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Mock, assistant professor of surgery in the Northwestern University Medical School, was awarded the honorary degree of doctor of science.

THE Oklahoma State College, Stillwater, Okla., at its thirty-second annual commencement, May 31, conferred the honorary degree of doctor of science upon Professor W. A. Tarr, professor of geology at the University of Missouri, and the honorary degree of doctor of agriculture upon Professor W. L. Burlison, professor of agronomy at the University of Illinois. These degrees were the first conferred by the college.

AT a meeting of the Royal Institution on May 9, Sir J. J. Thomson was elected honorary professor of natural philosophy, and Sir Ernest Rutherford professor of natural philosophy. The chairman announced that the president, the Duke of Northumber

I land, had nominated, among others, Sir Dugald Clerk and Sir Charles Parsons as vice-presidents for the ensuing year.

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THE first award of the Charles B. Dudley medal, established by the American Society for Testing Materials, has been made to Dr. D. J. McAdam, Jr.,

Science, composed of delegates from thirty countries. Leningrad will probably be chosen as the place for the next meeting.

SIR DANIEL HALL retired on June 4 from the post of director-general of the intelligence department of the British Ministry of Agriculture, which he has held since 1920. He will continue to act as chief scientific adviser and chairman of the Research Council of the Ministry.

SIR RICHARD GLAZEBROOK has been appointed, by Order of Council dated May 26, to be a member of the Advisory Council to the Committee of the British Privy Council for Scientific and Industrial Research.

MISS ELIZABETH F. HOPKINS, assistant botanist in the Seed Testing Laboratory of the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station at Geneva, has resigned in order to accept an offer from the Massachusetts Agricultural College to organize a seed testing laboratory at that institution.

DR. THOMAS A. JAGGAR, of the Hawaiian Volcanic Observatory, has arrived in Alaska, where a scientific

metallurgist at the United States Naval Engineering study of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes is being

Experimental Station at Annapolis, Md., for a paper on "Stress Strain-Cycle Relationship and Corrosion-Fatigue of Metals."

A PORTRAIT of Dr. William S. Baer, chief medical officer at the Children's Hospital School, Baltimore, and associate professor of clinical orthopedic surgery at the Johns Hopkins Medical School, has been presented to the hospital school.

PROFESSOR ALAN W. C. MENZIES, of Princeton University, will represent the American section of the Society of Chemical Industry at its annual meeting in Edinburgh in July, and will tender the invitation of the section to the society to hold its next annual meeting in New York.

DR. ERNEST W. BROWN, professor of mathematics at Yale University, has been appointed to represent the University of Cambridge at the centenary of the University of Toronto on October 6.

DR. H. L. WALSTER, dean of the School of Agriculture of the North Dakota Agricultural College, was elected president of the North Dakota Academy of Science for the coming year at the recent conferthe ence held at Grand Forks. Dr. Walster succeeds Professor Karl H. Fussler, head of the department of physics of the University of North Dakota. The tor Academy will hold its next convention at Fargo.

PROFESSOR K. D. GLINKA, director of the Soviet Experimental Station at Leningrad, has been elected president of the International Congress of Soil

carried out by the U. S. Weather Bureau. He will superintend the installation of seismographs at Dutch Harbor and at Kodiak.

DR. HERBERT GROVE DORSEY, senior electrical engineer of the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, has been transferred to the Pacific Coast for a few months to supervise the installation and adjustment of the fathometer on the survey ships Pioneer, Guide and Surveyor, working off the coasts of Oregon, Washington and Alaska.

O. M. MILLER, director of the school of survey of the National Geographic Society, headed a party which sailed for South America on June 23 to explore the source of the Maranon River, one of the chief tributaries of the Amazon.

NEIL M. JUDD, curator of American archeology in the United States National Museum, has left Washington to complete his explorations at Pueblo Bonito, New Mexico, under the auspices of the National Geographic Society. This season's expedition is the seventh sent by the society for the purpose of recovering and recording the story of this prehistoric Indian village.

DR. WILLIAM B. WHERRY, professor of bacteriology at the University of Cincinnati and member of the Board of Health, will lead an expedition into Mexico this summer to test the efficacy of the new treatment for typhoid fever.

DR. WILMOT C. FOSTER, assistant professor of anatomy of the University of Oregon Medical School, has

been granted a year's leave of absence to work in surgical anatomy at the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.

MRS. AGNES CHASE, associate botanist in the grass herbarium of the Bureau of Plant Industry, has returned from Europe where she spent several weeks studying type specimens of American grasses. She visited the herbaria at Vienna, Freiburg, Munich, Paris and Geneva. Of special importance was the De Candolle Herbarium acquired by the Delessert Herbarium, Geneva, and recently made accessible to visiting botanists by the director, Dr. John Briquet. The material of the De Candolle Herbarium, which is the basis of the Prodromus and the series of monographs, is segregated in the De Candolle Room; the remainder is incorporated in the general collection of the Delessert Herbarium.

Nature states that Mr. H. C. Sampson, who was recently appointed economic botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, left on June 11 for British Guiana at the invitation of the governor and under the auspices of the Colonial Office and Empire Marketing Board, to study and report on various agricultural matters in the colony. He will also visit Trinidad and the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture, and Barbados.

FRANCIS G. BENEDICT, director of the nutrition laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, in Boston, recently gave at the University of New Hampshire a lecture on "Physiological Research Institutions of Europe."

DR. SERGIUS MORGULIS, professor of biochemistry in the University of Nebraska College of Medicine, delivered an address on "Enzymes in the Service of the Cereal Chemist" at the annual convention of the Association of American Cereal Chemists on June 3.

THE medical library composed of 4,424 volumes, of the late Dr. George S. Huntington, professor of anatomy in the college of physicians and surgeons of Columbia University, said to be one of the rarest of its kind, will be purchased by the alumni, who have undertaken to raise a $35,000 fund for the purpose in memory of Dr. Huntington. The collection will be known as the George S. Huntington Collection and will be kept intact at the medical center.

DR. CHARLES FREDERIC MABERY, for thirty-five years head of the laboratory of the Standard Oil Company and since 1883 professor of chemistry at the Case School of Applied Science, Cleveland, died in Portland, Me., on June 26, at the age of seventyseven years.

CHARLES FREDERIC RAND, former chairman of the

executive board of the Engineering Foundation, died on June 21, at the age of seventy years.

JOHN M. GOODELL, former editor of the Engineering Record and an associate editor of Engineering News, died on June 22, aged sixty years.

THE fifteenth International Geological Congress will meet in South Africa in 1929.

THE Swiss Society of Natural Sciences will hold its 108th annual meeting from September 1 to 4 at Basel. The president, Dr. Fritz Sarasin, will give the opening address on September 1, which will be followed by a lecture by Professor A. Brachet (Brussels) on the causes and factors of morphogenesis; other lectures will be given by Professor L. Courvoisier (Berlin) on recent work and views in astronomy, by Professor L. Duparc (Geneva) on the Urals from the point of view of geophysics, geology and mining, and by Professor H. E. Sigerist (Leipzig) on Paracelsus in relation to modern thought. The general work of the meeting will be divided among fourteen sections.

THE Cyrus F. Brackett series of lectures at Princeton University next year will include a lecture by L. H. Kinnard, president of the Bell Telephone Company of Pennsylvania, on October 15 on "Development of Long Distance Telephony"; by the president of the National Broadcasting Company of New York, M. H. Aylesworth, on "Radio-The University of the Air"; by Dr. Frank B. Jewett, president of the Bell laboratories in New York, on "Cooperative Research," and by James T. Wallis, assistant vice-president of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who is to speak about "The Development in Motive Power on the Pennsylvania System."

DR. E. H. ANDERSON, director of the New York in Public Library, writes: "Add one more to your record of copies of Durant's 'The Algae and Coral Lines of the Bay and Harbor of New York.' The New York Public Library has Durant's own copy of this book."

THE firm of Johnson & Johnson, manufacturers of surgical supplies, New Brunswick, N. J., has established at the Mellon Institute of the University of Pittsburgh a fellowship that will study the exact requirements of surgeons and other medical specialists in the way of sundries, with the joint aim of developing new supplies that are needed and of standardizing the products now in use. An investigation will also be made of the processes of renovating used supplies, and several other Industrial Fellowships of the Institute will cooperate in devising satisfactory procedures. Dr. Frederic H. Slayton, M.D. (Rush) will be in direct charge of this research. All its investi

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gations will be conducted primarily for the benefit of the public. It is the plan to report the results in appropriate periodicals as the various phases of the studies are concluded.

THE Royal Aeronautical Society has recently received the following letter from Mr. Harry F. Guggenheim, president of the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, Inc.: "It affords me great pleasure to advise you that the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, Inc., has approved a grant of $5,000 to the Royal Aeronautical Society to enable it more easily to continue its splendid contributions to the aeronautical science of the world. It is the hope of the fund that this grant may stimulate the growth and strength of the Society to such a point that within a short while financial assistance from without will be unnecessary."

TEMPORARY reservation of a tract of public land in Nevada containing Lovelock Cave has been authorized by an executive order issued by the U. S. Department of the Interior. The area on which the cave is located contains approximately 40 acres and is in Churchill County. Its withdrawal is for the purpose of affording opportunity of scientific study of interesting prehistoric material found in the cave. According to the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution articles taken from Lovelock Cave are in a remarkable state of preservation and are particularly valuable on this account. With its temporary retention in public ownership as a result of the executive order, the site will be the subject of further archeological research.

THE National Forest Reservation Commission met recently, under the chairmanship of Secretary Davis, of the war department, and approved the purchase of 96,000 acres additional to the White Mountains National Forest in New England, the Allegheny in Northwestern Pennsylvania and the Pisgah in North Carolina. The commission also gave a hearing to a delegation from New England which urged the purchase of 23,000 acres within the boundaries of the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire, containing one of the few virgin timber stands in Northeastern United States. No decision was reached.

AN Imperial Agricultural Research Conference, at which delegates from all parts of the Empire will be present, will be held in London beginning on October 4. The Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries decided some time ago to call such a conference in 1927, and the proposal was endorsed by the last Imperial Conference, which appointed a special sub-committee to inquire into research. The ministry is responsible for arranging the conference, and the Empire Marketing Board is providing the necessary funds. An organiz

ing committee has been appointed under Lord Bledisloe's chairmanship and has already held its first meeting.

MILK ISLAND, lying off the coast of Gloucester, Mass., has been accepted by the state as a wild life sanctuary, according to an announcement of the state division of fisheries and game of the Department of Conservation. The island is the gift of Mrs. Roger Babson to the Federation of the Bird Clubs of New England, upon condition that it shall be known as the Knight Wild Life Reservation, in memory of Mrs. Babson's mother and father. The federation, in turn, has deeded the property to the state in trust for this purpose, and the governor and council have accepted it by formal vote. It will be administered by the Fisheries and Game Division, of which William C. Adams is director.

UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL
NOTES

AT the commencement exercises of Harvard University it was announced that during the year 1926-27 the university had received gifts of $6,003,372, in addition to subscriptions to the tenmillion-dollar campaign and to the alumni endowment fund and the income received under the will of Gordon McKay. Most of these gifts have during the year been chronicled in SCIENCE. Those of special interest to scientific men include: anonymous, for research and instruction in abnormal and dynamic psychology, $25,113; from the estate of Richard Dana Bell, for biological chemistry in the medical school, $100,000; from the General Education Board for the department of ophthalmology, $188,400; from the International Education Board endowment, for a southern astronomical observatory, $180,000; from the estate of Arthur S. Luke, for medical and surgical science, $237,081; from the Rockefeller Foundation, for the school of public health, $137,250; from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, for industrial psychology and for a survey of crime, $37,000; for the Charles Sprague Sargent Memorial Fund, $142,720; from Dr. Frederick C. Shattuck, to establish the Richard P. Strong Fund in Tropical Medicine, $100,000; from Harold S. Vanderbilt, for a medical school dormitory and salary for an instructor of physical training in the medical school, $470,100.

GIFTS to Wellesley College amounting to $814,000 were announced at the recent commencement exercises, bringing the Centennial Fund to $7,220,000. The gifts include $100,000 by George W. Farwell, of Boston, to establish the Ruby Frances Howe Farwell chair of botany, and $40,000 from the class of 1882, for the Susan Hallowell chair of botany. A gift of

$30,000 by Mrs. Robert Gould Shaw will be divided: $10,000 to the Hallowell chair of botany, $20,000 to the Hallowell Arboretum.

BOWDOIN COLLEGE has received a gift of $175,000 from Augustus F. Moulton, of Portland, for the construction of a Bowdoin Union, to be the social center of the college.

THE legislature of the state of Kansas before adjournment appropriated $300,000 for the erection of new buildings for the school of medicine of the University of Kansas at Kansas City. $100,000 is for a new nurses' home and $200,000 for an additional ward unit.

THE University of Pittsburgh announces the appointment of Dr. Robert T. Hance as professor and acting head of the department of zoology. Dr. Hance has been associated for the past several years with the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.

AT the Carnegie Institute of Technology the following appointments have been made: John H. Neelley, associate professor of mathematics; Howard V. Russell, assistant professor of physics and Walter H. J. Taylor, assistant professor of chemical engineering. THE following promotions are announced in the department of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania: to professorships of psychology: Drs. Samuel W. Fernberger and Karl G. Miller, and to assistant professorships of psychology: Drs. Robert A. Brotemarkle, Henry E. Starr and H. Sherman Oberly.

DR. R. L. SHRINER, associate in biochemistry at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station at Geneva, has accepted a position in the chemistry department at the University of Illinois.

DR. TOMLINSON FORT, head of the department of mathematics at Hunter College, New York City, has resigned in order to accept a similar position at Lehigh University.

DR. ALEXANDER G. RUTHVEN has been elected chairman of the department of zoology at the University of Michigan, and Dr. Robert R. McKibbin, assistant professor of soils at the University of Maryland, has been appointed lecturer in the chemistry department of Macdonald College, McGill University, Ste. Anne de Bellevue, Quebec, Canada.

DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE

CONCERNING "SPECIES-GRINDING"

IN SCIENCE for December 10, 1926, Dr. James G. Needham gives an interesting and well-deserved encomium of the natural history work of Dr. Curtis Gates Lloyd. But in praising his friend, Dr. Need

ham quotes from one of the least laudable of his personal prejudices.

In a general criticism of workers in taxonomy as engaged in "species-grinding," "practiced for the purpose of seeing one's name in print," "a sort of cheap notoriety which places a premium on slip-shod and hasty description," he takes a needless slap at a group as a whole signally unselfish and conscientious. For systematic zoology and botany give most of our clues to the origin of species, and therefore to "organic evolution," and on accuracy in taxonomy rests all our actual knowledge of geographical distribution. Slip-shod amateur work in any field is a nuisance in science, and there is no field it may not sometimes invade. The greater the public interest in any branch of science, the more likely it is to attract the charlatan and those unquiet spirits who find the methods of science too slow and laborious. In the interest of accuracy, taxonomists are obliged to resort to what Dr. Lloyd calls contemptuously "The time-wasting devices of priority hunters because he deemed them a hindrance to science." In like manner care for tools or instruments of precision in any science is likewise "time-wasting." It takes effort as keen for an anatomist to keep his knives sharp as for a geneticist to keep track of his observations. The eminent "intuitionists" do not do this, and in the long run their inspired guesses count for nothing.

More than eighty years ago Agassiz justified the work he put on his "Nomenclator-Zoologicus," as an effort to save systematic zoology from the utter confusion into which it was then falling. It was plain to him, as to all conscientious workers that the language of systematic science could not be altered at will without being made incomprehensible and useless, and that the law of priority was the sole basis on which order in the naming of any group could be established. If for any reason a writer rejects an earlier or established name for one he likes better, it opens the door to anybody's play of choice. Take any name you like or make a new one, and all continuity and certainty is lost. We know more or less well a million kinds of animals and almost as many plants, and we are not yet near the end of the list. To declaim against law and order in nomenclature is a sin against accuracy. That there are so many kinds of life in one small world is not the fault of naturalists. Facts are facts, and our duty is in Agassiz's oft-quoted words, to "strive to interpret what really exists."

All easy problems in biology are already solved, and any of the others may bring up new points of view. Practically also, one line of genuine work in any field is just as difficult as in any other and just as important. To sneer at any other lines of

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BIOLOGY VERSUS MYTHOLOGY IN A
CRIMINAL COURT

A LARCENY trial unique in the annals of criminology, resulting in conviction by a jury of five on March 15, 1927, grew out of a series of thefts of preserved frogs from the Southern Biological Supply Co., Inc., of New Orleans, La., by two former collectors of the company. The interesting feature of the trial was virtually a clash between modern mythology on the one hand and the sciences of ecology and taxonomy on the other. A single charge was filed covering only one theft, that of 462 preserved frogs consisting of five species, four of local and one of northern distribution. The defendants, pleading not guilty, set forth the plea, through their attorney, that it is a well-known fact that evaporation draws frogs and fish up into the clouds and the rain showers them again onto the land. It was therefore easily explained how the race of Rana pipiens indigenous to Indiana and Wisconsin was collected in St. Bernard Parish in southeast Louisiana by the collectors, who sold them to a competitor and to a local university.

The employees of the company described and identified the five species in the barrel from which the frogs were stolen, these including a large percentage of Rana pipiens which had been imported from the two northern states during the shortage resulting from the unprecedented droughts of 1924 and 1925. Every detail in the chain of circumstantial evidence was presented by the state, even the purchasers acting as state's witnesses. Percy Viosca, Jr., and Henry B. Chase, Jr., of the Biological Company, were qualified as experts in taxonomy and ecology of the Anura, and it was necessary for living and preserved frogs to take the stand as exhibits in order to prove the story of the defendants untrue. A surprise of the trial was the presentation by the defendants of living specimens of Rana pipiens which they claimed they caught in St. Bernard Parish the night before the trial in a typical Rana sphenocephala habitat, several hundred miles from the nearest approach of the range of pipiens. The defense attorney then attempted to prove that the defendants had secured their knowledge of frogs through experience, whereas the state's ex

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I HAVE more than once publicly protested against that abomination "data is." We say "phenomenon is" and "phenomena are," and I do not recall in Latin any singular verb used in English with a plural noun, excepting poor "data is."

I presume one reason is that "datum" is a rare word. The city "Datum" is the fixed level from which all heights and depths are measured, and "data" are the basic facts upon which we found a definite conclusion. I am glad to join with Dr. Morse in his protest against a singular verb and a plural noun.

The Oxford, the Century and the Funk and Wagnalls dictionaries all give "data, pl. of datum." Webster's does not list "data" but under "datum" says "pl. data.”

W. W. KEEN

In view of certain remarks which have appeared in SCIENCE recently concerning the use of the word "data," I feel minded to essay the rôle of devil's advocate for the apparently incorrect use. We speak and hence write English by ear and not by rules of grammar. Rules to the contrary notwithstanding, if "this data" sounds better than "these data" it will be used. There must be a more fundamental reason why "data" should be regarded as a singular rather than a plural. I believe there are two reasons. First, in this country we regard collective nouns either singular or plural in form as syntactical singulars. Such does not seem to be the case in England. For example: in this country "the committee is," while in England "the committee are," yet the phrase "committee of one" shows that we regard a committee composed of a single person as the exception, not the rule. Second, in ordinary use, "data" is not the mere plural of "datum." The two words possess quite different connotations. "Datum" appears to be almost exclusively used for a primary level in surveying while "data" connotes information or facts. Hence "data" as the plural of "datum" is a syntactical plural while "data" in the sense of facts is a collective which is preferably treated as a singular.

CHARLES H. BLAKE

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