SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS

THE meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and associated societies held at Kansas City, Mo., from December 28 to January 2, with a registration of about 1,900, was notable both for its scientific programs and for the addresses presented at the general sessions. A full report of the meeting, prepared by the permanent secretary, will be contained in a special number of SCIENCE to be issued on January 29.

THE third annual thousand dollar prize of the American Association for the Advancement of Science has been awarded to Dr. Dayton C. Miller, professor of physics at the Case School of Applied Science, for his address on "The Michelson-Morley Ether Drift Experiment," being the presidential address before the American Physical Society, presented at a joint meeting with the American Association, Kansas City, on December 29.

DR. LIBERTY HYDE BAILEY, elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at the Kansas City meeting, was also elected president of the Botanical Society of America.

DR. HARVEY CARR, professor of psychology in the University of Chicago, was elected president of the American Psychological Association at the recent meeting held at Ithaca, N. Y.

DR. JOSEPH ERLANGER, professor of physiology in the medical school of Washington University, has been elected president of the American Physiological Society and Dr. Alexander Forbes, associate professor of physiology in the Harvard Medical School, treasurer. Dr. Walter J. Meek, professor of physiology in the University of Wisconsin, was reelected secretary.

WILLIAM L. ABBOTT, chief engineer of the Chicago Edison Company, was elected president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers at the recent meeting in New York City.

THE next Lane medical lecturer at Stanford University will be Dr. R. Magnus, professor of pharmacology at the University of Utrecht, Holland, who will probably deliver his lectures in December, 1927.

PROFESSOR MARSTON T. BOGERT, of the department of chemistry at Columbia University, has been elected chairman of the section of chemistry of the National Academy of Sciences for the period 1926-29 in succession to Professor Wilder D. Bancroft, of Cornell University.

DR. EDWARD C. ROSENOW, of the Mayo Clinic, Rochester, has been awarded the Callahan gold medal for 1925 by the Ohio State Dental Society for "outstanding contributions to medical, bacteriologic and dental education."

JOHN I. CRABTREE, head of the photographic department of the Kodak Research Laboratories, and Merle L. Dundon, one of his associates, have been awarded bronze medals by the French Photographic Society, in recognition of their work on the determination of the kinds of fog produced on sensitive photographic material.

THE prize of the Marcel Benoist endowment, Zurich, has been awarded this year to Professor H. Zangger, director of the medicolegal institute, Zurich, for his recently published work on "Poisonings."

DR. LOUIS JACQUES SIMON, professor of organic chemistry at the Museum of Natural History, Paris, has been made an officer of the Legion of Honor by the French government.

R. B. MITCHELL, the Glasgow city electrical engi

neer, has been invited, as president of the I. M. E. A., to attend a conference of the International Electrotechnical Commission in New York next April, and the electricity committee has recommended that this visit be authorized by the city council and that Mr. Mitchell's expenses be defrayed.

DR. PAUL B. DUNBAR, of Maryland, has been appointed as an additional assistant chief of the Bureau of Chemistry of the U. S. Department of Agriculture. Dr. Dunbar will have general supervision of administrative matters relating to the enforcement of the federal food and drugs act, the tea inspection act and the naval stores act.

RAY V. MURPHY, formerly instructor in physical chemistry at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh, has resigned to take a position with the Western Electric Company, Chicago, as a member of the staff of the Switchboard Lamp Laboratory.

DR. S. C. HARLAND, professor of botany at the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture, Trinidad, has arrived in London from a trip to Panama, California, Honolulu, Japan, the Philippine Islands, Malay, Burma and Ceylon, where he has been investigating the possibilities of finding banana plants immune to Panama disease and limes not susceptible to withertip. PROFESSOR ALDO CASTELLANI, of the London School of Tropical Medicine, arrived in New York on December 31, en route to New Orleans to take up his duties as professor and head of the department of tropical diseases at the Tulane University of Louisiana School of Medicine.

DR. SIDNEY F. BLAKE, of the United States Bureau of Plant Industry, returned in November from abroad, where he had been examining types of South American compositae at the principal European herbaria.

DR. ALBERT P. MATHEWS, professor of biochemistry at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, is in England on sabbatical leave, working with Professor Edward C. Baly, of the department of physical chemistry, and with Professor Ramsden, of the department of physiology at the University of Liverpool.

DR. WILLIAM T. BOVIE, assistant professor of biophysics at Harvard University, will give a series of eight lectures under the auspices of the Lowell Institute during the month of January in Huntington Hall, Boston, on "The Influence of Light on Living Organisms."

DR. JOHN C. MERRIAM, president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, will give a lecture before the Columbia University Chapter of Sigma Xi, on January 14, at 8:15 in Schermerhorn Hall. His subject will be "Cave Exploration in California and its Bearing upon Problems of Pleistocene History."

DR. GEORGE E. VINCENT, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, New York, will deliver an address at the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Medical Library, on January 19.

PROFESSOR CHAS. H. RICHARDSON, professor of mineralogy at Syracuse University, gave a lecture at the Missouri School of Mines on December 18 on the subject of "Science and Religion."

DR. HOMER L. DODGE, of the University of Oklahoma, retiring president of the Oklahoma Academy of Science, gave an address on "Research as a State Policy" at the annual dinner of the academy on November 27.

PROFESSOR WILLIAM OTIS CROSBY, professor emeritus of geology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, died on December 31, aged seventy-six years.

PROFESSOR ALBERT CHAUNCEY EYCLESHYMER, professor of anatomy and dean of the college of medicine at the University of Illinois, died from a bullet wound on December 30. Dr. Eycleshymer was fiftyeight years of age.

DR. WILLIAM S. FOSTER, professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, died on January 2, aged thirty-seven years.

FILIBERT ROTH, emeritus professor of forestry at the University of Michigan, died on December 4 at the age of sixty-seven years.

DR. JOHAN AUGUST BRINELL, Bessemer medallist in 1907 of the Iron and Steel Institute, whose name is associated with the hardness testing of materials, died on November 17, aged seventy-six years.

PROFESSOR JOSEPH BROUGH, formerly professor of mental and moral science at the University College of Wales, died on December 7, aged seventy-three years.

SIR JERVOISE A. BAINES, an authority on Indian ethnography, died recently at the age of seventy-nine

years.

DR. ERNST H. EHLERS, professor of zoology in the University of Göttingen, died on January 2 at the age of ninety years.

THE Committee on scientific research of the American Medical Association invites applications for grants in aid of research on problems of interest to clinical medicine. Applications should reach the committee before February 15, 1926, and may be addressed to 535 N. Dearborn St., Chicago.

THE Japanese Association for the Advancement of Science was formed in April, 1925. The first annual meeting was held from October 30 to November 2 in Tokyo under the presidency of Dr. Kozai, president of Tokyo Imperial University. The next meeting will be in Kyoto.

A SERIES of radio talks on Chemistry and Human Progress" will be broadcast Wednesday evenings at 8:15 P. M. (Eastern standard time) from the University of Pittsburgh studio of the Westinghouse Station KDKA as follows: January 6, "Chemistry Advancing Civilization," Alexander Silverman; January 13, "Maintaining a Safe Milk Supply," Chas. Glenn King; January 20, "From Atmosphere to Soil," Kendall S. Tesh; January 27, "Dyes as a Civilizing Factor," Alexander Lowy; February 3, "Explosives and Human Progress," Gebhard Stegeman; February 10, "Speeding up that Process," Carl J. Engelder; February 17, "Where will Chemistry lead us ?" Alexander Silverman.

THE following papers were read before the Astronomy and Physics Club of Pasadena during the fall: "An Application of the Quantum Theory to the Emission of Light by Diffuse Nebulae," Dr. H. Zanstra; "The Gravitational Displacement of the Lines in the Spectrum of the Companion of Sirius," Dr. W. S. Adams; "Report on the Southampton Meeting of the British Association," Dr. H. Bateman; "Metastable Helium," Dr. C. Eckart; "Penetrating Radiation," R. A. Millikan and G. H. Cameron; "Slow Electrons in Gases," Dr. F. Zwicky; "Coronal Radiation," Dr. Edison Pettit; "A New Mass Spectrograph," Dr. W. R. Smythe; "Conduction and Evaporation Losses from Lakes," I. S. Bowen and N. W. Cummings; "Astronomical Evidence on Gravitational Displacement of Spectral Lines," Dr. C. E. St. John.

PROFESSOR DAVID EUGENE SMITH, of the department of mathematics at Teachers College, Columbia University, exhibited his collection of documents and objects relating to the history of mathematics at the meeting of the American Mathematical Society, which opened in New York City on January 1. There are 40,000 rare books, manuscripts, letters, portraits and instruments in the collection. Dr. Smith explained his collection at the afternoon session and told of receiving Omar's book from a Persian of Northern India. It is said to be the only copy remaining in a private collection. The text is in the Persian writing of the poet-scientist. Another interesting work in the collection is one of the two copies in the United States of the book of Al-Khowarizim, a Persian, who used the word algebra for the first time. There are also 3,000 portraits of mathematicians, said to be the largest number in one collection.

EMIL KAEMPFER, accompanied by his wife, sailed this week for Para, Brazil, where they will start on an expedition into the coastal regions to collect seabirds and other forms of life and then proceed to the remote sections of the country to collect specimens of bird and animal life for the American Museum of

Natural History. From the seacoast Mr. and Mrs. Kaempfer will travel by mule pack train to Nova York on the Parnahyba River, a district which has not been entered by collectors for fifteen years. Their final explorations will be made in the State of Bahia.

Ir is reported that the Detroit Arctic expedition will leave Detroit on January 20, for Point Barrow, Alaska. From there the explorers will make an attempt to reach the north pole by airplane, taking off about March 21. Captain George H. Wilkins, leader of the expedition, and Dr. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Arctic explorer, were in Detroit on January 2, to attend a dinner given in their honor by the Detroit Aviation Society.

A MUSEUM of natural history with branches of art, zoology and botany has been established at Roanoke, called the Virginia Museum of Natural History, Inc. The incorporators are M. A. Johnson, president; W. Ryland Martin, secretary; T. M. Nunn and E. A. Buchanan, all of Roanoke.

THE Journal of the American Medical Association states that at the instance of Dr. Tsuji, of the Kyoto Imperial University College of Medicine, Japan, a Society of Endocrinology was organized for the first time in Japan. The society placed a journal in circulation as its organ, of which the first number was issued recently. It will hereafter be issued every other month.

STANFORD UNIVERSITY has received a donation of

$4,000 from Mr. Roy N. Bishop, of San Francisco, in support of research work on diseases of the kidneys that is being carried on by Dr. T. Addis, and $5,000 from Mrs. Dorothy Fries Lilienthal, to establish a scholarship in memory of her mother, Florence Hecht Fries, to be known as the "Florence Hecht Fries Scholarship in Medicine."

DR. WILLIAM GATES, director of the department of middle American research at Tulane University, has given to the university $50,000 to be used in the furtherance of Central American research, not alone from an archeological standpoint, but relative to the study and development of tropical botany, agronomy, forestry, climatology and tropical medicine. It is hoped that further sums may be contributed towards the fund. An official invitation has been extended the department of middle American research of the university by the government of the Republic of Guatemala to establish an agricultural research station in Guatemala and to cooperate with that country in the development of its resources by an exchange of exports between New Orleans and the Central American country.

UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL

NOTES

YALE UNIVERSITY will receive $600,000 and the Sheffield Scientific School $300,000 under the will of George St. John Sheffield, of Providence.

A GIFT of $250,000 for the erection of a medical clinic building at the University of Pennsylvania has been made by Martin Maloney, of Philadelphia.

BOWDOIN COLLEGE receives $250,000 by the will of the late Frank A. Munsey, of New York.

CORNELL UNIVERSITY has received a gift of $50,000 from the Robert Boyd Ward Fund, Inc., of New York City. Income from the gift is to be available to the president for meeting emergency needs not provided for in the university's annual budget, such as the purchase of scientific apparatus or supplies, publication of the results of research in the university and lectures in the advancement of science.

THE Massachusetts Institute of Technology will receive $25,000 for "its general uses and purposes" under the will of Kenneth F. Wood.

A NEW Course surveying the whole field of science has been organized at the University of New Hampshire by the cooperation of nine departments, representing all the natural sciences and mathematics, and will be offered to freshmen beginning with the winter term. The aims of the course are to give the freshmen a unified view of the whole field of science, showing the interrelations of the several physical sciences, to survey briefly each main division, and to familiarize students with scientific methods.

THE teaching in public health and preventive medicine at Stanford University has been completely reorganized and Professor E. C. Dickson, of the department of medicine, has been placed in charge as acting executive.

FRANCIS L. WHITNEY has been made professor of geology and paleontology at the University of Texas, having been promoted from the rank of associate professor.

DR. WILLIAM E. BROWN has been appointed assistant professor of preventive medicine at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.

A. M. ALVARADO, formerly professor of chemistry at the Waukon Junior College, Waukon, Iowa, has been appointed associate professor of chemistry at Loyola University, New Orleans, La.

DR. EDWARD TAYLOR JONES, professor of physics in the University College of North Wales, has been

appointed to the chair of natural philosophy at the University of Glasgow, in succession to Professor Andrew Gray.

AT the University of Liverpool, Dr. T. P. Hilditch has been appointed to the Campbell Brown chair of industrial chemistry and Professor S. H. Gager, of the University of Edinburgh, has been appointed to the William Prescott chair of the care of animals with special reference to the causation and prevention of disease.

DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE MILLIKAN RAYS AND THE ACCELERATION OF RADIOACTIVE CHANGE

SOME weeks ago (Nature, September 12, 1925), A. Gaschler reported that he had succeeded in accelerating the change of uranium to uranium X by submitting uranium oxide to "strong rushes of momentary high-tension currents." One may suppose that, in any group of uranium atoms, the nuclei of a certain number reach a state of unstability in each unit of time, and that these decompose. But, at the same time, other nuclei may closely approach the verge of unstability, and these also may be caused to decompose under the influence of a sufficient disturbing force from outside. For this reason, the idea of artificial transmutation of uranium is usually entertained more favorably than that of the transmutation of mercury to gold; although, it may be added, mercury atoms, while never crossing the verge of unstability of themselves, may, in like manner to uranium atoms, closely approach it. In either case, the force from outside must apparently be greater than such as would operate a hair trigger effect. The trigger has a heavy pull, and the conservative objectors to the reported mercury transmutation have pointed out that the intensity of the energy applied falls far short of that associated with changes in the nucleus.

Such a defect in intensity can not, however, be charged against Millikan rays as described in SCIENCE for November 20. The energy associated, for example, with alpha particles ejected from the nuclei of the radioactive elements may conveniently be stated as lying between four and nine million equivalent volts. This is exceeded many fold by the energy corresponding, on the quantum theory, to radiation of the high frequency of the Millikan rays. One is therefore reminded of the experiments of A. Nodon (Compt. rend., 176, 1705 (1923)) who brought forward evidence of an increase of the activity of radioactive substances when outdoors and enclosed by envelopes of small absorbing power for gamma rays as contrasted to the smaller radioactivity of the same

substances in cellars and when heavily enveloped by lead. Nodon, it is true, attributed his "ultraradiation," as he called it, to the sun; but he reports some effect even at night (which he is at pains to interpret), as one would anticipate from the results of Millikan.

It may be recalled that rock analysis shows that, assuming percentage composition similar to that on the surface, there is enough radioactive material in a depth of only twelve miles of the earth's crust to supply by its daily disintegration all the heat the earth radiates daily into space. If atoms of number above eighty-two exist beneath this twelve-mile shell, and if they are distintegrating as actively as at the surface, we are forced to the logical conclusions of Joly, who supposes that the heat of radioactive origin will accumulate until the earth's hot interior, after a process of eversion, will disburden itself of its store of heat by radiation into space during one of the earth's "incandescent periods," and thus make ready for a fresh geological aeon. Such catastrophic events are, however, no longer inevitable if we alter one of the premises in the logic, and grant that the radioactivity of the heavy chemical atoms is not entirely spontaneous but is conditioned, in part at least, by irradiation by Millikan rays, which would penetrate only a limited distance into the earth's crust. One must suppose that workers in laboratories are so well and so constantly screened that fluctuation in rate of radioactive change has escaped them.

However this may be, further experiments on the possible acceleration of radioactive change by these very high frequency radiations would appear to be of great interest, and we hope Professor Millikan is planning such experiments.

PRINCETON, N. J.

ALAN W. C. MENZIES C. A. SLOAT

INSECT TOXICOLOGY

THERE is a growing tendency to supplement field experiments on insecticides with tests and comparisons in the laboratory where, under controlled conditions, more exact observations and deductions may be made. This development in economic entomology is exemplified particularly by the work of Moore, Richardson, McIndoo and Tattersfield. The writer believes that laboratory research on the effects of insecticides would develop more rapidly and fruitfully if laboratory and field workers alike had a single, definite conception of its purpose and potential importance.

The purpose of laboratory research on the poisoning of insects has been obscured in part by the lack of a significant name for it. At times it has been classed under insect physiology; again it has been

allied with chemical field control work in economic entomology. The writer proposes for it the name, insect toxicology,' to include the results of all investigations which deal in a quantitative manner with the effects of insecticides on insects. The term, insect toxicology, is not entirely free from ambiguity, because it also suggests the effects of poisons elaborated by the insects themselves; but, with the foregoing definition, it should be satisfactory.

Insect toxicology should have for its purpose the development of a body of knowledge comparable to vertebrate toxicology or pharmacology. Just as in medicine, pharmacology supplies a rational, scientific basis for applied therapeutics, E in entomology, insect toxicology should be expected to supply a similar sound basis for insecticide practice. The need for an insect toxicology fashioned in the manner of pharmacology has been recognized, consciously or unconsciously, by workers with insecticides who turn to manuals of pharmacology for suggestions, although they know that the vertebrate toxicology of such manuals may not be applicable to insects, even in a qualitative sense.

The quantitative conception of insect toxicology is especially important. Innumerable insecticide "cage experiments" have been carried out by many workers. The results have been more or less useful at the time and place of completion, but because they were not obtained under carefully controlled conditions by quantitative methods they have no value for building up the fundamental laws of insect toxicology which could be applied to the analysis of insecticide poisoning under any combination of natural conditions.

The writer has been devoting his time and thought to insect toxicology for several years, and has become convinced that it is practicable to build up a quantitative system of insect toxicology both for stomachpoison and contact insecticides on a few suitable laboratory insects. This conviction, for stomach-poisons at least, will be supported by subsequent publication of methods and results, which the writer believes compare favorably with those of vertebrate toxicology.

If the objection be made that the analogy between insect toxicology and pharmacology is not sufficient proof for the potential importance of the former, instances may be cited of the practical results already secured through insect toxicology. The impulse for the development of coated arsenicals for the Japanese beetle sprang from William Moore's observations on the repellant effect on the beetle of sublethal doses of

1 This term does not conflict with economic toxicology proposed by M. R. Miller (SCIENCE, XLIV, p. 264) to include all aspects of work in which poisons are employed to economic advantage.