DR. ADOLPH LOEWY, professor of physiology at the University of Berlin, has been appointed director of an institute at Davos, Switzerland, for research on the physiologic effects of residence in high altitudes as pertaining to the treatment of tuberculosis. THE November number of the Journal of Geology at the University of Chicago will bear the names of father and son as editor and managing editor, the former being Thomas C. Chamberlin, professor emeritus of geology, and the latter Rollin T. Chamberlin, associate professor of geology. From the founding of the journal twenty-nine years ago T. C. Chamberlin and the late R. D. Salisbury were the editors. The other editors are Stuart Weller, invertebrate paleontology; Edson S. Bastin, economic geology; Albert Johannsen, petrology; and J. Harlen Bretz, stratigraphic geology. Associate editors include representatives of Great Britain, France, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Australia, and Canada. DR. WILFRED H. OSGOOD, curator of zoology of the Field Museum of Natural History, and party, including Mr. H. B. Conover and Mr. C. C. Sanborn, of the Field Museum, sailed on November 16 for Valparaiso, Chile. They will proceed to the forested region of southern Chile about Corcovado Gulf and, after making general collections there, will work northward. Dr. Osgood and Mr. Conover will return via Argentine, Uruguay and southern Brazil about the middle of 1923 and Mr. Sanborn will remain in the field until 1924. WE learn from the Journal of the American Medical Association that the U. S. Public Health Service has begun a study of the methods used in the United States in the manufacture of biologic products. Passed Assistant Surgeon W. T. Harrison has started a tour of the country to investigate this subject, going to Toronto, Canada; Boston; New York, Otisville and Pearl River, N. Y.; New Brunswick, N. J.; Philadelphia, Swiftwater, Glenolden, Ambler and Mariette, Pa.; Asheville, N. C.; Buffalo, and Baltimore. DR. SAMUEL J. MORRIS, professor of anatomy at the West Virginia University School of Medicine, has obtained a year's leave of absence to study anatomy at the Harvard Medical School. DR. ALEŠ HRDLIČKA has returned from an extended trip to Western and Central Europe made for the purpose of visiting the more important recently discovered sites of early man, and of examining the skeletal remains. As the result of a special invitation by the minister of education of the Czechoslovak Republic, he delivered also a series of lectures on "Anthropology and man's evolution" at the Universities of Prague, Brno (Brün) and Bratislava (Pressburg), and at the People's University of Plzeň (Pilsen). PROFESSOR F. KRAUSE, of the University of Berlin, is now in Mexico City giving a course of lectures on nerve surgery. PROFESSOR D. PAHLE, of the University of Frankfort, Germany, arrived in Chicago on November 18. Under the auspices of the American Society for the Control of Cancer, he will give a series of demonstrations of the deep-therapy roentgen-ray machine at the Norwegian-American Hospital. PROFESSOR GEORGE C. WHIPPLE, of the department of sanitary engineering of Harvard University, will give a series of lectures on "The philosophy of sanitation" at the Wagner Free Institute of Science in Philadelphia on Saturday evenings in January. The educational committee of the Bureau of Standards has arranged with Professor A. Sommerfeld for a course of lectures on "Quantum Theory" and related subjects. These lectures will be given at the Bureau of Standards, Washington, D. C., early in March, 1923. PROFESSOR A. J. CARLSON, as the guest of the University of Nebraska Medical College on November 17, delivered two addresses, one before the student body and the other before the faculty. THE Harben lectures before the Royal Institute of Public Health will be delivered by Professor Theodore Madsen, M. D., director of the State Serum Institute, Copenhagen, on December 1, 4 and 5. The subjects of the lectures are: "Specific and unspecific antitoxin production," "Antitoxic treatment," and "The influence of temperature on antigren and antibodies." LORD BALFOUR has arranged to deliver his second course of Gifford lectures on natural theology at Glasgow University. The first will be given on Friday, November 24, the series being continued on November 28 and December 1, 5, 8, 12, and 15 and 19, and January 16 and 19. The lectures, which are open to the public, were begun during the session before the war. AT Lake Forest College there has recently been reorganized a Science Club, which has been dormant since the departure of Dr. James G. Needham in 1901. The departments of chemistry, biology and psychology are sponsors for the club and supervise the bi-weekly programs, the purpose of which is to stimulate interest in the general problems of the three fields. All persons in the vicinity interested in science are invited to attend. The following are the topics and leaders for the first three meetings: "Hypnotism," by Dr. W. R. Wells; "The tropism theory as a basis for the interpretation of human behavior," by Dr. W. H. Cole, and "The constitution of matter," by Dr. F. B. Coffin. THE three concluding addresses in the series of illustrated evening lectures given this autumn by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, are as follows: November 28, "The constitution of the hereditary material and its relation to development," Dr. T. H. Morgan, research associate in biology of the Carni, and professor of experimental zoology at Columbia University; December 5, "The properties of matter as illustrated in the stars," Dr. Henry Norris Russell, research associate of the Mount Wilson Observatory and director of the Princeton University Observatory; December 12, "The motions of the stars," Dr. Walter S. Adams, acting director of the Mount Wilson Observatory. AN Exhibition of Scientific Apparatus and Products will be an important feature of the approaching Boston meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, to be held in the building of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge, December 26 to 30, 1922. Those desiring to take part by exhibiting apparatus, materials, etc., should communicate at once with Professor R. P. Bigelow, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Professor Bigelow is chairman of the subcommittee on exhibits for the Fourth Boston Meeting. APPLICATION has been made for reduced railroad fares, on the certificate plan, for persons attending the annual meetings of the Geological Society of America, the Paleontological Society, the Mineralogical Society of America, the Society of Economic Geologists, the Association of American Geographers and the American Association of State Geologists, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, December 26-31, 1922. When purchasing tickets at the regular oneway fare, certificates of the standard form should be obtained from the railroad ticket agent. The granting of return tickets at one half the regular fare is conditional upon there being 250 persons in attendance upon the meetings who hold certificates showing that they have paid 67 cents or more on the going trip. For the purpose of commemorating the services of William Thompson Sedgwick to the cause of biology and public health, there has been established a memorial lectureship in the department of the Institute of Technology which he created. The desire of the founders is that the Sedgwick Memorial Lectures shall be given from year to year by men of distinguished eminence in any one of the subjects comprehended within the general scope of biology and public health in order that it may fittingly express the deep and broad sympathy of the man whom the lectureship is designed to honor. The committee in charge of the lectureship consists of Samuel C. Prescott, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Edwin 632 O. Jordan, University of Chicago; George C. Whipple, Harvard University; Gary N. Calkins, Columbia University, and Charles-E. A. Winslow, Yale University. The first William Thompson Sedgwick Memorial Lecture will be given in Huntington Hall, 491 Boylston Street, Boston, on Friday, December 29, at five o'clock, by Dr. Edmund Beecher Wilson, Da Costa professor of zoology at Columbia University, on "The physical basis of life." The lecture will form part of the program of the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Society of Naturalists and other societies during convocation week. It is announced from Stockholm that since it has been decided not to award the Nobel Prize for Medicnie for 1921, the prize will be added to the Special Medical Fund. The 1922 prize is reserved for next year. THE Méthane Association, organized in 1916 with the object of advancing industrial chemistry in Poland, has been reorganized as an Institute of Research, and Professor Moscicki has been appointed director. The government of Poland has made a grant of land in the neighborhood of Warsaw, where buildings for the institute will be erected. WILLIAM EASTMAN STANDOW, a graduate of the University of Denver and a graduate student at Columbia University, was killed by an explosion in the chemical laboratory on November 17, through the explosion of a chamber containing aniline hydrochloride. PROFESSOR JEREMIAH GEORGE MOSIER, for twenty years in charge of the work in soil physics at the University of Illinois, died on November 10, 1922, at the age of sixty years. A correspondent writes: Professor Mosier graduated from the University of Illinois in 1893. He then became an assistant in geology in the same institution, in which position he served for three years. After a period spent in highschool teaching he reentered the service of his university in 1902 to take up the work in soil physics, a subject which at that time was largely undeveloped. Professor Mosier was an unusually inspiring teacher and he has won the love and respect of the hundreds of students who have come under his instruction. In Pro his field of investigation his interest was broad; UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL THE $1,600,000 financial development project for Dickinson College and Pennington Seminary has been brought to a successful conclusion. Of this amount, Dickinson, it is reported, will receive $1,250,000 and Pennington $350,000. The money will be used for buildings, betterment, liquidation and endowment. GROUND has been broken for the new laboratory of the department of hygiene and bacteriology of the University of Chicago, which when completed will be devoted to bacteriologie and chemical research. It will be erected at a cost of $50,000. UNDER the will of the late Sir William Dunn a further sum of £45,000 now accrues to the School of Biochemistry of the University of Cambridge, making a total gift for the purpose of the school of £210,000. PAUL MARTYN LINCOLN, of Cleveland, Ohio, has been elected professor of electrical engineering and director of the School of Electrical Engineering in Cornell University. Professor Lincoln, who is a practicing engineer, was professor of electrical engineering at the University of Pittsburgh from 1911 to 1915. He was president of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers in 1914. CHARLES HARLAN ABBOTT, PH. D. has resigned his position at the Massachusetts Agricultural College to accept the professorship of zoology at the University of Redlands, California. DR. J. R. CURRIE, a senior medical officer of the Scottish Board of Health, has been appointed to the chair of preventive medicine in Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario. DR. H. STANLEY ALLEN, of the University of Edinburgh, has been appointed to the chair of natural philosophy in the United College, St. Andrews, which has become vacant by the retirement of Professor Butler. DISCUSSION AND CORRESPOND- FINANCIAL SUPPORT OF TECHNICAL It is a not uncommon practice for members of the faculties of our colleges, universities, and other schools to enrich the libraries of these institutions by donating copies of technical journals received by the individual either by subseription or by virtue of membership in some scientific society. This loyalty to the local institution is natural and laudable from the standpoint of the institution, but it may, perhaps, not be realized that if every one of our colleges and universities were to depend upon such gifts for their files of scientific periodicals there would shortly, in the case of many such publications, not be any journal to donate, so inadequate is the financial support of scientific publications. With the exception of those journals, such, for example, as the chemical journals, which have a large and financially profitable circulation among practical workers outside of libraries and faculties, many of our journals devoted to pure science are barely, or not at all, able to exist except for generous subsidies. Outside of members of societies of which the publications may be the official organ, paid subscriptions may be expected only from a very few individuals not members, from a very small number of public libraries in our larger cities, and from educational institutions. It is a matter of record that many of our journals devoted to publishing the results of research do not have subscriptions from more than a small fraction of American institutions maintaining a department in the given science, and in many cases this results because some member of the departmental staff contributes his personal copy to the library. One of our biological journals recently faced the necessity of either securing a generous additional subsidy, or of increasing its subscription rate by one dollar a year, or of suspending publication. The subsidy was not forthcoming and so the subscription price was advanced. Notice to this effect was followed by cancellation of subscription, not by one of our private, struggling, small colleges, but by one of the largest of our state universities. The letter of cancellation stated that the institution would hereafter depend upon a donated copy. The existence of all of the journals of the class referred to is a matter of vital importance to the colleges and universities. None of them is maintained for its own sake as a business venture. Practically all of them were established because of the impossibility of securing the publication of the results of research with any degree of promptness-often not within a year or eighteen months, or even longer, after the completion of the manuscript. Our colleges and universities should regard practically all of these journals as established primarily for their advantage, and the journals in turn are justified in expecting support from these institutions to the extent of at least one subscription. The donation of personal copies by professors to the library of their institution may help the library to the extent of a few dollars, but the present extent of this practice is depriving journals, indispensable to donor and benefactor alike, of hundreds of dollars each of support annually. It is an interesting but regrettable fact that, while it is comparatively easy to obtain money for research, nothing is much more difficult to secure funds for than the publication of the results of research. C. STUART GAGER ACOUSTICAL RESEARCH THE quotation from the London Times on the subject of Acoustical Research (November 3, 1922) conveys an impression which seems to need correction. In justice to the life-long labors of the late Professor W. C. Sabine, now gathered into a volume of Collected Papers on Acoustics (Harvard University Press), it should be said that the practical problem of predicting the acousties of an ordinary auditorium in advance of its construction, or of correcting one already built, was solved by Professor Sabine some twenty years ago. The essential feature to be considered in such a problem is the reverberation and Sabine's papers on this subject are full and complete. Other acoustic questions are, of course, sometimes involved such as the transmission of sound through walls, the effect of resonance, etc. Several of these had also been the subject of prolonged experimental investigation by Professor Sabine at the Jefferson Physical Laboratory at Harvard but some of the results were withheld until the work could be completed. His untimely death interrupted this program, and since then the work has been continued here and at the Acoustical Laboratories at Riverbank, Illinois, under the direction of Dr. Paul E. Sabine, as described in Mr. Munby's article in Nature, October 28, 1922. Architects in this country have become aware of the importance of Sabine's results and scores of cases could be cited in which the application of the principles worked out by him has led to complete success. The opinion that "Architects are still unable to predict with certainty the acoustic properties of the halls and chambers they design" implies a lack of respect for Sabine's profoundly accurate and thorough work which I am sure no one will maintain who has taken the trouble to acquaint himself with the subject. THEODORE LYMAN, Director JEFFERSON PHYSICAL LABORATORY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY AUSTRIAN SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS TO THE EDITOR OF SCIENCE: The present financial difficulties of scientific and technical journals have no doubt come to the attention of many readers of SCIENCE. I am tempted to call their attention to a specific case by quoting a recent letter from William Ford Upson, American trade commissioner in Vienna: On a pathetic appeal of Professor Wilhelm Exner, an eminent Austrian scientist, president of the Technisches Versuchsamt, I am sending to the Bureau of Standards, with my compliments, the Mitteilungen des Technischen Versuchsamtes for one year. The publication is in sore straits for lack of funds and its ambition is to get 100 foreign subscriptions at $1.00 per year each, to enable it to continue publication, but its efforts have proved unavailing except that I am sending out a few copies at my own expense. Could you help in the good work in any way? The Bureau of Standards is already a subscriber to this publication, but I trust that the above appeal will put other research laboratories or libraries on the subscription list. WILLIAM F. MEGGERS BUREAU OF STANDARDS AN APPEAL ONE hundred Russian university and professional men, mostly scientists, many of them internationally famous, recently exiled from Russia by the Soviet government, are in Berlin in serious circumstances. Local charity is housing and feeding them, but they lack sufficient clothing, shoes and pocket money to get through the winter without acute distress. An appeal has come to the American Relief Administration for one thousand dollars to provide some relief (averaging only $10 a man) for these exiles. Unfortunately all of the A. R. A. funds must be spent for relief inside of Russia. The appeal has been turned over to me. Will the scientific men of America help these suffering scientific men of Russia? A generous friend, Princess Cantacuzene, of Washington, has given me one half ($500) of the sum needed. I shall be glad to be one of fifty to give $10 each, or one of one hundred to give $5 each, to make up the other half. I will undertake to receive the gifts and send personal receipts for them, and later obtain and publish in SCIENCE a blanket receipt from Berlin for the whole amount received and sent |
