56

helm Institute for Aeronautical Research in Göttingen, was awarded a gold medal on the occasion of a lecture that he gave recently before the Royal Aeronautical Society of London.

M. PAUL HELBRONNER, known for his geodetic work in the French Alps, has been elected a member of the Paris Academy of Sciences, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Haton de la Goupillière.

DR. GEORGE H. WHIPPLE, dean and professor of pathology, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry, was awarded the honorary degree of doctor of science by Colgate University at its recent commencement.

THE degree of doctor of science has been conferred by De Pauw University on Dr. William Albert Riley, head of the department of animal biology of the University of Minnesota.

OHIO WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY, at the recent commencement exercises, conferred the degree of doctor of science on Eugene Wesley Shaw, geologist for the Standard Oil Company of South America.

THE University of Leeds has conferred the honorary degree of doctor of science upon Dr. A. G. Perkin, professor emeritus.

THE following degrees will be conferred by Birmingham University: Dr. A. C. Seward, Downing professor of botany in the University of Cambridge; Dr. Arthur Lapworth, professor of chemistry, University of Manchester; Sir David Ferrier, emeritus professor of neuropathology, King's College, London; Sir Watson Cheyne, Bart., and Sir Walter Fletcher, secretary of the Medical Research Council.

G.B.E.

O.B.E. (Civil Division): Mr. G. W. Grabham, government geologist, Khartoum; Mr. T. F. Main, deputydirector of agriculture, Bombay, and Mr. V. E. Pullin, director of radiological research, War Office.

PROFESSOR WILLIAM A. WALDSCHMIDT, assistant professor of geology in the Colorado School of Mines, for the past five years, has resigned from the faculty in order to accept a position in the geology department of the Midwest Refining Company, Denver.

DR. MALCOLM H. BISSELL has resigned as associate professor of geology at Bryn Mawr College and will spend next year as an honorary fellow in geography at Clark University.

SIR HUMPHRY ROLLESTON, Bt., regius professor of physic, has been appointed to represent the University of Cambridge at the third Imperial Social Hygiene Congress at Westminster from October 3 to 7.

PROFESSOR FULLEBORN, of the Hamburg Institute for Tropical Diseases, has been invited by the Argentine government to visit South America to study hookworm disease.

THE Rawson-MacMillan expedition, being sent out by the Field Museum of Natural History, sailed from Wiscasset, Maine, on June 25, for Labrador and Baffin Land. This expedition is being financed by Frederick H. Rawson, of Chicago, and is led by Commander MacMillan. Among the members of the museum staff who sailed with the party are William D. Strong, Alfred C. Weed, Arthur G. Rueckert and Sharat K. Roy. The party will remain in the Arctic for fifteen months and will establish a shore station in the Eskimo village of Nain, Labrador.

ERICH F. SCHMIDT, assistant in archeology in the department of anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History, has joined the field party of the Oriental Research Institute of the University of Chicago, to assist in an archeological reconnaissance of Asia Minor.

DR. WALDEMAR JOCHELSON, who has been the guest of the American Museum of Natural History during his visit to America, is now preparing to return to Russia, where he has accepted a position as division curator of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the Academy of Sciences, Leningrad, and as lecturer on ethnology at the Leningrad University.

DR. CHARLES A. KOFOID, chairman of the department of zoology of the University of California, has left Berkeley to attend the international congresses on zoology and genetics in Europe, and to visit the leading scientific laboratories of Northern and Central

Europe. At the International Zoological Congress in Budapest, Hungary, which takes place in September, he will read a paper on "Human Intestinal Protozoa and their Relation to Diseases in Man." From that meeting Dr. Kofoid will go to the International Congress of Genetics in Berlin, Germany.

DR. ALFRED N. RICHARDS worked last year at the National Institute of Medical Research in London, having been granted leave of absence from the chair of pharmacology in the University of Pennsylvania Medical School.

THE non-resident lecturer in chemistry under the George Fisher Baker Foundation at Cornell University for the first term of the year 1927-1928, October 1, 1927, to February 1, 1928, will be Dr. Paul Walden, professor of chemistry and director of the chemical institute of the University of Rostock. While at Cornell, Professor Walden will lecture upon Non-Aqueous Solutions, Stereo-Chemical Problems and Optical Inversion, and will hold a weekly colloquium.

DR. ALFRED ADLER, Vienna, will give the introductory lecture at the fourth International Congress for Individual Psychology, which will take place in that city from September 17 to 19. The first session will be devoted to the subject of "The Prevention and Treatment of the Psychoses." Sunday will be devoted to the prevention and treatment of problem children and criminals, and Monday to lectures by prominent scientists of Vienna. The lectures will be in English, French or German.

SIR JOSEPH THOMSON, O.M., delivered the tenth Sylvanus Thompson memorial lecture before the Röntgen Society, London, on June 14, taking as his subject "The Structure of the Atom."

A BUST of Emil von Behring was recently unveiled in the hall of honor of the University of Mexico, of which he had been made a doctor honoris causa in 1910.

PINEL, the French specialist in mental diseases, died in 1826, and, on May 30, 1,277 scientists and physicians met at the Sorbonne to pay tribute to his memory. He was regarded as the first to treat insanity as a disease and apply humane methods of treatment.

AFTER the death of Sir William Macewen, professor of surgery in the University of Glasgow from 1892 to 1924, a committee was formed to promote a fund for the purpose of commemorating his life and work. The first purpose of the fund was to procure a bust for presentation to the university and a replica to Lady Macewen. The second purpose was the establishment of a Macewen Memorial Lecture, and the third the

foundation of a Macewen Medal in the Class of Surgery. We learn from the British Medical Journal that the busts have been presented to the university and to Lady Macewen and the medal has been founded and the first award made. The first memorial lecture was delivered by Professor Harvey Cushing, of Harvard University.

A BRONZE bust of the late Alexander Smith, for many years professor of inorganic chemistry at the University of Chicago, has been recently presented to the university by Mrs. Smith. Industrial and Engineering Chemistry states that as the late Professor Nef was the founder of the department of chemistry and as Professor Stieglitz shared equally with Professor Smith in assisting Professor Nef in the upbuilding of the department, it has seemed fitting that the university should also possess busts or paintings of Professors Nef and Stieglitz and a movement to provide funds for these has been started by a committee of graduates of the department. The busts or paintings of the three men will ultimately be placed in the library of the George Herbert Jones Laboratory, the new research chemistry building about to be erected. Contributions to the fund should be sent to Dr. J. W. E. Glattfeld, of the department of chemistry of the University of Chicago, who is treasurer of the committee.

DR. JOHN G. WILLIAMS, a specialist in roentgenology and a pioneer in Brooklyn in the development and use of deep X-ray therapy, died on July 2, aged fifty-four years.

Nature reports the death on May 30 at the age of ninety-five years of Surgeon-General Henry Cook, formerly dean of the faculty of medicine of the University of Bombay.

THE deaths are also announced of Dr. G. von Tschermak, emeritus professor of mineralogy and petrography in the University of Vienna, aged ninetyone years, and Dr. Anton Wassmuth, formerly professor of mathematical physics in the University of Graz, aged eighty-two years.

WE learn from Nature that Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, has celebrated the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the birth of the Reverend Stephen Hales, who was born in 1671, died in 1761, and was buried in the south transept of Westminster Abbey. For fifty years Hales was curate of Teddington, and it was there he wrote his "Vegetable Statics" of 1727. A fellow of the Royal Society and a foreign member of the Paris Academy of Sciences, Hales's scientific work took a practical turn, and he was instrumental in improving the ventilation of ships

A MEETING was held recently in the American Museum of Natural History with the object of establishing in New York City an astronomical society for amateurs and was presided over by Dr. Clyde Fisher. Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the museum, made the welcoming address. Other speakers were Dr. Oswald Schlockow, district superintendent of public schools of New York City; Mr. John A. Kingsbury, secretary of the Milbank Memorial Fund, and Mr. George H. Sherwood, director of the museum. Of the audience present, 340 signed applications for membership. Dr. Fisher was elected temporary president.

THE Sigma Zeta chapter of Sigma Pi Sigma National Physics Fraternity was installed at William and Mary College, June 2, with seventeen charter members. Professor H. E. Fulcher, of Davidson College, Davidson, N. C., was in charge of the installation. A banquet was held after the installation and addresses were made by Dr. R. C. Young and others.

THE thirty-second annual conference of the Bunsen Society for Applied Physical Chemistry was held in Dresden, from May 26 to 29, under the presidency of Dr. Mittasch, of Ludwigshafen.

THE fifty-sixth annual meeting of the American Public Health Association will be held at Cincinnati from October 17 to 21, with headquarters at Hotel Gibson. In conjunction with it the Ohio Society of Sanitarians and the Ohio Health Commissioners will hold their annual meetings. Each of the nine sections of the association-laboratory, health officers, vital statistics, public health engineering, industrial hygiene, food and drugs, child hygiene, public health education and public health nursing-will hold individual section meetings. In some instances two or more sections will combine for joint meetings. The topic for discussion at the forum session is "Has Prohibition promoted the Public Health," Professor C.-E. A. Winslow, of Yale University, presiding. One session will be given to the discussion of mental hygiene from the angle of the home, the school and the industrial field. An analysis will be made by a special committee on the health programs in operation in normal schools and colleges and will be supplemented by constructive suggestions. Dr. Herman N. Bundesen, health commissioner of Chicago; Dr. William H. Park, of the New York City Health Department Laboratories; Dr. Clarence E. Smith, of the U. S. Public Health Service, and C. W. Larson, of the U. S. Department of Agriculture, are among the specialists asked to give the most recent developments in the sanitary production and handling of milk. Several luncheon and dinner meetings will be held by sections, in

trial hygiene, food and drugs and public health education. Besides a special session on venereal disease control, a round-table luncheon conference has been scheduled. Trips to points of interest in and around Cincinnati have been arranged by the local committee.

THE Journal of the American Medical Association

reports that under the auspices of the Swiss Goiter Committee, an international conference on goiter will be held in the aula of the university buildings in Berne, Switzerland, on August 24, 25 and 26. The president of the conference, Dr. H. Carrière, will give the opening address on the general distribution of goiter, and among other speakers will be Professor L. Aschoff, Freiburg; Dr. David Marine, New York; Professor de Quervain, Berne; Dr. McCarrison, Cooroon, India; Professor Galli-Valerio, Lausanne, and Professor Wagner von Jauregg, Vienna. The assembly will be welcomed by the officials of the canton and the city of Berne. There will be a demonstration in the surgical clinic by Professor F. de Querin, on August 27, and in the afternoon a trip to the poor farm with a demonstration of cretins. The conference was first planned by the Swiss Goiter Committee in 1923, and had to be postponed until this year.

THE Department of Agriculture will participate in the Arkansas River Flood Conference on July 14 and 15, at Tulsa, Okla. E. A. Sherman, associate forester of the Forest Service; S. H. McCrory, of the division of agricultural engineering of the Bureau of Public Roads, and H. H. Bennett, of the Soil survey, of the Bureau of Chemistry and Soils, will represent the department in connection with phases of flood control which affect agricultural activities. At the conference, phases of flood control, particularly by means of reforestation, control or erosion by terracing, planting of cover crops, and by proper grazing, will be discussed.

THE U. S. Department of Agriculture announces that the new unit known as the Food, Drug and Insecticide Administration became effective on July 1; W. G. Campbell will be in charge. Congress created the Food, Drug and Insecticide Administration recently for the purpose of separating work involving scientific research from the work of law enforcement. The new arrangements involve no change in the policy of enforcement and other acts concerned. The laboratories of the Bureau of Chemistry that are now engaged on food and drug control work will operate under the new unit. Mr. Campbell was a lawyer before joining the department of agriculture about twenty years ago. P. B. Dunbar, Ph.D., the assistant chief of the new unit, entered the service of the Bu

reau of Chemistry in 1907, and since 1925 has been assistant chief.

THE Accademia dei Lincei of Rome, founded in 1603, has received an annual donation of $4,275 from the Rockefeller Institute for the purchase of scientific periodicals.

THE 250,000th Leitz Microscope has recently left the works. It has been a traditional policy to give each 50,000th microscope to an institution or individual responsible for the development of science. These microscopes, which represent milestones in progress, have been presented as follows: The microscope bearing serial No. 50,000 to the German Tuberculosis Sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland; the microscope No. 100,000 to Dr. Robert Koch, in Berlin; the microscope No. 150,000 to Dr. Paul Ehrlich, in Frankfurt; the microscope No. 200,000 to Dr. Martin Heidenhain, in Tübingen; the microscope No. 250,000 to the Institute for Tropical Hygiene, in Hamburg.

SURGEON-GENERAL HUGH S. CUMMING, U. S. Public Health Service, has arranged through the deputy minister of health of the Dominion of Canada for a board of officers of the public health service to visit Montreal to make an intensive survey of the typhoid situation in that city, and to secure the facts as to the source and extent of the outbreak. The board will secure such information as might be needed to enable it to submit recommendations to prevent the spread of typhoid from Montreal into the United States. The officers detailed on the board are Surgeons Leslie L. Lumsden, James P. Leake and Clifford E. Waller, and Sanitary Engineer H. R. Crohurst, all men of experience as sanitarians in the public health service.

THE work of the branch laboratory of the Bureau of Entomology, Department of Agriculture, at Tallulah, La., has been seriously hampered by the Mississippi flood, according to a statement issued by the department. The substance of the announcement follows: A report received from this station says, in effect: "We are very busy salvaging things. Evidently our air field will be under water for a long time yet, possibly a month, but the water has fallen enough so that we are able to start moving out our dusting machinery. . . . All electrical equipment is, of course, ruined, but the remainder of the machinery has not rusted much. Delicate parts are ruined. There are two areas near here which were not overflooded, owing to protection from small private levees, and we think we can soon get started in these areas on our important research work, especially the hopper. One stretch of deep water will probably have to be crossed by boat all summer. All experiments south of Tallulah will have to be reached by boat for a long time, as the highway there is under ten feet of water in some places yet." Another laboratory of

...

the bureau, situated at Baton Rouge, La., is on high ground, not affected by the flood, and none of the experiments in progress there have suffered.

UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL
NOTES

THE cornerstone of the new teaching hospital of the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Medicine, to be built at a cost of $2,000,000, was laid on June 14. In conjunction with the remodeled Polyclinic Hospital buildings, the new plant will completely replace the former Medico-Chirurgical, Polyclinic and Diagnostic Hospital plants, which have become merged as parts of the Graduate School of Medicine.

THE Medical College of Virginia, Richmond, as a residuary legatee, will receive from the Martha Allen Wise estate approximately $130,000 for the care and treatment of patients at the St. Philip Hospital, a large modern colored institution owned and operated by the college for teaching purposes.

THE Eli Lilly and Company of Indianapolis have recently given to the University of Kansas School of Medicine a research fellowship for the special study of hypertension, under the supervision of Dr. Ralph H. Major, head of the department of internal medicine. The fellowship amounts to $1,800 a year and was recently given to Mrs. Vera Johnsmeyer Jones.

THE University of Edinburgh has received a gift of £40,000 from Mr. Thomas Cowan, a shipowner of Leith, to assist in furthering the success of the scheme

for the establishment of a residential house for male students attending the Edinburgh University. Mr. Cowan's previous gifts to the university, amounting to £30,000, are being applied to provide a hall of residence for students, which is to be called Cowan House.

DR. G. CARL HUBER, dean of the Graduate School of the University of Michigan, has been appointed to succeed the late Dean Alfred H. Lloyd.

DR. ELMER A. HOLBROOK, for the past five years dean of the School of Mines and Metallurgy at the Pennsylvania State College, has resigned. Dean Holbrook is to become dean of the combined engineering and mining school at the University of Pittsburgh.

ROLLAND M. STEWART, professor of rural education, has been appointed director of the Agricultural Summer School of Cornell University, to take office after the close of the school this summer, which will be under the direction of Professor George A. Works, who will next year become dean of the Library School of the University of Chicago.

NEW appointments at the Medical College of Virginia, Richmond, include Dr. William B. Porter, professor of medicine; Dr. Sidney S. Negus, professor of

chemistry; Dr. J. C. Forbes, assistant professor of chemistry; Dr. Lewis C. Punch, associate in pathology, and J. G. Jantz, associate in anatomy.

AT Armstrong College, Newcastle, Mr. Clement Heigham has been appointed professor of agriculture, in succession to the late Professor D. A. Gilchrist, and Dr. J. W. Heslop Harrison to be professor of botany, in succession to Professor J. W. Bews, who has resigned.

DISCUSSION

MEAN SEA-LEVEL AS AFFECTED BY

SHORELINE CHANGES

It seems to have been quite generally assumed that carefully made tidal observations, extending over a period sufficiently long to eliminate the disturbing effects of meteorological and astronomical causes, will give a value for mean sea-level which at any given place will remain essentially constant. As mean sealevel determinations afford the only satisfactory basis for detecting slow elevation or subsidence of the continent, the validity of the assumption noted is a matter of no small importance.

A number of years ago the writer became convinced that the mean sea-level surface bordering an irregular shore is itself an irregularly warped surface, and that its elevation changes appreciably with changes in the form of the shoreline. Special studies of this problem are now in progress, and a full discussion will be published at an early date. It is desired here to indicate briefly some of the facts upon which the theory of a fluctuating mean sea-level surface is based. The facts are not novel, but their consequences seem not fully to have been appreciated, especially by those citing records of mean sea-level observations as proof of slow continental subsidence or elevation.

We may begin with the simple and obvious case of a bay connecting with the open sea by a narrow inlet and receiving the waters of inflowing rivers. It is known that under such conditions the influx of river water will raise the mean level of the bay. A striking example of this phenomenon is presented by Kennebecasis Lake or Bay, which receives the waters of the St. John River and connects with the sea at St. John, New Brunswick, by the very narrow tidal channel famous for producing the "reversible falls" -from the sea into the embayment when the tide outside is high; from the embayment back into the ocean when the tide outside is low. According to the Canadian hydrographic authorities, the mean level in the embayment is at least two feet higher than the mean level outside. There can be no doubt that

many such embayments along our coasts have abnormally high mean levels, the excessive elevation generally amounting at most to but a few inches, but in some cases rising as high as a foot or more. What would happen if storm waves, tidal currents, or other agencies widened or deepened the inlets between sea and embayment, or created additional inlets, so that better egress of waters from the embayment to the sea would be insured? Obviously the ponding of the river waters would be less effective, and the mean level of the embayment would fall. Thus would be created, within the embayment, fictitious indications of an uplift of the land. Or suppose that the inlet were gradually narrowed or shallowed through the deposition of débris by wave or tidal currents, so that the escape of the river waters was more and more obstructed. In this case the mean level within the embayment would gradually rise, and one would find there fictitious indications of a gradual subsidence of the coast.

Let us consider next the case of mean sea-level as It is not difficult to understand that if the wind blows constantly in a given direction, the level of a water body over which it blows must be permanently distorted with an abnormally low level toward the windward shore, and an abnormally high level along the lee shore. A land mass separating two water bodies so affected will have distinctly different mean water levels on its two sides. If one of the water bodies be the ocean, and the other a bay or lagoon separated from the ocean by a bar through which a very narrow inlet permits restricted ebb and flow of the waters, the difference in mean levels on the two sides of the bar will persist. If, however, the inlet be widened, or if new inlets be broken through the bar, the water levels will approach equality; and this will result in a fictitious indication of land elevation on one side of the bar, and a fictitious indication of subsidence on the other.

affected by prevailing wind directions.

It can be shown that tidal conditions alone, unaffected by either river inflow or wind direction, will produce local inequalities of mean sea-level which are subject to fluctuations with changes in the form of beaches and inlets. To take a single example, imagine a bay or lagoon separated from the sea by a bar through which a narrow inlet admits the rising ocean so slowly that high tide in the lagoon never rises as high as high tide in the ocean. When the ocean waters fall, the waters in the lagoon will flow back into the ocean, but so slowly that before the lagoon is emptied the ocean waters begin again to rise. Thus low tide in the lagoon is always higher than low tide in the ocean, just as high tide in the lagoon is always lower than high tide in the ocean. Now such tidal