purpose of developing instruments for the Ordnance Department for measuring velocities of projectiles. DR. R. R. DYKSTRA, professor of surgery in the department of veterinary medicine of the University of Kansas, has been appointed veterinarian of the Kansas State Board of Agriculture for the year 1918. CECIL C. THOMAS has resigned his position as instructor in botany at the New York State College of Agriculture at Cornell University, to accept an assistantship in plant disinfection with the Federal Horticultural Board of the U. S. Department of Agriculture. MAJOR SAMUEL C. PRESCOTT, of the Sanitary Corps, National Army, who is professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is about to make an extended tour through the cantonments of the South and West. DR. EDWARD CLARK, of Buffalo, has been relieved of his duties as acting chief of the division of child hygiene of the state department of health at Albany, and has returned to his former duty as sanitary supervisor of the western part of the state, with station at Buffalo. Dr. Herman F. Senftner, New York City, has succeeded Dr. Edward Clark as the head of the division of child hygiene, pending the release of Dr. Henry L. K. Shaw, Albany, from military service. DR. E. H. LESLLE has resigned from his position as chief chemist of the General Petroleum Corporation of Los Angeles, and has assumed new duties as technical adviser to the sales department of the U. S. Industrial Alcohol Company and the U. S. Industrial Chemical Company. He will be located in their main offices at 27 William Street, New York City. DR. W. K. FISHER, of Stanford University, has been granted leave of absence until August 15 to accompany the University of Iowa's biological expedition to the British West Indies. PROFESSOR HENRY C. SHERMAN, of Columbia University, lectured on February 27, before the Chicago Institute of Medicine upon "Fundamental Requirements in Human Nu trition," and on February 28 spoke to the City Club of Chicago on "America's Food Problem" and to the faculty and students of Illinois University Medical College on "Nutrition and Food Economics." THE annual address of the Alpha Omega Alpha Honorary Medical Fraternity at Western Reserve Medical School was delivered on February 20 by Dr. Roger G. Perkins, professor of hygiene, whose subject was "Medical Conditions in Roumania," Major Perkins has just returned from Roumania with the American Red Cross Commission. THE building for an aeronautical school to be erected at the Carnegie Institute of Technology is to be called the Langley School of Aeronautics, in honor of Samuel Pierpont Langley. DR. SAMUEL G. DIXON, commissioner of the Pennsylvania State Department of Public Health, president of the Academy of Natural Science, formerly professor of hygiene in the University of Pennsylvania, died on February 26, at the age of sixty-six years. DR. ARTHUR H. ELLIOTT, emeritus chief chemist of the New York Consolidated Gas Company and emeritus professor of chemistry and physics in the College of Pharmacy, died on March 2, at the age of seventy years. CHARLES A. HART, systematic entomologist of the State Natural History Survey, died suddenly of heart disease on February 17. He was a member of the American Society of Zoologists. THE death is announced of Professor Christian Hornung, Sc.D., on January 31, 1918, of arteriosclerosis, aged seventy-three years. For fifty years Professor Hornung held the chair of mathematics in Heidelberg University, Tiffin, Ohio. He is referred to as "a distinguished scholar, author of mathematical texts and correspondent of many noted astronomers and mathematicians and a member of the national societies devoted to his profession." THE REV. A. T. G. APPLE, M.A., died in Lancaster, Pa., on February 5, of angina pectoris, aged fifty-eight years. For the past eleven years Professor Apple has been professor of mathematics and astronomy in Franklin and Marshall College and director of the Scholl Observatory. A correspondent writes: "He was an indefatigable worker and his publications on Jupiter brought him recognition both in this country and abroad. The observations and calculations in connection with this work and also that on the double stars, have been used in the Government Almanac. Professor Apple was a member of the American Astronomical Society, the British Astronomical Association and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science." J LIEUTENANT E. J. WOODHOUSE, until recently economic botanist to the government of Bengal, has died from wounds received in action in France. THE death, at the age of fifty-eight years, is announced of Dr. G. Lepage, professor of obstetrics in the University of Paris. THE Rockefeller Foundation has appropriated $125,000 to continue the war demonstration hospital of the Rockefeller Institute, $50,000 for the work of the medical division of the National Research Council of the Council of National Defense and $12,281 for other medical war research and relief work. DR. T. MITCHELL PRUDDEN, emeritus professor of pathology in Columbia University, who has spent many years in the study of the small ruins of southern Colorado, has presented to the American Museum of Natural History a collection of pottery and other objects acquired during the course of his work. Dr. W. L. Hildburgh has presented to the museum a very carefully selected collection of archeological objects from New York state, containing some fine Iroquois pots and pipes. Dr. Hildburgh, known for his work in anthropology, has resided for a number of years in England. A "GENERAL Congress of Civil Engineering" will be held in Paris on March 18-23 next. The objects of the conference, as recently explained to the French Minister of Commerce and Industry and quoted in Nature, are to awaken the French nation to the need for increased industrial enterprise and the attainment of industrial agreement. The Minister expressed the hope that the conference would give very close attention to such questions as the saving of fuel and the thorough utilization of intellectual and mechanical effort; wage war on waste of all kinds; and advocate the systematic utilization of by-products, and the adoption of improved scientific mechanical methods of production-in short, give that place to applied knowledge that it now merits. THE California Academy of Sciences announces that the course of popular scientific lectures is being continued on Sunday afternoons at three o'clock in the auditorium of the Museum in Golden Gate Park as follows: February 17. Professor E. G. Linsley, department of geology and astronomy, Mills College, "Our nearest neighbor, the Moon." Illustrated. February 24. Dr. F. W. Weymouth, department of physiology, Stanford University, "The crab fisheries of the Pacific coast." Illustrated. March 3. Professor Harold Heath, professor of zoology, Stanford University, "The Pacific whale fisheries." Illustrated. March 10. Mr. Ralph Hopping, U. S. Forest Service, "Pine insects and their depredations." SENATOR OWEN introduced into the Senate, and Representative Dyer into the House of Representatives, the following bill regarding rank of the Medical Reserve Corps of the Army: That hereafter the commissioned officers of the Medical Corps, and of the Medical Reserve Corps of the United States Army on active duty shall be distributed in the several grades in the same ratios heretofore established by law in the Medical Corps of the United States Navy. The Surgeon-General shall have authority to designate as "consultants" officers of either corps and retire them as the interests of the service may require. SECRETARY of the Interior Lane has designated Bartlesville, Okla., as the location of the new experimental station of the Bureau of Mines for the investigation of problems relating to the petroleum and natural gas industries. The station is one of three new experimental stations for the establishing of which the sum of $75,000 was appropriated by the last Congress. The two other stations have been located at Minneapolis, Minn., for the study of iron and manganese problems, and at Columbus, Ohio, for research connected with the ceramic and clayworking industries. The selection of Bartlesville was due to its location in the heart of the great mid-continent oil and gas field. The selection was influenced also by the offer of a free site and by the raising of $50,000 by the citizens of the town. This sum of money will be applied to the building of offices and laboratories and the purchase of engineering and chemical equipment. The technical staff of the new experimental station will study various problems having practical commercial application to the petroleum and natural gas industries, including questions of production, transportation, storage and refining of petroleum and various problems connected with the technology of natural gas. One of the greatest needs of the petroleum industry has been the coordination of scientific research with the practical side of the industry, for compared with other mineral industries it has been singularly backward in this respect. The station is aimed to act an intermediary between the facts evolved by scientific investigations and the needs of the oil industries. That is, men will be employed who will be able to gather scientific data and find out how they may be applied to the practical needs of the industry. JACOB T. BOWNE, librarian of the Young Men's Christian Association College, has given his anthropological collection to the Springfield Museum of Natural History. The collection consists of some thousands of objects with complete catalogue giving the history of each object and the conditions under which it was found, with many bibliographical references to further sources of information. Mr. Bowne has spent fifty years in the study of primitive man, laying special emphasis upon the North American Indian, and the greater part of the collection is made up of relics of the Indians of the Connecticut Valley within twenty miles of Springfield. The specimens of Indian handiwork in stone, bone, shell and pottery were gathered from sites of ancient camps and burial places in this immediate vicinity. In addition to the objects. Mr. Bowne's gift includes several hundred books on anthropology, some of them very rare, together with archeological cabinets, manuscripts, maps and diagrams. The collection will remain in Mr. Bowne's keeping for the present. In accepting the collection for the museum, the directors passed the following resolution: Resolved, That the directors extend to Mr. Jacob T. Bowne the hearty and appreciative thanks of the City Library Association for the gift of his extensive and finely organized anthropological collection, which is the result of many years of assiduous and discriminating study. The collection, relating especially to the North American Indian type and more particularly to the Indian of the Connecticut valley within 20 miles of Springfield, including the remains of aboriginal handiwork in stone, bone, shell and pottery, gathered from the sites of ancient camps and burial places in this immediate vicinity, forms a most desirable accession for the museum of natural history. The citizens of Springfield are deeply indebted to Mr. Bowne for his generosity in making this public gift. UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL THE Carnegie Corporation has presented McGill University with $1,000,000 in recognition of the institution's "devoted service and sacrifice towards Canada's part in the war." In the State University of Iowa this year, not a single undergraduate in the College of Liberal Arts qualified for the Sigma Xi. Although students are taking their studies more seriously than in former years the records show that the ablest students have been drawn into war service. DR. RUSSELL A. HIBBS, of the University of Louisville, has been appointed professor of orthopedic surgery in the college of physicians and surgeons of Columbia University. Dr. Eugene W. Caldwell, of Bellevue Hospital Medical College, has been appointed to the newly established chair of roentgenology. Dr. Vera Danschakoff, formerly of Moscow, has been promoted to be assistant professor of 7 N anatomy and Dr. I. H. Goldberger, has been appointed special lecturer of child hygiene in the school for oral hygiene. MR. ARTHUR C. WALTON, M.A. (Northwestern '15), M.A. (Harvard '16) has been made acting professor of biology in the chair made vacant by the death of Professor Umbach. Mr. Walton holds a Harvard traveling fellowship and had planned work in Sweden but was prevented by the war. FRED G. ALLEN, of Erie, Pa., a graduate of the University of Toronto, has been appointed assistant professor in electrical engineering at Lafayette College to take the place left vacant by the resignation of E. D. Tanzer, who has become assistant professor of electrical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. rests is not at all in evidence, save only perhaps in the remark that "the ordinary bacteriological dilution scale is in reality a logarithmic scale." It does not, however, follow necessarily that the most probable number of B. coli is the geometric mean as obtained by Mr. Wells. In support of this contention, see a thoroughly mathematical treatment of the whole question by M. H. McCrady,1 of the laboratories of the board of health of the Province of Quebec; the formulas there derived show that the logarithmic function is more complicated than Mr. Wells perhaps has in mind. His experimental data may, on the other hand, show that his proposed method will serve well as a "first approximation." The second impression coming from a study of the article is the feeling that this method merits a mathematical treatment. It seems to be essentially as follows: Five sets of twenty tubes each, containing portions of the sample in powers (not "multiples") of ten, are tested for the presence of gas, indicating the presence of B. coli. For the dilutions 10 c.c., 1 c.c., .1 с.с., .01 с.с., .001 c.c., graded with the scale numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, respectively, the number of tubes showing presence of B. coli was 20 18, 8, 1, 0, respectively, the experiment having been extended from a dilution at which all tubes gave positive results to one in which no DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE tube gave such a result. In going from the | EARLY in January Miss Margaret Heatley, instructor in botany at Wellesley College, sailed for South Africa to take charge of the botanical department in Huguenot College of Cape Colony during the absence on sabbatical grant of Dr. Bertha Stoneman. Miss Alice M. Ottley, who was absent on leave, has returned to Wellesley College to fill the vacancy in the botany department caused by Miss Heatley's absence. NOTE ON THE GEOMETRICAL MEAN AS A B. COLI INDEX It is always a beneficial means of grace for a scientist to wander into paths outside his own domain; such excursions often reveal too the lack of coordination between the various sciences, although happily there has been great progress within the past two decades in this respect. These remarks are evoked by a reading of the note by William Firth Wells: "The Geometrical Mean as a B. Coli Index" in SCIENCE for January 11. The first impression gained is the lack of a clear presentation of the method. The notion of a geometric mean is purely mathematical, but it must be said that to a mathematician, even to one fairly conversant with the theory and methods of bacteriological analysis, the theory on which this method weakest dilution to the next higher there was a gain of one tube, next a gain of 7, then of 10, then of 2. The scale numbers, which appear to correspond to the logarithms of certain hypothetical most probable numbers of B. coli for the separate dilutions, are averaged with the foregoing gains used as weights, i. e., 2, 10, 7, 1, 0; and the weighted mean thus found corresponds to the logarithm of the desired most probable average number of B. coli. In other words, the weighted geometric mean of the above-mentioned hypothetical numbers of B. coli is taken as the desired average. An immediate consequence of the mathematics involved is that the same result is 1 M. H. McCrady, "The Numerical Interpretation of Fermentation-Tube Results," Journal of Infectious Diseases, Vol. 17, No. 1, January, 1915, pp. 183-212. always obtained by dividing the sum of all the positives except the highest by the highest, e. g., 1/20 (18+8+1+0)=1.35. That a mathematical treatment would improve and standardize the computation can be seen from the remark that a hasty study gives the following simpler result (subject to the doubt already expressed as to the validity of the theory): The aggregate per cent. of "positive" tubes gives the logarithm of the most probable average number of B. coli per 100 c.c., e. g., 1/20 (20+18+8+1+0)=2.35, and this is the logarithm of 224. This rule will explain, for example, why Mr. Wells's "reversion method" works, for it is the mathematical equivalent of the foregoing. A further implication is that the author would seem to be wrong in saying that the percentage positive" (the aggregate percentage) gives the desired result for a test using a single dilution; to use a concrete example, 18 positives out of 20 at 1 c.c. together with 0 positives out of 20 at .1 c.c. should by any test be regarded as indicating a smaller number of B. coli than the 18 positives alone, yet the rule here commented on yields the same results for both. It will be of undoubted value to have Mr. Wells's more complete presentation particularly of the experimental data which he mentions. W. D. CAIRNS OBERLIN COLLEGE, OBERLIN, OHIO SOME DEFECTS IN OUR AGRICULTURAL In the preface to the text-book on agricultural botany ("Traité de Botanique Agricole et Industrielle") by J. Vesque, professor of agricultural botany in the National Institute of Agronomy of France, the following criticism on the agricultural instruction then (1885) given in France occurs: In France the agricultural instruction attaches itself more and more to rearing of livestock. It is too much forgotten that the animals are nourished by the plants, or, if it is not forgotten, it is taken for granted that the culture of plants consists merely in the production of a maximum mass of vegetables. The nature of the plants, the spe cies which populate our fields, the seeds confined to the soil are far from preoccupying the cultivator as much as the nature of the soil and the fertilizers employed. All the agricultural instruction may at this point be summed up in three words: Zootechny, agricultural chemistry and rural engineering. The plant, the initiative in all agricultural pursuits, is almost excluded. How many cultivators know the herbs of their farms, how many are capable of distinguishing the good from the badi Liebig was certainly not wrong in accusing the students of the agricultural schools of knowing neither the seeds of the grasses nor the grasses themselves. These remarks, describing the character of the agricultural instruction in France in 1885, fit the condition prevailing in many of our American agricultural colleges at the present day to a strange degree of exactness. The same neglect of the scientific knowledge of plants is present, not only in courses in which animal industry is the major subject, but even in such courses as agronomy and horticulture, which from their very nature should deal largely with plants. We find the botanical equipment of the average graduate very meager indeed. He has not infrequently been the recipient of long lecture courses on forage plants without possessing definite knowledge of the distinction between grasses and legumes; or he has studied ornamentals in his horticultural courses without enough training in botany to appreciate either the meaning of the description of a plant or the importance of its scientific name; or he may have spent considerable time in judging corn without having clearly in his mind to which family of plants the Indian corn belongs, or what characteristics distinguish it from the other members of its family. Such vague knowledge of plants is not uncommonly met with among graduates from agricultural colleges claiming thoroughness for their preparation. No one will deny the right of agriculture to the title of a generous place in the higher education, based as it is on those natural sciences, in which our country claims its proudest distinction in its progress. It is also undoubtedly the intention of all these agricultural colleges, |