of the Mining Research Laboratory and honorary professor in the University of Birmingham, on the occasion of the annual dinner of the society held on November 19. The medal was first awarded in 1920, to Sir Almroth E. Wright, and again in 1923, to Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins.

THE Council of the Physical Society of London has awarded the fourth Duddell medal for meritorious work on scientific instruments and materials to F. Twyman, F.R.S., managing and technical director of the firm of Adam Hilger.

THE Bavarian Academy of Sciences has elected as corresponding members Professor Harald Bohr, of the Copenhagen Technical Institute, and Professor Niels Bohr, of the University of Copenhagen.

SIR ARTHUR KEITH and Mr. C. R. Peers have been elected honorary members of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society.

SIR JOSEPH THOMSON was entertained at a dinner in his honor held in Cambridge, England, on the occasion of his seventieth birthday on December 18.

A DINNER in honor of Dr. Lightner Witmer, founder of the psychological clinic of the University of Pennsylvania, was held on December 30 at the Hotel Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, marking the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the clinic.

ASSOCIATES and friends gave a dinner in honor of Dr. Francis X. Dercum, for many years professor of nervous diseases of Jefferson Medical College, on December 11. Dr. Dercum celebrated his seventieth birthday last summer.

the Peabody Museum, and Professor George E. Nichols has been appointed director of the Marsh Botanical Garden.

DR. HENRY C. SCHUMACHER has been appointed director of the permanent Cleveland Child Guidance Clinic, which began operation on January 1, when the present Child Guidance Clinic demonstration in Cleveland closed. The position of psychiatrist which he vacates at the All-Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic will be filled by Dr. Harry M. Tiebout, who has been on the staff of the Cleveland Demonstration Clinic.

DR. PAUL M. GIESY, until recently director of the Brooklyn research laboratories of E. R. Squibb and Sons, has resigned to engage in consulting practice, handling chemical and pharmaceutical work, in New York City.

BRIAN MEAD, of the research laboratory of applied chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been appointed to a position on the research staff of the Humble Oil and Refining Company at Baytown, Texas.

EUGENE VAN CLEEF, of the department of geography at the Ohio State University, has been appointed acting chairman for the period from January 1 to October 1, 1927, during which time C. C. Huntington, present chairman, will be on leave.

DR. ALFRED N. RICHARDS, professor of pharmacology at the University of Pennsylvania, has been granted a year's leave of absence to study abroad, and is now at the National Institute for Medical

DR. DAVID FAIRCHILD, of the U. S. Bureau of Plant Industry, left New York on December 9 for Gibraltar. The latter part of December he planned to leave Gibraltar for the west coast of Africa, where he will continue his collection and study of seeds and plants for the bureau.

DR. WILLIAM BEEBE, naturalist and explorer, sailed on December 28 for Haiti, heading the tenth expedition of the department of tropical research of the New York Zoological Society.

To continue his Arctic exploration where he left off last spring, Captain George H. Wilkins plans to leave Seattle for the north on February 12. Two airplanes, The Alaskan and The Detroiter, are stored at Fairbanks.

DR. FREDERICK P. GAY, professor of bacteriology, who is on a year's sabbatical leave, is delivering courses of lectures on the "Fundamental Factors of Immunity in the Communicable Diseases" at the Uni

versities of Brussels, Ghent, Liège and Louvain, as American visiting professor to Belgium under the auspices of the commission for relief of the Belgium Educational Foundation.

ON December 11 Professor E. C. Jeffrey, of the botanical laboratories of Harvard University, delivered an address to the Royal Canadian Institute on the subject "New Lights on Evolution."

DR. ELIOT BLACKWELDER, professor of geology in Stanford University, delivered two lectures at the School of Mines and Metallurgy at Rolla, Mo., on December 16 and 17.

DR. HAVEN EMERSON, of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, presented a report on tuberculosis in Boston at a special meeting of the Boston Health League on December 17. Dr. Emerson recently conducted a study in Boston at the request of the mayor.

DR. ALLEN O. WHIPPLE, professor of surgery in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, addressed the Orleans Parish Medical Society on December 13, giving the first memorial annual lecture established by the society in honor of the late Dr. Stanford E. Chaille, for many years dean of the Tulane University School of Medicine.

DR. ALFRED ADLER, of Vienna, gave a series of three lectures on December 13, 14 and 15 in the Community Auditorium, New York, on "Individual Psychology in Theory and Practice."

DR. ALBERT EINSTEIN, professor of physics at the University of Berlin, recently gave a course of lectures at the University of Leiden.

THE Huxley lecture at the University of Birmingham is to be delivered by Professor Elliot Smith on February 1, 1927.

THE Wilbur Wright memorial lecture of the Royal Aeronautical Society will be given next May by Professor Ludwig Prandtl, of the University of Göttingen.

THE senior class of the medical school at the University of Pennsylvania presented a portrait of the late Dr. Allen J. Smith to the university at a meeting in the medical laboratory on December 17. Dr. Smith was at one time dean of the medical school.

A PAINTING of Walter Reed has been unveiled at the George Washington University Medical School. Walter Reed, known for work in connection with the conquering of yellow fever, was at the time of these discoveries a member of the faculty of the George Washington University Medical School.

LOUIS SIFF, professor of mathematics at Louisville

University, Kentucky, died by suicide on December 25. Professor Siff was fifty-seven years old.

DR. HENRY GUSTAV MAY, professor of bacteriology and chief of the division of animal breeding and pathology of the Rhode Island State College and Experiment Station, died on December 23 in his fortyfirst year.

DR. WILLIAM P. MURRAY, head of the department of ophthalmology, otology and rhinology at the University of Minnesota, died on December 27 from an infection received while performing an operation.

SIR WILLIAM TILDEN, F.R.S., formerly professor of chemistry and dean of the Royal College of Science, London, and emeritus professor in the Imperial College of Science and Technology, South Kensington, died on December 11 at the age of eighty-four years. A JOINT meeting of the Optical Society of America and the American Physical Society will be held at New York in Fayerweather Hall, Columbia University, on Friday and Saturday, February 25 and 26. The sessions of the Optical Society will be held on Friday, those of the Physical Society on Saturday.

IT is announced that the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry will hold its 1927 session at Warsaw beginning on September 18.

THE centenary of the Ludwig-Maximilians University at Munich, which counted among its members Liebig, Pettenkofer and Röntgen, was celebrated last November.

THE Sigma Xi Alumni Association of the University of Pittsburgh held an open public meeting on December 16 when lectures were given by Captain Wm. Mayo Venable, of the Blaw Knox Company, on "The Sensations of Color," and Dr. H. M. Johnson, Simmons Fellowship, Mellon Institute, on "Sleep."

THE communal administration of Blankenberghe, on the coast of Belgium, has recently organized a laboratory for research in marine biology, to be associated with the University of Liège and under the direction of M. Désiré Damas, professor of zoology at the university.

THE Rockefeller Foundation has renewed, for a second period of three years, its appropriation of $40,000 to the National Committee for Mental Hygiene for the training of fellows in extramural psychiatry and psychiatric social work. These fellowships are open to physicians under thirty-five years of age, graduates of a class A medical school, who have had at least one year's training in a mental hospital.

THE Physical-Technical Institute in Leningrad has

opened a high-pressure laboratory, which is the first of its kind in Soviet Russia. It is devoted to the investigation and testing of materials and insulators and the transmission of energy. The necessary transformers have been ordered from Germany.

THE laboratories of the Banting and Best Chair of Medical Research at the University of Toronto have been moved from the medical building to the pathologic department.

THROUGH the interest of Senator James W. Wadsworth, Jr., and the cooperation of Colonel B. D. Foulois, commanding officer, Mitchell Field, State Entomologist E. P. Felt, of the New York State Museum, has arranged for systematic collection over Long Island and adjacent territory at various altitudes, with a specially devised insect trap attached to the wing of an airplane. Preliminary work has resulted in capturing two specimens at an altitude of 3,000 feet, and it is expected that considerable numbers will be found even higher in the air. It is hoped that this investigation may develop facts of importance in controlling injurious pests and explain insect movements in different sections of the world.

ACCORDING to the Journal of the American Medical Association, the American Association for Medical Progress has completed a survey of nearly all medical colleges and research institutions in the United States with regard to inspection by responsible visitors and the care of laboratory animals. It was found that responsible visitors are welcome at all times at these institutions. Some laboratory directors extend special invitations to officers of humane societies in order that they may observe the conditions under which animals are used for experimental purposes. All these institutions have adopted a set of rules governing the use and care of animals, which provides, among other things required, that operations be approved by the laboratory director who alone can make exceptions to the use of anesthetics, and then only when anesthesia would defeat the object of the experiment. Attached to the report of this survey is the set of rules observed by medical schools and research institutions. They require humane treatment of animals, and the return of vagrant animals to their homes when claimed and identified.

THE National Park Service has set aside an area about seven miles square in the high Sierras of Yosemite National Park as a wild life reservation. The fifty square miles are in what is known as the Hudson Arctic Alpine life zone, the elevation ranging from 9,000 to 12,000 feet. Thus far it has not been much visited by man and lies virtually in its natural state, wooded with lodge pole pine and inhabited by snowshoe rabbits, marten, fisher and other kinds of fur bearers that exist in frigid climates. The area

has abundant food and water and has a rich and varied flora.

L. S. LEAKEY, member of the Cutler Dinosaur Expedition to Tanganyika, in a lecture delivered before the Kenya and Uganda Natural History Society at Nairobi on the work of the expedition in the Lindi district said that it was expected that the work would continue for five years in the hope of finding skeletons of the Dinosaur, particularly skulls, in the upper reaches of the ancient river. He announced that he was also making investigation on the Stone Age deposits of Kenya.

A COURSE designed to train professional builders with broad knowledge in both business and engineering fields has been established at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and will start in February. The course was founded by Louis J. Horowitz, president of the Thompson-Starrett Company, of New York, through a grant from the Louis J. and Mary E. Horowitz Foundation. Professor Ross F. Tucker will give the course.

ACCORDING to the British Medical Journal new departments for medical entomology and biochemistry have been added to the research division of the South African Institute for Medical Research at Johannesburg, and the department of bacteriology has been extended by the establishment of a branch for plague research. Field investigations into plague have also been instituted in a camp in the Orange Free State Province. A survey of the mosquito and molluscan carriers of malaria and bilharzia respectively has been commenced. Sir Spencer Lister became director of the institute last August, when Dr. W. Watkins-Pitchford retired through ill health.

THE Journal of the American Medical Association states that the Paris court of appeals recently confirmed the sentence imposed on a man who made shorthand copies of lectures delivered by various professors in the medical faculty and the faculty of pharmacy and offered them for sale to the students. The deans of the two faculties brought the suit against him, but the court required the ten professors themselves to make the definite charge; each was awarded 100 francs damages, the amount asked.

UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL
NOTES

DURING the past year $2,208,000 have been pledged towards the $20,000,000 fund being raised at Princeton University. This brings the total contributions to $4,587,000.

JULIUS GOLDMAN, of the New York banking firm of Goldman, Sachs and Company, has given $10,000 to the Johns Hopkins University for research in geology.

THE University of Tennessee formally dedicated its new anatomy building on December 16. At a dedicatory dinner at the Hotel Peabody in the evening the speakers were Dr. William D. Haggard, Nashville, past president of the American Medical Association, and Dr. William A. Evans, professor of public health, Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago.

DR. E. J. KRAUS, professor of applied botany at the University of Wisconsin, has accepted an appointment at the University of Chicago.

MARIE FARNSWORTH has resigned her position as research chemist for the U. S. Bureau of Mines to accept a position on the staff of the department of chemistry of the Washington Square College of New York University.

H. DARWIN KIRCHMAN, instructor of chemistry at the University of Hawaii, has been appointed instructor in chemistry at the University of California, Southern Branch.

H. MUNRO Fox, fellow of Gonville and Caius, has been appointed to the Mason chair of zoology at the University of Birmingham.

DR. R. R. MARETT has been appointed to the Frazer lectureship in anthropology at the University of Cambridge.

DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE

BOVERI ON CANCER

IN the number of SCIENCE for November 19, 1926, page 499, there is a letter from Professor Maynard M. Metcalf accusing American physicians of gross negligence because they are not acquainted with a paper of Boveri's containing some suggestions on the genesis of cancer. In the Journal of the American Medical Association, April 11, 1925, he printed a similar protest. He complains rather plaintively that two past-presidents of the American Medical Association, thirty professors in medical schools, several prominent surgeons and the head of an important American institution for cancer research have never heard of Boveri's work. This is indeed a sad situation, but one which should not cause too much depression in the zoological world. No one would expect past-presidents of the American Medical Association, able clinicians as they may be, to burden their minds with a theory like Boveri's. They have more important things to think of, and as for surgeons and professors in medical schools, it is far better that they should never have heard of it. It may, however, cheer Professor Metcalf to know that annually more than a thousand medical students who use Delafield and Prudden's "Text-book of Pathology" have found Boveri's theory mentioned-that is, if they read the

text-book at all. And even in Professor Metcalf's own institution, Johns Hopkins, I know of a number of men who have read Boveri's brochure and relegated it to their shelves.

But if Professor Metcalf will again carefully read Boveri's paper, as I have just done, he will see that his master by no means makes the dogmatic statement quoted in the letter to SCIENCE that "studies of double fertilized sea-urchin eggs (have) established the probability that human and other animal cancer is essentially a distortion of the numerical relations of the chromosomes in the cells." Boveri himself says that the essential part of his hypothesis, and he is very careful to stress the fact that it is only hypothesis, is not abnormal mitosis, but a certain "abnormal chromosome composition (Bestand)," which may result from abnormal mitosis, and he acknowledges that it is entirely hypothetical whether, should such pathological chromosomic alterations occur, they could cause unrestricted growth of the cells affected. Boveri also frankly states that it is quite impossible with present methods to demonstrate such conditions in the nucleus as he postulates, and he confesses that he has experimented on the problem but failed to obtain any confirmation of his opinion. In other words, Boveri's hypothesis is one of those completely sterile suggestions which, however interesting they may be philosophically, permit as yet of no direct experimental approach.

I entirely agree with Professor Metcalf's general contention that many of the medical profession, including myself, are exceedingly ignorant of the finer aspects of cytology, but with full realization of the situation I have for twelve years been trying in vain to find a zoologist who would advise us how to attack the cancer problem from Boveri's point of view. All real students of the problem will, I am sure, join me in the hope of light from our zoological colleagues, and if Professor Metcalf's letters stimulate his brethren in that field to help us, they have accomplished a great purpose.

1145 AMSTERDAM AVENUE, NEW YORK

FRANCIS C. WOOD

THE rather categorically academic assertions of Professor Maynard Mayo Metcalf as to our (the American physician) ignorance of Boveri's contribution to the biology and cytology of cancer, prompt a reply. All students of the biologic sciences, including those who happen to be physicians, are no doubt aware of the contribution by Boveri, which appeared some years ago and is largely lost and forgotten in the mass of later contributions to our knowledge (or perhaps lack of knowledge) of cancer. Boveri

called especial attention to the deviations from the normal in the mitotic changes in the cancer tissue cells. But Dr. Metcalf's statement, "Boveri's studies of double fertilized sea-urchin eggs established the probability that human and other animal cancer is essentially a distortion of the numerical relations of the chromosomes in the cell," must not be construed as an opinion by Boveri himself. Boveri merely called attention to the peculiar chromosome figures in cancer tissue, an observation verified by every student of cancer since then. Particularly striking are these figures in the sarcomas of the young.

Anyway, the important thing is, what is the cause of cancer and how may it be controlled or prevented? It is rather deplorable that Professor Metcalf's search, "extending over fifteen years," has not brought to light one American physician who knew of Boveri's researches.

ALBERT SCHNEIDER

NORTH PACIFIC COLLEGE OF OREGON, PORTLAND, OREGON

THE AVOCADO AND VITAMINS

IN a recent pamphlet entitled "Calmin Avocado Orchards," distributed by the Calmin Mortgage Corporation of Fallbrook, California, it is stated, in regard to the avocado (page 15) that "Vitamin C is also found in liberal quantities."

In a series of twelve guinea pigs, of various weights, fed in our laboratory on a diet of avocado mash, oats and water, all the animals but two developed some of the typical lesions of scurvy within twenty-six days. All the animals died toward the end of the third week, or in the fourth week, of the disease, save the two dying at twelve and fifteen days of bronchopneumonia, these two showing no evidence of scurvy. The average daily intake of avocado mash varied between three to six gm. for one hundred gm. of initial body weight. No relation was noted between the amount taken and the severity of the lesions. Four control animals, fed on oats and water, also developed the signs and lesions of scurvy during the third and fourth week, at about the time scurvy usually appears in laboratory animals. Santos (Amer. Jour. Phys., 1922, 59: 310-334) found the avocado, a fruit that is eaten raw, to be relatively high in vitamin B. He also endeavored to determine the vitamin C content, realizing the practical value of this vitamin in foods that are palatable in the raw state, but he was unable to get the guinea pigs to eat the fruit.

DIVISION OF PEDIATRICS, STANFORD MEDICAL SCHOOL, SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

LLOYD B. DICKEY

THE VELOCITY OF GRAVITATION IN SCIENCE for November 26 on page 525 a method is described for measuring the velocity of propagation of gravitational potential. I wish to point out that this method can not give the result desired because the apparent motion of the sun in its diurnal arc is due to the rotation of the earth. The experiment proposes to find the local apparent time of the maximum vertical component of the sun's gravitational attraction as measured on a delicate balance. But since this attraction is a continuous process (as is the emission of radiation from the sun) the maximum vertical component must necessarily occur when the sun is on the meridian, that is, at local apparent noon, whatever the velocity of gravitation may be.

Although the speed of light is finite, the real sun is of course directly on the meridian when we see it there, and would be there no matter what the speed of light might be.

"METABOLOGY"

CARL T. CHASE

DR. MAX KAHN has added three words to the vocabulary of metabolism which have since been incorporated in the standard medical dictionaries. They are: "eubolism," "dysbolism," "pathobolism” (SCIENCE, June 20, 1922).

The growth and study of metabolism has progressed so much that I believe the vocabulary can be increased by the addition of the term "metabology," or the study of metabolic processes in the organism. This word does not appear in current medical dictionaries.

MORRIS H. KAHN

SCIENTIFIC BOOKS

Aeronautical Meteorology. By WILLIS RAY GREGG, A.B., meteorologist, U. S. Weather Bureau, fellow American Meteorological Society, fellow Royal Meteorological Society, Ronald Aeronautic Library, C. de F. Chandler, Editor. The Ronald Press, New York, 144 pages, XI plates, 33 figures. Price, $2.50.

THE editor of this library series remarks that we need progressive literature of aerial navigation, technical information for designers, engineers, pilots and the growing army of students. This is all true, but at the present time much more is written about the machine than about the medium in which the machine is to function; that is to say, study of the air itself is subordinated to study of the airplane. Perhaps this is proper; but the reviewer for one is glad to