It was then appropriate that before his retirement, there should be some demonstration of appreciation by the scientists themselves. This took the form of a buffet supper at the Raleigh Hotel, Washington, February 16. The event was planned by a committee chosen from the membership of the various Washington scientific societies in which the Department of Agriculture is largely represented. In the menu were included various items representative of the work of the department, such as Dasheen Chips," "Soy Bean Sauce," "American Roquefort Cheese," and "New Unnamed Grapes." During the evening, Dr. B. T. Galloway presented Secretary Meredith with a vellum volume bound in hand-tooled, dark morocco, and containing the following inscription of appreciation signed by the five hundred and sixty scientific and technical men who attended:

The researches of the United States Department of Agriculture in recent years have become so diversified and so important for the welfare of the country and are so absolutely dependent on a wise, far-seeing and sympathetic administration, such as you have given us, that your departure from among us is a matter of very general regret.

Your broad comprehension and appreciation of the fundamental importance of scientific research in agriculture, your prompt recognition of the needs of the service and your enthusiasm and effective efforts to secure proper recognition of the work and workers have been most stimulating to us and have been of the greatest value in promoting a better understanding of the activities and purposes of the department and their vital relation to the business and industrial interests of the nation and the progress of the whole people.

In view of the above facts, we the undersigned, desire to express our deep appreciation and to thank you for what you have done and extend to you our hearty good wishes for all time to come.

In response, the secretary spoke briefly of his interest in the scientific work of the department, and his hopes for its future development. The esteem in which Mr. Meredith is held, was evidenced by the large attendance at this unofficial gathering. And the spirit of those present was such that when all joined in a rousing cheer for "Meredith " and

in singing "He's a jolly good not only wholly in harmony w but a fitting expression of for the man.

CONGRESS ON MEDICAL THE Annual Congress on tion, Licensure, Hospitals an will be held at Chicago on M 10, under the auspices of Medical Education and Hos Council on Health and Publi the American Medical Associa ciation of American Medical Federation of State Medical United States and The Ameri on Hospital Service.

The program of the sessio Education are as follows: Introductory Remarks, Arthur De

man of the Council on Medical Hospitals, Chicago.

The Significance of Group Practis to the Profession and the Comm Leonard, Academy of Clinical M

SYMPOSIUM ON GRADUATE TRAINING MEDICAL SPECIALTIE

Medicine and the Medical Special (a) Internal medicine, George ical professor of medicin sity.

(b) Pediatrics, Harry M. McCla of pediatrics, University (c) Nervous and mental disea

Hamilton, professor of ne tal diseases, University o (d) Dermatology and syphilolo Pusey, emeritus professor University of Illinois. Surgery and the Surgical Specialtie (a) Surgery, Charles H. Frazie clinical surgery, Universi vania.

(b) Ophthalmology, Walter B.
ton.

(c) Oto-Laryngology, Wendell C
York.

(d) Orthopedic surgery, Robert

fessor of orthopedic sur University.

(c) Urology, Hugh H. Young, clinical professor of urology, Johns Hopkins University. The Relation of the General Practitioner to the Specialist, James B. Herrick, professor of medicine, Rush Medical College. Obstetrics and Gynecology, J. Whitridge Williams, dean and professor of obstetrics, Johns Hopkins University.

Public Health and Hygiene, Victor C. Vaughan, dean and professor of hygiene and physiological chemistry, University of Michigan. Preclinical Subjects

(a) Anatomy, Albert C. Eycleshymer, dean and professor of anatomy, University of Illinois.

(b) Physiology, Joseph Erlanger, professor of physiology, Washington University. (c) Pharmacology and therapeutics, Charles W. Edmunds, professor of materia medica and therapeutics, University of Michigan. (d) Pathology and bacteriology, James Ewing, professor of pathology, Cornell University.

Summary of Reports on Graduate Training in the Specialties, Louis B. Wilson, chairman of the Council's Committee on Graduate Medical Education, Rochester, Minn.

THE MANUFACTURE OF CHEMICALS FOR

RESEARCH WORK

To reduce the cost of chemicals needed for research work in various scientific departments of the University of Wisconsin, the chemistry department will give a new course in the manufacture of organic chemicals during the summer session under the direction of Professor Glenn S. Skinner. The only other course of this kind given anywhere in the country is at the University of Illinois.

Professor J. H. Mathews states that most of the chemicals now available for experimental work are obtained only at excessively high prices and the department is compelled to make the choice between excessively high laboratory fees or curtailment of laboratory instruction. It will be possible with the laboratory facilities available during the summer months to manufacture these chemicals more cheaply than they can be purchased, thus materially cheapening the cost to the student. All men of science in the university have

been asked to leave their orders for chemica with Professor Skinner and as far as is po sible these orders will be filled by his cours

Only eight advanced students will be a mitted to the course, and they will work fro nine to ten hours a day and will receive abo 40 cents an hour for their work. Only th most promising graduates and upper classme will be selected for the work, with the view giving them intensive training in practic organic chemistry and experience in larg scale operations.

INSTITUTE FOR FOOD RESEARCH AT STA FORD UNIVERSITY

THE Carnegie Corporation of New Yo announces that it has entered into an agre ment with Leland Stanford Jr. University, I which a food research institute is to be esta lished at the university for the intensive stud of the problems of production, distribution ar consumption of food. The corporation e pressed hope that the new organization will time be known as the Hoover Institute.

Need for such an institution was first su gested to the corporation by Mr. Herbe Hoover, former food administrator and a tru tee of Stanford University. The selection Stanford was due in part to the fact that the is deposited there documentary material rel tive to the economic side of the war gather by Mr. Hoover. He will serve as a member the advisory committee.

The institute will begin work July 1. T corporation will provide $700,000 for its su port for ten years.

The university has agreed to make its scie tific laboratories available to the institute. is not intended to duplicate the equipment research laboratories working in the field nutrition, but to cooperate with other agenci

Need for continual research work in prc lems arising after food has left the farme hands was emphasized by experience during t war, it is explained, when the study of fo supply was necessary to attain maximum e ciency in the nutrition of the nations involve During the war much of the previous data: garding food was found to be inaccurate.

with a commercial wood products utilization

company.

DR. EDWARD A. SPITZKA assumed his new work in the neuro-psychiatric section, medical division, War Risk Insurance Bureau, Washington, D. C., on March 1.

DR. HORACE W. FRINK, assistant professor of neurology at the Cornell Medical College, has sailed to work in psycho-analysis with Professor Freud at Vienna.

PROFESSOR SELSKAR M. GUNN, formerly associate professor of public health at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who has served for three years as associate director of the Commission for the Prevention of Tuberculosis in France, has left for Prague, Czechoslovakia, where he is to act as adviser in Public Health to the Ministry of Public Health. This appointment is in connection with the program of cooperation between the International Health Board of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ministry of Public Health.

A MEMORIAL lecture on the life and work of the late Sir William Abney will be delivered before the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain by Mr. Chapman Jones.

As a tribute to the services and character of the late General William C. Gorgas, the Senate has ordered that the remarks made at the memorial services in his honor, held at Washington, D. C., January 16, be printed.

UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL
NEWS

THE sum of $1,000,000 has been given to the new School of Medicine and Dentistry of the University of Rochester, by Mrs. Gertrude Strong Achilles and Mrs. Helen Strong Carter, daughters of Henry A. Strong, who died in Rochester in 1919. The money will be used toward the erection of a clinical hospital as a memorial to the father and mother of the donors.

THE Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society announces that in the department of mathematics at the University of Illinois, As

21

sociate Professor R. D. Carmichael has bee promoted to a full professorship; Dr. C. 1 Green, Dr L. L. Steimley, and Dr. B. Ma garet Turner have been appointed instructor. Professor E. R. Smith, on leave of absen from Pennsylvania State College, has bee appointed associate.

DR. RHODA ERDMANN, formerly lecturer Yale University, has been appointed lectur on experimental cytology in the University Berlin.

AT the University of Cambridge Dr. W. 1 H. Duckworth, Jesus College, has been a pointed to the newly created readership anatomy, Mr. F. A. Potts, Trinity Hal demonstrator of comparative anatomy, C. Pennell, Pembroke College, an addition junior demonstrator in anatomy and Dr. C. Myers, Gonville and Caius College, has bec appointed reader in experimental psycholog

DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENC HUMAN NATURE AS A REPEATING FACTOR: THAT THRICE TOLD TALE

THE following comments on Profess Wood's "Thrice Told Tale," SCIENCE, Janua 14, 1921, are based upon my long experience showing celestial objects through a great tel scope to tens of thousands of Saturday-nig visitors, and in explaining photographs of st clusters, the Milky Way, spiral nebulæ, etc., thousands of others. Perhaps these commen will be of interest to the psychologists.

I fear that Professor Wood is unduly co cerned about the victimization of present-da expositors of the universe, including himse Contrary to his implication that the respon to his (Wood's) explanation of the univers made by the chance visitor to his ingenio telescope, could never be made again, I wou say that the incident in all its essentials h certainly happened many times, and it w doubtless occur many times in the future, f human nature is a first-class repeating facto

When visitors to an observatory get a su den appreciation of the bigness of our sun a other stars, of the number of suns in o stellar system, of the possible number

planets revolving around those suns, of the strong probability that intelligent life exists in abundance throughout the universe, of the number of the spiral nebulæ, of the probable sizes and masses of the spirals, etc., they frequently react with the comment that, if what the astronomer says (of the universe) is true, it doesn't matter much whether we (the people of the nation or the peoples of the earth) do this or do that. Their "this" and their "that" are generally dictated by the subject which happens to be uppermost in the public mind at the time. If our country is thoroughly interested in the presidential campaign, as it certainly was in the struggle of June, 1912, what is more natural than that Professor Wood's lone visitor should not be the only person to illustrate his philosophy by turning to that absorbing question of the day? And so, following a sudden comprehension of the extent and contents of the universe, our Hercules cluster visitor reacted, "I think it doesn't matter very much whether Roosevelt or Taft is nominated at the Chicago convention;" and G. Lowes Dickinson's lone telegraph operator in a railroad shack in the Rockies reacted, "I guess it doesn't matter two cents after all who gets elected president."

Other visitorial reactions here have drawn upon other subjects occupying the public mind, but there is no call to describe them now.

I recently asked one of my colleagues who has dealt extensively with the visiting public in the past twenty-six years whether he has had any experience bearing on this subject. He replied: "I have on several occasions drawn visitors' responses paralleling the incident described in your address. I have observed this reaction, not only in connection with visitors to the observatory, but from members of audiences to which I have lectured. Last month I delivered a short lecture to the patients in the tubercular hospital at Livermore, California, on Life in other worlds,' making references to the great number of suns in our stellar system, the possible multitudes of planets revolving about those suns, and the probability that many of those planets are inhabited. At the close of the lecture one of the patients came

After

up to me and said, lecture, I don't think it mat we patients get well or not

I am respecting the value in saying that the essential Wood's story have happened in the past thirty-three yea with the more than 200,00 ideas of the universe have an immense number of c through the telescopes or by interpretation of astronomica hope it is also an understate my experience in dealing with this interesting psychologica have been somewhat more ex of others who have written on

May I turn from these natu an incident truly astonishing known book I have read of who, looking at the moon thr was told that the large ring-fo was the crater Copernicus (o or Archimedes-I can not lo now), and who said to his should like to know how astr ered that the name of that cr cus." This imaginary event i in astronomical circles, but opinion, had thought that it ac or even could happen. Yet, night in the nineties a visitor the observing chair said to me ness and innocence, "I was abl description of the moon's surfa like to have you tell me how a covered that the name of that Copernicus." If this unnatura. repeat, why waste energy and hypothesis that Wood's neighbo cord with widely prevailing ph genuine unique?

W. 1
MOUNT HAMILTON, CALIFORNIA,
February 17, 1921

GALILEO AND WOC

TO THE EDITOR OF SCIENCE been interested in horns, and I