention was called to the close similarity, though not identity, of results obtained by SCHLOESING on both cotton and worsted at 24 degrees Centigrade (75 degrees Fahrenheit) by a radically different method of procedure. The method used

*The Venturi Meter: A paper read before the American Society of Civil Engineers by Clemens Herschel, M. Am. S. C. E., December 21, 1887.

Other references: Research on the Hygroscopic Properties of Various Textile Materials; M. T. Schloesing, Jr.; Bulletin Soc. d'Encouragement pour L'Industrie Nationale, 1893; Abstracted in Journal of The Society of Chemical Industry, Vol. XIII., 1895. Also translated in Textile World Record, November, 1908. Referred to by J. H. Lester, M. Sc. F. I. C., in paper on Moisture in Cotton and Yarn, December, 1904.

Cotton, Hygroscopic Action of: O. Masson & E. S. Richards, Royal Society Proceedings, 1906, 78 A, 412.429.

Some Comparative Data on Moisture in Cotton and Worsted, by William D. Hartshorne, Transactions, The National Association of Cotton Manufacturers, Vol. 79, page 194, 1905. Egyptian Cotton, by same, Vol. 81, page 161; Moisture in Cotton, by same, Vol. 89, pages 44 and 75.

by SCHLOESING of obtaining known (not necessarily constant) states of relative humidities in a vessel or chamber by the use of pure sulphuric acid of known strengths gave a new impetus to the study of the problem, from the point of view that practical benefits cannot reach their fullest fruition until the laws underlying a given class of phenomena are fully understood, or rather that the more nearly we do understand the fundamentals of these laws the greater benefit we can derive from their application to practical, everyday problems. For instance, it is only after the laws of falling bodies in vacuo are known - where the feather and apple behave alike that we can practically account for the perturbations in these laws in the science of ballistics, or the art of gun practice; or assuming the formal statement of them to be true, and only true in vacuo, that their demonstrated controlling effect on celestial bodies leads to the conclusion that the principal occupant of space is not "matter," as we understand the term.

In the original experiments carried out under the writer's direction in 1896, where a certain skein of yarn was weighed ten times a day for a year, under outside atmospheric conditions, a record of which was kept, it was not found possible to correlate results of regain with either temperature or humidity conditions, owing to the very apparent fact of "lag," that is, the element of time required for the material to assume a condition corresponding to the humidity and temperature, which were never constant for a long enough period to admit of such correlation.

In my paper of 1905, advantage was taken of this lag by weighing two skeins which were one drier and the other more moist than the local conditions would probably give, and the means of results obtained after a half hour or more of time were taken as representing the true data for comparison, and by the aid of a large number of such results, under varying atmospheric conditions, regain tables were prepared by interpolation from charts graphically representing these results on both cotton and worsted. For most practical purposes these tables are probably sufficiently near the truth, under ordinary indoor temperatures

and humidities, but for the higher humidities there is a marked variation from the figures given by SCHLOESING, and the relationship of regain to temperature for the same humidity was not demonstrably apparent. On the other hand, SCHLOESING'S method of making use of conditions of known humidity in obtaining the facts (not the law) of regain neglected the phenomena of lag, or the time element, in the problem. It is true that MASSON and RICHARDS recognized the lag element, and in their experiments on absorbent cotton made use of it after a certain manner for a single temperature (20 degrees Centigrade), but the experiments as reported did not extend far enough to generalise as to the law of regain. The general law for such regain was, however, given by the writer in the paper referred to, and its specific application made for worsted at a single temperature (70 degrees Fahrenheit) with a fair degree of accuracy considering the circumstances of the observations. These observations, however, were not accurate enough to correlate results for different temperatures, particularly at the higher humidities, with anything more than a rough approximation. To do this better it was necessary to obtain the elimination of the lagging effect by direct observations under conditions of constant temperature and constant humidity indefinitely maintained, or so closely known that the constant condition required could be calculated for. To do this many attempts Every attempt to obtain

were made which proved failures. greater accuracy in one direction revealed the necessity for greater accuracy, or greater control, in another direction before results could be depended upon to the degree required in order to obtain the controllable conditions described by SCHLOESING, and at the same time eliminate the lagging effect. The apparatus shown by the phantom diagram, Fig. 1, (see appendix) was finally designed, and so perfected that observations could be repeated over and over again under conditions calculably alike, upon different pairs of skeins, so that a fairly accurate average for a given kind of material could be obtained at as many points of temperature and humidity as might be found necessary. The