112

medical school in Shanghai was planned by the foundation, the Harvard Medical School of China was purchased by the Chinese Medical Board, and the Pennsylvania Medical School at Shanghai consented to step aside in favor of the larger institution. A few months ago, however, after the foundation withdrew from the field, the Pennsylvania Medical School began pushing forward its plans to enlarge its plant. The erection of a science laboratory building, to cost $100,000, was promptly begun. This will house departments of physics, chemistry and biology and, temporarily, the medical laboratories also, but the latter will be removed to other buildings which will be erected later. The institution will provide a premedical course covering three years, and a medical course of four years similar to those established by the Peking Union Medical College.

THE FOREST SERVICE

cent.

areas.

Further appropriations to carry on t chase work within the areas have been mended by the National Forest Rese Commission. "To leave these Eastern in their present half finished condition subject them to formidable fire haza other difficulties of management."

There is need also for some action to the danger to the National Forests fr 24,267,723 acres of private lands t intermingled with land belonging to t ernment. Most of this land is forested misuse, mismanagement and neglect je the government's holdings. General tion is urged to acquire the private purchase or exchange.

The 1919 fire season was unusually and long drawn out, the report states. the third successive year of severe dro the northwest, and the worst of th Fires began to occur before much of tomary work of preparation had bee and this imposed a further handicap forest force, which had been depleted T loss of many experienced men. number of forest fires in the National was 6,800, or 1,227 greater than in vious year. The area of National lands burned over was 2,000,034 ac estimated damage was $4,919,769, and cost of fire fighting was $3,039,615.

These fellowships are to be located at various agricultural colleges in the eastern part of the United States for the purpose of investigating the use of gypsum in crop production and for making a fundamental study of the relation of sulphur to crop nutrition and growth.

The revival of interest in gypsum and other sulphur fertilizers has largely grown out of the remarkable results that agricultural scientists and farmers of Oregon and Washington are obtaining from the use of sulphur sources on alfalfa and clover, and other legumes. In many of the soils of these states a leguminous crop can not be successfully grown without an addition of a sulphur source, and such additions give increases in yield ranging from 25 to 500 per cent.

Two of these are to be used in continuing the fellowships that have already been in operation for considerably more than a year at the University of Chicago and at Iowa State College. The others will be strategically distributed at state agricultural colleges and experiment stations in central and eastern United States.

THE NATIONAL MUSEUM AND DR. JORDAN On the occasion of the seventieth birthday of David Starr Jordan, chancellor emeritus of Stanford University, which occurred on January 19, the following letter was addressed to him by Dr. Charles D. Walcott, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution:

On the occasion of your seventieth birthday, permit me, on behalf of the Smithsonian Institution and the National Museum, to offer my congratulations as well as thanks for your faithful cooperation during half a century.

For fully fifty years you have labored for the high ideals expressed by the founder of this institution in the words "increase and diffusion of knowledge among men," and for nearly the same period your work has been in close association with the institution and its staff.

Your work has also been intimately connected with the National Museum since its organization as such, and your scientific papers are among the most valued contributions to the museum's publications from its very first volume to the latest.

Your early associations were with Baird, Gill, Brown, Goode and Tarleton Bean, and your name will go down in the museum's history linked with theirs. No wonder we have always regarded you as one of us, and we know that this sentiment is being reciprocated by you.

As a slight token of my appreciation of your services to science and to the museum, may I not ask you to accept the designation as honorary associate in zoology?

I trust that you may be spared for many more years to continue your work.

SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS WILLIAM THOMPSON SEDGWICK, professor of biology in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1883, died on January 25, aged sixty-five years.

AT a meeting of the Société belge de Médecine of Brussels, Belgium, held on December 27, 1920, Dr. William H. Welch, director of the school of hygiene and public health of the Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. Simon Flexner, the director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, were made honorary members of that organization.

THE dinner and reception given by the medical profession of Philadelphia to Dr. William W. Keen, at the Bellevue Stratford Hotel, on January 20, in honor of his eighty-fourth birthday, was attended by 600 physicians and friends. Dr. George de Schweinitz was the toastmaster, and the speakers included Dr. William H. Welch, Baltimore; Dr. J. Chalmers DaCosta, Philadelphia, and Mr. David Jayne Hill. Major-General Merritte W. Ireland, surgeon-general, U. S. Army, presented a specially bound volume containing addresses and letters as a tribute to Dr. Keen, and Dr. William J. Taylor, of the College of Physicians, presented a life size bust of Dr. Keen in army uniform, by Samuel Murray. Dr. Keen in responding made an address that will be printed in SCIENCE.

A PORTRAIT of Dr. Samuel W. Lambert, dean emeritus of the college of physicians and surgeons, Columbia University, was presented to the college on January 28. The presentation

J. E. Ackert, professor of parasitology of the Kansas State Agricultural College, and by Dr. D. L. Augustine, assistant in medical zoology at the Johns Hopkins University.

DR. LUDWIG SILBERSTEIN, of the research laboratory of the Eastman Kodak Company, delivered a series of fifteen lectures before the faculty and students of the University of Toronto on January 10-22. The first six lectures were devoted to explaining the general procedure of fixing events in space and time, and to developing the presence of special relativity with their consequences and applications to optics and to dynamics of a particle. The next six lectures were devoted to the conceptual as well as the mathematical aspects of general relativity and gravitation theory. The last three lectures were concerning the quantum theory of spectra.

AT the meeting of the American Philosophical Society on Friday evening, February 4, Dr. John C. Merriam, president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, read a paper entitled "Researches on the antiquity of man in California."

THE Aldred lecture was delivered at the Royal Society of Arts on January 12, by Dr. C. S. Myers, director of the psychological laboratory, and lecturer in experimental psychology, University of Cambridge. The subject "Industrial Fatigue."

was

THE American Roentgen Ray Society will award $1,000 to the American author of the best original research in the field of the roentgen ray, radium or radio-activity.

MARY WATSON WHITNEY, professor of astronomy emeritus and from 1889 to 1910 director of the observatory of Vassar College, died on January 20 aged seventy-three years.

DR. LINCOLN WARE RIDDLE, assistant professor of cryptogamic botany and associate curator of the Farlow Herbarium of Cryptogamic botany, died at his home in Cambridge on January 16 in the forty-first year of his age.

PRINCE PETER ALEXEIEVITCH KRAPOTKIN, distinguished as a geographer and for his books on science and natural history, has died at Moscow at the age of seventy-eight years.

M. PAINLEVÉ, professor of mathematics Paris and former prime minister has return from China to which he had been sent on mission concerning Chinese universities a railways. He has obtained from the Chine government the promise of an annual su vention of 100,000f. for an institute Chinese higher studies in Paris. The Chine government has also agreed to the creation, one of the Chinese universities, of an affiliat branch of the University of Paris, and it w devote to this purpose the sum of 500,00 annually, on condition that the French go ernment gives the same amount. The Chine president has further promised to have rep duced the collection of four great class which contain the essence of Chinese civili tion, and to present three copies to Fran These volumes run to not less than 5,000,0 pages.

THE British Medical Journal states that t late Dr. A. J. Chalmers, the authority on tr ical diseases, who died on his way home leave in April last, left a valuable collecti of medical books mainly on tropical diseas and including some almost priceless incun ula. The whole of these, with the except of about sixty volumes, presented to the Ro College of Physicians of London, have b given by Mrs. Chalmers to the Royal Soci of Medicine, which has decided that the lection shall be kept together and be knowr the "Chalmers Collection." Mrs. Chlan has presented the society with the sum of £ for the shelving and furnishing of a room which the books will be kept as a memoria her husband. It is hoped that the collec of books on tropical medicine will be adde from time to time, and the room chosen the Chalmers Library is well adapted for purpose. This coincides with the reconst tion of the new Section of Tropical Medi and Parasitology. The section was forme 1912, but was suspended during the war, has only this session been formerly co tuted. The new section will start with brary of its own-perhaps the finest colle of books on tropical medicine to be f anywhere.