PROFESSOR G. ELLIOT SMITH, professor of anatomy in the University of London, delivered the Huxley lecture at Birmingham University on February 1 on "Science and Culture."

DR. J. S. HALDANE is giving in the University of Glasgow a course of ten Gifford lectures on "The Sciences and Philosophy."

WITH the opening of the fall semester at Hartford Seminary Foundation, Connecticut, James Y. Simpson, professor of biology at New College, Edinburgh, will give twenty lectures on the "Relation of Religion

and Science."

PROFESSOR S. C. LIND, dean of the school of chemistry at the University of Minnesota, gave the principal address at the dedication of the new chemistry building at the University of Colorado on February 19. Dr. Lind spoke on the "Progress of Chemistry in the First Quarter of the Twentieth Century."

AT the regular monthly dinner of the biologists of Tucson, Arizona, on February 4, Dr. D. T. MacDougal, of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, discussed the rôle of green leaves in the synthesis of organic products necessary to man. Thirty-three biologists, including several winter visitors, were in attendance.

PROFESSOR CHARLES P. BERKEY, of Columbia University, is lecturing at Mount Holyoke College on the evening of February 25 on certain phases of the geological work of the Third Asiatic Expedition.

ON February 5, Dr. E. G. Martin, professor of physiology at Stanford University, delivered an address to the Royal Canadian Institute, on "Fatigue and Rest."

DR. GUSTAVE M. HORTSMAN, head of the department of chemistry and assistant dean of the College of Pharmacy at Fordham University, died on February 15, aged sixty-eight years.

Dr. Llewellyn GARNET NOEL, professor of dental pathology in the Vanderbilt University School of Dentistry until its suspension in 1926, died on January 20, aged seventy-five years.

JOSEPH JACKSON LISTER, F.R.S., of Cambridge, England, known for his work on the Foraminifera, died on January 30, at the age of sixty-nine years.

SIR GEORGE GREENHILL, mathematician, well known for his work in aeronautics and gunnery, died on February 17.

LEOPOLD SPIEGEL, professor of chemistry in the

years.

DR. OTTO WIENER, professor of physics at the University of Leipzig, has died, aged sixty-five years.

INFORMATION has been received of the death of Professor Charles Marquis Smith, associate professor of physics at Purdue University, which occurred last July at the age of fifty-four years. Professor Smith had just completed twenty-five years in the department of physics. He was a former pupil of Dr. Röntgen in the University of Munich. At the time of his death he was president of the local branch of Sigma Xi and treasurer of the Indiana Academy of Science. In 1918 he was called to Washington as one of a committee to develop a course in radio for government use.

A PERPETUAL memorial was inaugurated in December in memory of Dr. Stanford Emerson Chaille, for many years dean and professor of surgery in the medical department of Tulane University. This me morial will be in the form of addresses, to be delivered by prominent surgeons and physicians, which will be published and deposited in an alcove to be dedicated to this purpose. The inaugural address was delivered on December 13, by Dr. Allen O. Whipple, professor of surgery at Columbia University and chief surgeon of the Presbyterian Hospital at New York City.

Nature states that a committee has recently been formed in Paris to raise funds for the erection of a monument to the memory of the famous French engineer, Gustave Alexandre Eiffel, the builder of the Eiffel Tower. Born in Dijon on December 15, 1832, Eiffel was trained as a civil engineer at the École Centrale des Arts et Métiers in Paris and became known as a great bridge builder. The contract for the tower which formed such a feature of the International Exposition of 1889 was signed in January, 1887, and the full height was reached on March 13, 1889. The steel lattice work reaches a height of 984 feet. Eiffel died on December 28, 1923, at the age of ninety-one years.

The Christian Science Monitor states that the first centenary of the passing of Alessandro Volta, who was one of the great pioneers in electrical science, will be commemorated by an exhibition to be held at the beginning of May in the Villa dell'Olmo. This villa is one of the finest on Lake Como. The exhibition will be presided over by Senator Guglielmo Marconi, and during the time the exhibition remains open an international electrical congress will sit at Como. It will be divided into three main sections, the first being devoted to a show of electric communications, illus

trating the great progress made in the world of natural science during the last hundred years; the second will contain a national exposition of electrical industries, and the third will consist in a national exposition of the silk industry.

THE United States Civil Service Commission an

nounces the open competitive examinations for agricultural engineer at a salary of $3,800, associate agricultural engineer at a salary of $3,000 and assistant agricultural engineer at a salary of $2,400, applications for which must be on file with the Civil Service Commission at Washington, D. C., not later than March 22. The examinations are to fill vacancies in the Bureau of Public Roads, Department of Agriculture, for duty in Washington, D. C., or in the field, and in positions requiring similar qualifications.

THE Ohio Phytopathological Society held its third annual meeting at Columbus during farmers' week. Several of the members gave plant disease talks before the various sections of the farmer's week program. Seventeen were present at the banquet held at the Neil House on the evening of February 3. Dr. H. H. Whetzel, of Cornell University, was the guest of honor and gave an address on the future of plant pathology. At the business meeting the plans for the summer meeting of the American Phytopathological Society to be held in Ohio during the coming summer were discussed. Dr. H. C. Young and Curtis May, of the Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station, succeed Dr. W. G. Stover and Sherman Humphreys, of Ohio State University, as president and secretary of the society.

THE American College of Physicians held its eleventh annual clinical session in Cleveland, Ohio, from February 21 to 25, under the presidency of Dr. Alfred Stengel, of Philadelphia.

IT has been decided to hold the next International Mathematical Congress at Bologna, in 1928.

DR. F. S. ARCHENHOLD, director of the Treptow Observatory, Berlin, has announced that the proximity of Mars to the earth has induced the arrangement of a special exhibition at the observatory. It is desired that any material relating to Mars such as old and new drawings, maps, books, etc., be sent for exhibition addressed Treptow-Sternwarte, Berlin-Treptow.

THE late Dr. Charles D. Walcott, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, left an estate valued at more than $160,000, of which $50,000 is provided for the Smithsonian Institution, conditioned on it remaining independent of any executive branch or department of the government.

MORE than half the amount which the New York Botanical Garden is seeking as an endowment, chiefly for the purpose of building a laboratory for experimental research with plants, has been contributed, according to an announcement made by Dr. Frederic S. Lee, president of the board of managers of the garden. John D. Rockefeller, Jr., has pledged $500,000 and Edward S. Harkness has given $300,000. Additional donations which bring the total amount received so far to $1,019,000 have been made by George F. Baker, Mrs. Andrew Carnegie, Robert W. de Forest, Dr. and Mrs. N. L. Britton, Daniel Guggenheim, Mortimer L. Schiff, Mrs. Arthur H. Scribner, Felix M. Warburg, Dr. and Mrs. Lee and others.

GIFTS totaling more than $50,000 were received during the first three weeks in February by the American Society for the Control of Cancer. The amount needed to make R. Fulton Cutting's conditional gift of $250,000 available is now reduced to $260,266.

THE President in a recent letter to Congress asked for a supplementary appropriation for the legislative establishment, United States Botanic Garden, of $876,390. The sum is needed, it was stated in the letter, for the construction of the necessary buildings required for the enlarging and relocating of the botanic garden.

ACCORDING to Popular Astronomy, the construction of a 24-inch reflecting telescope for the University of Kansas has recently been begun. Mr. William Pitt, of Kansas City, Missouri, an amateur astronomer, will grind and figure the mirror and will build the driving clock. Mr. Pitt, who is an expert machinist, is donating his services for this purpose. Pyrex will be used in order to minimize temperature effects. It is estimated that the telescope will be ready for use in about two years. It is planned to use the instrument for determining positions of asteroids.

THE Associated Sportsmen's Clubs, of California, is leading a campaign throughout western and Pacific coast states for a fund of $10,000 to be used by the U. S. Biological Survey in defraying the expense of a preliminary survey looking toward the reflooding of Lower Klamath in California, Malheur Lake in Oregon and Bear River Marshes in Utah. Dr. E. W. Nelson, chief of the Biological Survey, has stated that, with this survey completed, the work of reflooding the areas mentioned might be accomplished at a moderate expense and dried up marshes converted from death traps into healthy resorts for birds.

ACCORDING to the Experiment Station Record a new wing is being added to the building of the School of Agriculture of Cambridge University, replacing a range of army huts set up in 1919. The new wing

contains a basement, three stories, and storage space in the attic, and measures 26 by 80 feet. The basement will contain three rooms, of which one is to be used for the nutrition calorimeters and another for metabolism experiments. On the first floor is a lecture room and other facilities for the work in estate management and on the second floor quarters for the farm economics staff and a library. The top floor will be devoted mainly to plant breeding, horticulture and tropical agriculture. The building is expected to be completed by April, 1927.

WISCONSIN's first national forest will be established soon if the National Forest Reservation Commission gives its approval to U. S. Forest Service plans already approved by the State of Wisconsin. Governor Zimmerman, jointly with the Wisconsin land commission and the commissioner of conservation, has approved the proposal under the terms of an enabling act passed by the 1925 state legislature which extended permission to the federal government to acquire not more than 100,000 acres for the establishment of a national forest in Wisconsin. The purchase of the full 100,000 acres is contemplated in present federal Forest Service arrangements.

AN exhibition of some of the results of research recently carried out in adhesives (glues and sticking substances) and their application has been arranged at the Science Museum, South Kensington, by the adhesives research committee of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. This committee was established by the department in 1919 to continue the work of the adhesives research committee of the Conjoint Board of Scientific Societies which was set up towards the end of the war to conduct research on adhesives with the aid of a grant from the ministry of munitions, The exhibition was opened to the public on December 18, and will remain open for some months.

ACCORDING to press dispatches, the financial commission of the League of Nations assembly has decided to allot 30,000 gold franes for technical studies to be devoted especially to an investigation by a specialist of malaria and infant mortality and the creation of a system of medical statistics. The league is desirous of interesting Latin-American countries in technical activities, seeking to demonstrate that it can be useful to states who have few if any political problems to submit to Geneva.

UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL

NOTES

COMPLETION of the fund of $250,000 for the erection of a biological laboratory as a memorial to the

late President W. Arnold Shanklin and tentative plans for the building have been announced by Dr. James Lukens McConaughy, president of Wesleyan University.

NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY has received a bequest of $100,000 by the will of the late Charles Deering, machinery manufacturer, of Florida.

THE faculty of the college of applied science of Syracuse University has voted to abolish the degrees of civil engineer, electrical engineer and mechanical engineer, and will hereafter award degrees of bachelor of science in the fields of civil, electrical and mechanical engineering.

DR. WILLIAM H. EYSTER, professor of botany at the University of Maine, has been appointed to the chair in botany at Bucknell University to take effect next year.

PROFESSOR W. L. HART has been appointed chairman of the department of mathematics at the University of Minnesota to succeed Professor W. H. Bussey, who resigned the chairmanship so that he might devote more time to his duties as assistant dean and as editor-in-chief of the American Mathematical Monthly.

H. J. WING has resigned his position as assistant professor of chemistry at Doane College to become assistant professor of chemistry at State College, Brookings, S. D.

THE University of Pittsburgh announces that the following engineers of the Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company have received part-time appointments as Westinghouse lecturers: Director of courses, C. S. Coler; electrical engineering, J. F. Calvert, A. M. Dudley, W. C. Goodwin, Q. Graham, R. E. Hellmund, C. W. Kincaid, C. M. Laffoon, C. Lynn, J. F. Peters and J. Slepian; mechanical engineering, G. W. Penney, R. Soderberg and S. Timoshenko; physics, T. Spooner; physical metallurgy, O. W. Ellis; engineering mathematics, G. B. Karelitz.

DR. ALBERT SALATHE will go to Syracuse University in February from the Centenary College of Louisiana to become associate professor in the department of chemical engineering, college of applied science.

SIRÔZI HATTAS, formerly with the Mitsubishi Research Laboratory, Tokyo, Japan, is now assistant professor of chemical engineering, Tohoku Imperial University, Sendai, Japan.

PROFESSOR WILHELM TRENDELENBURG, professor of physiology at Halle, has been made rector of the university.

All three kinds of filters (Maassen, Pukall and Chamberland) contain pores large enough to allow the passage of gold particles of about 30 μu and less. The pores of a cell are of very different sizes, the Chamberland cell containing, for example, large pores, which allow the gold particles to pass through, and others which retain most of them. The size of the pores is, however, not the sole criterion in filter experiments. It is of especial importance in coarse filters, whether the particles to be filtered are held to the surface of the cell by adhesion or adsorption" (A), or not (B).

(A) In the first instance the substance to be filtered gathers upon the outside surface (and to a certain extent in the deeper pores), and prevents the other particles from forcing their way through; first, because the pores are made smaller; second, because the particles held fast to the surface of the cell repel the freely moving particles following the course of the current.1

(B) When adhesion or adsorption does not take place, all colloidally dissolved substances pass freely through the cell, providing the pores are large enough.

In the presence of a protective colloid, e.g., egg albumen, all the gold particles pass smoothly through, whereas in the absence of protectors, matters proceed as in case (A). The fact that protected gold particles of 30 μu and over easily pass through Maassen and Pukall filters should be of interest to bacteriologists. The Chamberland filter, too, contains, besides the very small pores chiefly present, others which permit the passage of particles of the size mentioned.

Another point of great importance to bacteriologists has been emphasized by Professor H. Bechhold, who found that lecithin emulsions whose droplets were several in diameter passed through ultrafilters capable of retaining hemoglobin, and whose pores were less than 30 μ (pressure 150 g./cm2). Bechhold explains that the droplets assume a filiform shape in their passage, reforming on their exit.2

1 This action may be due to the well-known negative electric charge of the particles, which apparently also affects the adhering gold particles.

Bechhold says in the latter reference, p. 832:

Therefore the diameter of the pores of the ultrafilter gives no definite idea of the diameter of a retained particle as far as emulsions are concerned, whose disperse phase has a low surface tension against the dispersing phase.

Since the work of Heilbronn, Chambers, Seifriz and others shows the great changes in viscosity which organisms exhibit during mitosis, and since changes in the milieu may produce similar changes, we must observe many precautions before hazarding an opinion about size deduced from filtration experiments. Alteration of the pH of the milieu may modify the charges of particle and of filter, and even reverse them. Salt ratios and antagonism must be considered, as well as anything leading to formation of surface films. And these or other factors may influence the viscosity of protoplasm. Professor H. Schade illustrates a phagocyte passing in filiform fashion through an orifice very much less than its average diameter, and appearing in its usual guise after it emerges on the other side of the membrane. JEROME ALEXANDER

NEW YORK, N. Y.

PUBLICATION BY PHOTOGRAPHY IN SCIENCE for December 31, Professor Albrecht discusses the use of photographic reproductions of typewriting in scientific publication, and mentions the difficulty of the irregular spreading of ink on the typewritten sheet. Some years ago I had occasion to publish (American Journal of Psychology, 29, 1918, p. 120) a 4-page psychophysical table and, wishing to obtain a clear reproduction and yet to avoid the expense of having so extensive a table set up in type, resorted to the following method which may be of interest in this connection:

The ribbon was temporarily removed from the typewriter, or set as for stencil cutting. The sheet of paper upon which the table was to be typed was covered with a sheet of carbon paper and placed in the machine. As the typing proceeded each key impinged directly upon the back of the carbon paper and made an impression from the latter on the white paper. The result was a remarkably clear reproduction, which photographed well with about 2:3 reduction and which is quite legible in the final printed form. This method is somewhat more difficult than typewriting with a ribbon, as the typist can not see what she is writing. All errors were corrected by pasting over the mistake a piece of paper with the correct figures. A new sheet of carbon paper must, of course, be used for every page. The increased

clarity of reproduction by this method, however, seems worth the extra time and effort involved. GILBERT J. RICH

INSTITUTE FOR JUVENILE RESEARCH,
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

IN SCIENCE for December 31, Professor Sebastian Albrecht, of Dudley University, Albany, calls attention to the callitypic reproduction of tables in Volumes IV and V of the Transactions of the Astronomical Observatory of Yale University. Some years ago during a strike of printers in the east, a number of publications depended entirely upon the typewriter and photoengraver for the preparation of their matter.

Professor Albrecht makes reference to irregularity of impressions. The electric typewriter obviates this phase, as the several models now on the market do not depend upon the touch of the fingers for impact with the paper, but have a uniform stroke, and the intensity of the impression can be regulated.

The communication refers to typing with an ordinary typewriter ribbon. During the newspaper strike in the east when copy was prepared for zinc etchings, the publishers used carbon paper made up in narrow strips the same width as the standard typewriter ribbon for the machines used, and substituted these for the ribbon. In this way a sharp impression was secured-cleaner than the impression of the type through an inked ribbon.

OTTO KNEY

THE FRENCH SOCIETY FOR

BIOGEOGRAPHY

AT the time when the Société de Biogéographie enters into the fourth year of its existence, we draw the attention to this association which includes naturalists on all specialties: botanists, biologists, ethnologists, geologists and zoologists whose aim is to study in common the distribution of all beings over the surface of the globe, to specify the conditions of such distribution and to investigate into the determination of consequences of the formation of the flora and fauna both living and fossil.

The society holds every month a sitting, the order of the day of which having been settled beforehand affords useful and interesting discussions on the different subjects in hand. Besides it institutes at fixed intervals deep investigations on a subject selected among those which most deservedly engross the minds of biogeographers and whose solutions require the concourse of all the disciplines represented; thus it is that thanks to the initiative of the society, a series of memoirs bound in a volume of 250 pages has lately been devoted to the "Histoire du Peuplement de la Corse" and that it is preparing just now a new volume on "Le Peuplement des Montagnes."

THE JOURNAL OF GENERAL PHYSIOLOGY THE relation of publication to the advance of science is not open to debate, and because of the rôle which publication plays scientists are concerned in having available a suitable outlet in which to report their work, whether this be in a journal owned by a society, by an individual or endowed. Where but one journal exists in a special field of science, it becomes much more important that its editorial policies be such as to encourage the submission of the best work and that those responsible for its conduct obtain and hold the respect of workers in that field.

The Journal of General Physiology occupies a unique position, in that it offers the only outlet in America for papers in this field, and in the last analysis its policies are determined by a group virtually independent in many respects. Many engaged in research in general physiology feel that as now managed the Journal is not serving the science adequately. The usual courtesies of correspondence are frequently neglected, the receipt of manuscript is not promptly acknowledged, it is customary to print dates of acceptance rather than dates of receipt of manuscript, thereby depriving authors of some weeks or months of priority for new work, and in one case on record not only did the Journal decline to reply to any letters of inquiry concerning a manuscript but without having indicated whether or not it was acceptable, declined to return it until it was demanded by a legal representative. While this is an extreme case, the experience of several would indicate that if the Journal of General Physiology is to perform its functions properly, the procedures of its board should be revised, and steps taken to establish and maintain the editorial ethics which in general are accepted in the offices of scientific publications.

This matter is brought to the attention of physiologists generally as a constructive criticism and with a view ultimately to draft suggestions which it is believed those responsible for the Journal of General Physiology will duly consider because of their established interest in the science.

MATILDA MOLDENHAUER BROOKS

WASHINGTON, D. C.

The account given by Dr. M. M. Brooks of her unfortunate experience with a paper sent to me for the Journal of General Physiology is in its main fea