22, the award of the Charles Lester Leonard prizes for meritorious service performed during the year in X-ray work was made to Dr. Evarts A. Graham, of St. Louis, Mo., and to Dr. G. Failla, of New York City.

THE French government has made Professor Casimir Cépède, head of the department of applied biology at the University of Paris, a chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur. M. Sebileau, professor of anatomy, University of Paris; M. Jean André, professor of chemistry, Institute of Agronomy, Paris; M. Phillipe Glangeaud, professor of geology, University of Clermont, and M. Sartory, professor of pharmacy, University of Strasbourg, have been promoted to officers of the legion.

DR. LEOPOLD SPIEGEL, the well-known chemist of Berlin, has celebrated his sixtieth birthday.

PROFESSOR J. C. HINTON, of the Wesleyan College, Macon, Ga., has retired after thirty-five years of service. He has been dean of the college for the past twenty-five years.

It is announced that Dr. Harvey J. Howard, of the Rockefeller Hospital, Peking, who was kidnapped by Chinese bandits in July, has been freed.

G. A. BOLE, superintendent of the Ceramic Experiment Station of the Bureau of Mines, Columbus, Ohio, has been designated as supervising ceramist of the bureau and as such will have technical supervision of all ceramic investigations carried on both at the Columbus station and at the other experiment or field stations.

CLIFTON E. HALSTEAD, formerly of Syracuse University, has resigned to accept a position with E. R. Squibb & Sons, New York City.

THE vacancy caused by the death of W. E. Cutler, leader of the British Museum East Africa Expedition, has been filled by the appointment as his successor of Frederick W. H. Migeod.

SIR FRANK HEATH, secretary to the British Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, will shortly visit Australia.

DR. H. BERKELBACH VAN DER SPRENKEL, assistant professor of anatomy, University of Utrecht, and Dr. John Cairney, lecturer in anatomy in the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, are spending the current academic year at the department of anatomy in the University of Chicago as Rockefeller fellows, engaged in research upon the comparative anatomy of the nervous system.

DR. A. E. JENKS, professor of anthropology, University of Minnesota, has taken up residence again at

Minnesota after two years of absence-the first with the National Research Council, Washington, the second in travel and study in Europe. In addition to the regular 1925 summer session courses of the University of California (southern branch, Los Angeles), Dr. Jenks gave a course of four weekly public addresses under the title, "Known facts about prehistoric man in Europe," as follows: (1) Fossil man, (2) Influence of environment and animal companions, (3) Material culture, and (4) Non-material culture.

DR. ALEŠ HRDLIČKA, of the Smithsonian Institution, has reached Cape Town, South Africa, from Adelaide, Australia, on his return to Washington.

DR. WM. A. PERLZWEIG, of the Johns Hopkins Medical School, is spending three months at the Carlsberg Institute in Copenhagen.

DR. CHARLES C. MOOK and Coleman S. Williams, of the American Museum of Natural History, have returned to New York with many fossil specimens gathered in a three months' tour through western Montana and Idaho.

THE first lecture of the Harvey Society, under the patronage of the New York Academy of Medicine for the season 1925-1926, will be given on October 3 by Dr. F. R. Nager, professor of otology at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, on "New problems in otology."

DR. HORATIO B. WILLIAMS, Dalton professor of physiology in the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, was the principal speaker at the opening exercises at the medical school on September 24. His subject was "The future of biological investigation."

DR. G. H. MATTHEWS, of the Eastman Kodak Research Laboratory, will speak on "Recent developments in color photography" before the Western New York Section of the American Chemical Society and the Niagara Falls Section of the American Electrochemical Society, which will meet jointly on October 20 in Buffalo, N. Y..

PROFESSOR E. GLEY, Paris, was tendered a banquet by the dean of the medical faculty and others on his visit to Havana on his way to lecture in Mexico. He spoke at Havana on "The influence of the thyroid on growth" and "The origin and action of epinephrin." He is to deliver a series of eight lectures on his return visit.

PROFESSOR G. BERTRAND, of the Pasteur Institute, Paris, has been invited by the Instituto de la Universidad de Paris, at Buenos Aires, to deliver a course of lectures on biochemistry, with especial reference to agriculture.

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DR. EPHRAIM MACDONALD EWING, formerly assistant professor of physiology at the Tulane University of Louisiana School of Medicine, died on August 27, aged thirty-seven years.

JOHN MURDOCH, naturalist and ethnologist, and formerly librarian at the Smithsonian Institution, died on September 22, aged seventy-three years.

ON September 11, Professor Ernst von Hammer, of the Technische Hochschule of Stuttgart, Germany, died at the age of sixty-seven years. For over forty years he had filled the chair of geodesy and practical astronomy in that institution and he was the author of numerous books and articles on subjects connected with his work.

PROFESSOR GEORG KLIEN, director for more than forty years of the East Prussian Agricultural Institute in Königsberg, has died, aged seventy-six years. THE United States Civil Service Commission has announced an open competitive examination for junior sanitary engineer, at a salary of $1,860, applications for which will close October 24. The duties are to carry on public health work involving engineering problems, including stream pollution, sanitary surveys, treatment of water, sewage and industrial wastes, drainage and anti-malarial measures, and

other similar matters.

APPOINTMENTS to the staff of the Wilmer Eye Institute at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, Baltimore, have been announced as follows: Dr. William Holland Wilmer, director; Dr, Cecil H. Bagley, resident ophthalmologist and instructor in ophthalmology; Drs. Leo J. Goldbach, Alan C. Woods and Clyde A. Clapp, associates in clinical ophthalmology; Drs. Reginald D. West and Dobert Y. Fechtig, instructors in clinical ophthalmology; Drs. R. S. Wygodski, Bernard V. Kelly, Joseph E. Brumbach, Joseph G. O'Brien, Aaron Robinson, Franklin Hazelhurst, Jr., Chester E. Hurwitz, Frank A. Pacienza and Frederick A. Holden, assistants in clinical ophthalmology. Charles L. Burky will do research work. Those who will devote full time to the institute (having no private practice) are Drs. Wilmer, Bagley and Wygodski. The institute opened on October 1, with sixty beds in the Nurses' Home Building of the Johns Hopkins Hospital group; this adjoins the administration building.

A ONE-WEEK'S course in elementary and advanced chemistry was given in connection with the Exposition of Chemical Industries, held in Grand Central Palace during the week of September 20 to October 3. Daily addresses were given by Drs. Arthur D. Little, H. E. Howe, William Haynes and Charles H. Herty.

We learn from Nature that the opening meetings of the fifth congress of the French Society of Chemical Industry will be held at Paris in the second week in October. As part of the proceedings, a special assembly will commemorate, on October 11, the one hundredth anniversary of the practical establishment of the soap industry by the French chemist, Michel Eugène Chevreul, who, in 1825, with J. L. Gay-Lussac, started a factory for the manufacture of stearic acid. Through his prolonged scientific researches Chevreul explained the process of saponification. The president of the French Republic, members of the Academy of Sciences and those of kindred bodies will join in the forthcoming commemorative session. Born at Angers on August 31, 1786, Chevreul died in 1889, at the age of one hundred and three years. At seventeen he went to Paris, entering Vauquelin's chemical manufactory; ultimately he became director there of the laboratory. Later (1824) he took up the post of director of the dyeing department and professor of dyeing at the tapestry works of the Gobelins. His researches on the principles of harmony and contrast of colors were carried out at this period. In 1864 Chevreul was appointed director of the Museum of the Jardin des Plantes, retiring in 1879. Elected a foreign member of the Royal Society in 1826, Chevreul was awarded the Copley Medal in 1857.. The centenary of the birth of this distinguished chemist was celebrated in Paris with signal honor and many felicitous demonstrations.

THE third International Aerial Navigation Congress will meet in Brussels from October 6 to 10, under the patronage of King Albert and Prince Leopold. This congress, which follows that of Paris in 1921 and of London in 1923, will be divided into six sections juridical, medical, scientific, air navigation, technical, and travel and propaganda.

THE New England intercollegiate geological excursion will be held on October 9 and 10 in the vicinity of Waterville, Maine. New fossiliferous localities and the glacial geology of that region will be studied. Those desiring to attend should communicate with Professor E. H. Perkins, Colby College, Waterville, Maine.

THE Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station will celebrate its semi-centennial on October 12. Connecticut was the first state to establish an agricultural experiment station, thus inaugurating the movement in this country.

THE first of the radio talks of the Smithsonian Institution for the season, entitled "Flies," by Dr. J. M. Aldrich, was given from Station WRC on October 1, and the institution will present a talk on each Thursday evening following. During the summer, arrange

ments were made for a similar series of talks originating in New England to be given from Westinghouse Stations WBZ at Springfield, Mass., and WBZA at Boston under the auspices of the Burgess Radio Nature League in cooperation with the Smithsonian Institution.

THE American Medical Association is to publish a journal on pathology to be known as the Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, beginning with January, 1926. The editorial board for this new journal has not been made public.

MORE than 4,000 specimens of the minerals of rarer metals gathered by Frank L. Hess, during eighteen years' service with the U. S. Geological Survey, have been turned over to the U. S. National Museum. These specimens will form an important addition to the collection.

THE late Miss Lilian Suzette Gibbs, of Teneriffe, Wales, a well-known botanist, has left to the trustees of the British Museum (Natural History Botanical Department) her collections of plants and books and papers connected therewith, and to the University of London such a sum as will produce a net annual income of £150 for a studentship in cancer research, either on the physiological or the chemical side, to be called "The Laura de Saliceto Studentship" in memory of her mother.

THE Riforma Medica states that the Argentine government has donated 10,000 liras to the Grassi Institute at Rome for study of parasitic diseases.

AT Yale University funds have been provided for the promotion of two pieces of research in the school of medicine. A grant from the Henry B. Loomis Fund will be used by Dr. Dudley J. Morton, instructor in surgery, for an investigation of the mechanics of the human foot and its disorders, and a gift of $5,000 from Mrs. Philip J. Goodhart and her son, Howard L. Goodhart, Yale, '05, of New York City, provides for the further investigation of a scarlet fever antitoxin by Dr. Francis G. Blake, chairman of the department of internal medicine.

THE governing board of the University of Michigan has recently accepted the management of the Menominee County Agricultural School, located at Menominee in the Upper Peninsula. It is the plan of the board to continue the present course of study, which is of a secondary type, and to add such other courses in agriculture and home economics as will extend the service of the institution to that portion of the state. For the next two years $75,000 has been appropriated by the state to operate the school. Karl Knaus, formerly county agent leader in Kansas, has been appointed superintendent.

UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL

NOTES

ASA CANDLER has made an additional gift of $300,000 to Emory University, Atlanta, Ga., bringing the total amount of his gifts to the institution up to $7,000,000.

THE University of Wisconsin has decided to lengthen its course in pharmacy from two to three years. This is in conformity with the recommendation of the American Conference of Pharmaceutical Faculties, in which thirty-four leading universities hold membership.

HENRY O. LINEBERGER, president of the North Carolina State Dental Society, is chairman of a committee of five dentists, comprising S. J. Betts, Hillsboro; Isaac H. Davis, Oxford; G. L. Hooper, Duke; J. H. Judd, Fayetteville, designated by the dental profession to endeavor to secure the erection and maintenance of a first-class college of dental medicine and surgery in North Carolina.

PROFESSOR W. O. HOTCHKISS, state geologist of Wisconsin, has announced his acceptance of the presidency of the Michigan School of Mines at Houghton, Mich.

DR. JOHN W. BURKE has been appointed professor of ophthalmology in the Georgetown University Medical School to succeed Dr. William H. Wilmer, who recently went to the Johns Hopkins Medical School.

PROFESSOR FREDERICK WOOD, of Lake Forest College, has been appointed professor of mathematics at Wesleyan College, Macon, Ga.

C. C. HAMILTON, associate entomologist at the University of Maryland, has been appointed associate professor of entomology at Rutgers University.

DR. W. H. PYLE, of the University of Missouri, has gone to Teachers' College, Detroit, to carry on research and teaching on the psychology of learning.

CHAS. W. RODEWALD, formerly an instructor in the department of chemistry at the University of Nebraska, has been appointed assistant professor of chemistry at Washington University, St. Louis.

DR. WILLIAM W. GRAVES, for a number of years chairman of the department of neurology at the St. Louis University School of Medicine, has been appointed director of the department; Drs. Louis Rassieur and Max W. Myer have been advanced from the rank of associate professors of surgery to professors of surgery.

DR. PERCY BRIGL, first assistant in the institute of

@physiological chemistry at the University of Tübingen, has been appointed professor and director of the institute of agricultural chemistry at the Agricultural High School at Hohenheim.

DR. FELIX HAFFNER, of Munich, has been appointed professor of pharmacology at the University of Königsberg to take the place of Professor H. Wieland, who has retired.

DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE

SOLAR VARIATION AND THE WEATHER

In the New York Times' issue of July 26, Dr. McAdie, director of Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory, reviews three papers by Messrs. Clayton, Hoxmark and Abbot recently published by the Smithsonian Institution. Like many others, for instance, Floyd W. Parsons in the Saturday Evening Post of July 25, Dr. McAdie appears to understand that persons connected with the Smithsonian Institution have predicted cool or disastrous summers for 1925, 1926 and 1927.

This is not the case. No person connected in any way with the Smithsonian has ventured any such excessively long-range forecasts or knows of any method of making them. This mistake arises from confusing with us Mr. Herbert Janvrin Browne and perhaps others who have no connection at all with the Smithsonian Institution, though they claim to make use of some of our results. We disclaim all responsibility for their forecasts.

The story we told in the three articles referred to was mainly twice told, once by their texts, and again by their illustrations, but yet Dr. McAdie does not appear to have grasped it. Certainly he has not elarified it for his readers, and therefore I venture to do so. Perhaps Dr. McAdie, as they say, failed to see the forest because it was obscured by the trees.

What we told is essentially this: Measurements by the Smithsonian Institution of the sun's rays available to warm the earth have been going on for twenty years. Since 1918 they have been made on every possible day at our Chile observatory, and since 1920 have also been made at our Arizona observatory. Prior to that, and from their inauguration in 1905, they were made, during part of the year only, at Mount Wilson, California. The duplicate daily results since 1920 agree within one half per cent., and combine to indicate decided variability of the sun.

Some authorities still doubt the adequacy of our proof of the sun's variability. In the paper by Abbot, their objections are discussed, and many confirmatory evidences tending to support the view of the variability of the sun are given.

If the sun varies, the earth's weather ought to vary,

too. Mr. Clayton has examined this question for more than ten years, first while official forecaster of Argentina, and since 1923 privately, with financial support by Mr. John A. Roebling, and working in cooperation with the Smithsonian Institution.

As early as 1917, Clayton appeared to find definite relations between the solar changes reported by the Smithsonian Institution and weather changes in all parts of the world. He reduced these relations to a system of weekly forecasting which was adopted officially in Argentina in December, 1918, and is still used there.

Hoxmark, who succeeded Clayton as Argentine official forecaster, gives in his paper the degree of success in making definite forecasts of temperature and rainfall for Buenos Aires each week since he assumed charge in 1922. He employs the much-used mathematical method of correlations in comparing the predictions with the events, because it is independent of personal bias. One does not see why Dr. McAdie should make fun of so sensible a procedure. The Argentine official weekly forecasts, while by no means perfect, are in the right direction by far the most of the time, and are sold, not given away, satisfied customers.

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Clayton's paper reports his recent studies of the weather of the United States in its relations to the apparent solar changes. Having found clear evidences of many such relations, he has reduced his results to a system of forecasting of temperatures for the city of New York. To make a rigid test, he had, for over a year, forwarded daily to the Smithsonian Institution definite forecasts of daily New York temperatures three, four and five days in advance, average weekly temperature departures forecasted two days before the beginning of each week, and average monthly temperature departures forecasted two days before the beginning of each month.

The Smithsonian Institution has compared these forecasts with the events for a period exceeding one year, and finds by mathematical methods, altogether without opportunity for personal bias, that a real foreknowledge by Mr. Clayton is exhibited.

It is true that the correlations are not high. The relations between solar variation and the weather are

highly complicated. Much more work and study are required to make them clearer. Moreover, the accuracy and fullness of the solar data are still not adequate to the purpose. Fortunately the National Geographic Society has recently financed the installation of a third solar observatory to be located in the eastern hemisphere and to cooperate with the two in Chile and Arizona. If further studies by Clayton and others seem to warrant going on with this new departure in weather forecasting, it is to be hoped

TERTIARY GLACIATION IN WYOMING,

COLORADO AND UTAH1

SINCE 1914 the origin of erratic boulders up to twenty feet long on Green Mountain and elsewhere in Central Wyoming, at altitudes of about 8,500 feet, had been an unsolved problem until June, 1925, when definite evidence was found of glacial deposits of mid-Tertiary age. A fresh grade on the state highway five miles west of Alcova, Wyoming, exposed good glacial débris with boulders exhibiting excellent striations and scoured faces. This débris definitely occurs beneath the White River formation, classed as Oligocene. Elsewhere in the Sweetwater Valley the glacial boulders rest on Eocene formations.

The glacier leaving these big erratic rocks originated on the Wind River Mountains and extended at least 125 miles toward' Casper.

Definite glacial débris nearly 1,000 feet thick on Diamond Peak, Colorado, and Uinta quartzite boulders twenty feet long, showing grooved flat faces, on Aspen Mountain, Wyoming, prove the glacial origin of the Bishop conglomerate, which is older than the Brown's Park and younger than the Green River formations. The Bishop occurs all around the Uinta Mountains.

The smoothed outcrops of the pre-Cambrian granite near Encampment, Wyoming, and boulder beds beneath the North Park formation at Walcott indicate mid-Tertiary glaciation off the Medicine Bow Range.

Large boulders with peculiarly flattened faces, as if ice-scoured, at the bottom of the Castle Rock conglomerate and on Green Mountain are thought to be traces of the same glacial époch in the Denver Basin.

The possibility of the Kingsbury conglomerate and other singular boulder deposits in the Rocky Mountains being a phase of this glaciation is recognized, which when carefully studied will perhaps prove extensions of the discovery of an important epoch of glaciation in post-Eocene and pre-Miocene time, and 1 Preliminary communication.

AN OBVIOUS NEW CASE OF
POLYEMBRYONY

MORPHOLOGISTS in general are so greatly interested in polyembryony that all new cases should be advertised.

In the August, 1925, number of the Journal of Economic Entomology, Mr. S. J. Snow, of the Bureau of Entomology, in an article entitled "Observations on the cutworm, Euxoa auxiliaris Grote, and its principal parasites," records the rearing of an encyrtid parasite of this cutworm which is, very obviously, polyembryonic, since from 1,068 to 1,511 individuals were reared from a single cutworm.

THE "HARMLESS" CORAL SNAKE ERROR as well as truth has the faculty of repeated rising after frequent crushing. Certain misinformation has such capacity for harm that the task of the cynic becomes indistinguishable from that of the philanthropist and at the reappearance of the hoary falsehood of the harmless coral snake it becomes meet, right and our bounden duty to do all that in us lies to blast it as publicly as possible.

Some twenty-five years ago Kipling wrote "Rhinegelder and the German Flag," a story of a collector in Venezuela who, misled by the published statement of an American authority, thought nothing of being bitten by a coral snake and so died. His last bitter words as he felt his arm and realized his position might serve as a text. "It is genumben to der clavicle. I am a dead man, and Yates he haf lied in print."

In Newman's recent "Vertebrate Zoology," on page 257, there is the following statement: "The coral snakes are said to be extremely poisonous, but their biting apparatus is so constructed that they can not open the mouth wide enough to bite a human being so that they may be set aside as harmless, so far as man is concerned."