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has recently accepted a position with the Central Scientific Company of Chicago as manager of development and manufacturing.

PROFESSOR JAMES H. LEUBA, of Bryn Mawr College, who is to be abroad during the next academic year on sabbatical leave, has been invited to give five lectures at the Sorbonne in the Fall of 1921, under the auspices of the Institut de Psychologie. His subject will be the psychology of religious mysticism. He He is also to deliver a series of lectures at Kings College, London.

THE Columbia Chapter of the Society of Sigma Xi announces a lecture on "Progress in physics in the last decade," by Michael Idvorsky Pupin, professor of electro-mechanics. This lecture which was given on the evening of May 4 is the first of a proposed series of annual lectures on the Progress of Science.

AN address on "The spirit and method of research in agriculture" was given by Dr. E. W. Allen, of the office of experiment stations, at the college of agriculture, at the Ohio State University, on April 15.

DR. ARTHUR GORDON WEBSTER, head of the department of physics at Clark University, will sail on May 28 for London, where he will deliver a lecture on "Researches on Sound," before the Royal Institution, on June 10.

DR. FRANK SCHLESINGER, director of the Yale Observatory, will deliver an address before the Yale chapter of Sigma Xi on "The distances of the stars," on May 10.

DR. C. G. ABBOT, assistant secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, delivered an address before the Washington Academy of Sciences on April 22 on "The solar constant observing stations of the Smithsonian Institution."

DR. GEORGE FREDERICK WRIGHT, known for his contributions to geology especially glacial period, and professor emeritus of the harmony of science and religion at Oberlin College, died at Oberlin on April 20, aged eighty-three years. THE establishment of the Chemical Warfare Service at Edgewood Arsenal, Edgewood,

Maryland, will appoint fifty chemists as soon as suitable men can be secured. The United States Civil Service Commission has announced that until further notice it will receive applications for these positions in the following grades: Chemist at $3,000 to $5,000 a year, associate chemist at $2,000 to $3,000 a year, and junior chemist at $1,400 to $2,000 a year. Promotion from the lower to the higher grades will depend upon demonstrated ability and the needs of the service. The examination announcement states that there ате opportunities for employment in fifteen specialties of chemical science. Full information and application blanks may be obtained by communicating with the United States Civil Service Commission, Washington, D. C.

THE inadequacy of the appropriation to the Bureau of Fisheries for scientific work has made necessary a reduction in the number of projects to be pursued by that bureau during the next fiscal year and will necessitate keeping the Woods Hole, Massachusetts, laboratory closed during the summer. Therefore, no applications for the use of tables during the coming season can be approved.

A COMMUNICATION from J. Parke Channing of New York, chairman of the American Engineering Council's Committee on Public Affairs, has been placed before President Harding and representatives of the council have been advised that the president is considering the recommendation that an engineer be placed on the Interstate Commerce Commission with other recommendations for appointments to the three vacancies. A supplementary communication was also submitted to the president naming six engineers with qualifications for this appointment in the hope that such list would be useful to him. In representations to the president, the council is also acting for the American Society of Civil Engineers, the American Association of Engi

neers and the American Institute of Consulting Engineers. The American Engineering Council's Committee on Procedure has appointed L. W. Wallace, executive secretary of the council, as its representative on the U. S.

Board of Surveys and Maps. Mr. Wallace succeeds Alfred D. Flinn, secretary of Engineering Foundation, and has been assigned to the Committee on Cooperation. Members of the Advisory Council of the board have been urging the American Engineering Council to aid them in obtaining an adequate program involving a larger appropriation for topographic maps. Congress has asked for an outline of this program and as soon as this is completed the council will decide on the support that can be given.

THE prospect of large lumber operations in South America carried on by interests from the United States is opening a field of promising possibilities to the American forester, and this situation has caused the faculty of the New York State College of Forestry to consider the advisability of adding Spanish to the language requirements of the forestry course. The value of Spanish to the American forester is a reflection of the growing scarcity of forests in the United States and Canada. The consequential high prices of wood products make lumbering in distant countries profitable. South America, according to authorities of the college, presents a new sphere of discovery in wood utilization as there are many species of trees about which little is known regarding their applicability to commercial purposes. The pine forests of Chili and southern Brazil occupy vast areas. The Brazilian Parana pines are said to cover 260 million acres and will produce from five to ten thousand board feet per acre. Restrictive export duties and the lack of shipping facilities have prevented earlier exploitation of these natural resources of South America, but the prodigality of the United States in the use of its forests has overcome these obstacles.

UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL
NOTES

THE College of Agriculture and the College of Veterinary Medicine of Cornell University will receive approximately $1,350,000 from the State as a consequence of the appropria

tion bill signed by Governor Miller. The College of Agriculture will receive, roughly, $1,250,000, while the Veterinary College, it is estimated, will receive $100,000, which is slightly less than last year's appropriation.

THE North Carolina Legislature has granted the University of North Carolina $925,000 as a two-year maintenance fund and $1,490,000 for permanent improvements for two years.

PROFESSOR GEORGE C. EMBODY has returned to Cornell after spending the period since last September establishing at the University of Washington the first college of fisheries in an American university.

DR. IRA M. HAWLEY, of Cornell University, has been appointed professor of zoology and entomology at the Utah Agricultural College and Entomologist for the Utah Agricultural Experiment Station. Sherwin Maeser, Ph.D., University of California, has been appointed associate professor of chemistry at the college.

DR. LEWIS KNUDSON, of the department of botany of Cornell University, has gone to Spain to assist in establishing departments of plant physiology in the Universities of Madrid and Barcelona.

DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE PALEOBOTANY AS VIEWED BY TWO

GEOLOGISTS

In the current April American Journal of Science appear two papers reciting the larger stratigraphic and faunal evidence bearing on climate in time. Professor A. C. Coleman in the first of these lectures cites especially Dr. Knowlton's views of all-tropic ancient climates thus:

Part I. of Dr. Knowlton's paper rouses enthusiasm with its splendid array of forests mostly tropical from all parts of the world culminating in the Eocene flora. His account of the vegetation of the past confirms and heightens the impression left by paleozoology that during the greater part of the world's history temperatures have been genial even in the far north and far south where

frigid climates now reign. Annual rings are rarely found in the trees, and only once before the Pleistocene is a period of severe cold admitted in the early Permian time of glaciation; and then the cold period was "probably of short duration,' and did not affect North America, Europe or northern Asia.

It is further observed that while few references to periods of cold or drought in the world's history are found in paleobotany, "mild and moist periods are tremendously emphasized," and intervening periods of drought and cold "slurred over, or entirely unrecorded."

It is not surprising, then, that the evidence for aridity and cold during several periods of the earth's history should make little impression on a paleobotanist!

In somewhat similar inference or vein, Professor Charles Schuchert follows with several pages on climatic evolution. To Coleman's brief consideration of the more readable phases in the evidence for desert conditions seasonal variations, and ice ages in the past, Schuchert adds the Blackwelder view that a study of the color phases and stratification of the Alaskan sedimentary series indicates a more or less persistently cool moist climate throughout the known geologic history of Alaska. And the more or less provable fact is emphasized that there is usually "a dearth of plant evidence for the climatic conditions during the early and late parts of the many periods when the continents were largest, highest and most arid.”

For several years I have called attention to the remarkable series of Rhätic plant localities in Argentina which strongly suggest a climate like that of to-day. And too, the shales in which these plants occur are highly laminated [seasonally so]. But in such instances, which may be depended upon to multiply, the paleobotanist must yet find the fuller means of proving the presumption of cold and aridity from plant types, however insistently others ask immediately coordinated proof. Similarly it was stated in SCIENCE several years ago that:

may

There is a very small record of the upland vegetation of past times; although the enormous extent of the unknown upland record could not be surmised so long as the alternate emergence and subsidence of the continental areas remained wholly unmapped. Yet it appears that the high upland and polar, and not the tropic or coastal fringe plants have long included the great majority of plastic forms; and it is certain that upland and polar forms moved forward during the periods of continental emergence closing the geologic epochs, and were least liable to extinction during medial subsidence. That is to say we know best the aplastic coastal fringe forms with a broken record.

Again it was stated (Vol. II., p. 238, American Fossil Cycads):

Almost invariably from the Devonian on, it has been mainly xerophyllous lacustrine or swamp types which form the great bulk of fossil plants. Even the 3,000 species of Carboniferous time afford only a one-sided picture of the specialized coal swamp floras; no glimpse is had of contemporary mountain or upland florules.

Furthermore the notion that the tepid climates of the older botanists and zoologists have no basis (Berry), and are not sustained by the long studied invertebrate record, only finds a more insistent expression in recent text books. It goes back to Leopold von Buch, and received elaboration by Neumayr. It finds so far as elements go mention in Dana. It was stated to me in pretty hard and fast form in the field as a beginning student, by an old teacher, A. von Könen, twenty-eight years ago. And any one who takes the trouble to read a contribution I brought out in 1903, on the rôle of polar climates in evolution, then a sort of philosophic study, can well understand that the ideas of the real character of sediments and the indicators of seasonal change which are quite in entirety of more recent date, would have been "old grist" for the polar mill.

As a main objective, let me try to explain in a few brief paragraphs for the sake of both botanists and geologists the nature of the paleobotanic crux.

Primarily the Cretaceous floras looked tropical, and it has been difficult to read anything else into them. If it can be done it will require long and elaborate quantitative study of the phytologic factors. It would however be early to say there are no cold scrub forests in the lower Cretaceous, and I give some attention to this subject in the current April number of the American Journal of Botany. Then at the other end of a long record stood juxtaposed the dank coastal fringes of coal plants; whence the long series of the Permian, Triassic and Jurassic, found their more obvious antecedents in warm climates and seemed to terminate in such. The ginkgos were long almost the only element suggesting interruption to the all-tropic landscape, with the fact that they must be a very great phylum, hidden. But with the cycads dominant and certainly tropical, there was no open sesame to a broader vista for the paleobotanist.

Now it was at this point that Nathorst and Wieland, using the words of the excellent University of Glasgow historian of botany, "began to learn something about the cycads." It was found that these had flowers with the possibility of all the sex variation seen in dicotyls, and stems with generalized structure. A great Cycadophyte leaf series was discerned resting under more than a suspicion of affinity to the forerunners of the angiosperms. And presently it was found that the cycadeoid types were in great numbers microphyllous, and that they crossed over into small fernlike leaves called Taniopteris, etc. Next the paleobotanists seemed as if by common consent to see side by side with the ever lengthening cycadeoid record a a great ginkgoid phylum. Within but a few fortunate years of investigation types of scrub, for such many of the cycadeoids surely are, and forest elements with the capacity to live in varied climates, could be pointed out with some degree of safety.

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summer nor a winter. And so the difficulties which beset the work on fossil plants must be met serially.

Meanwhile as paleobotanists we are peculiarly indebted to Dr. Knowlton for his splendid Philippic on tropic climates. It was well that it should appear in this time of rapid accumulation of new facts, at least as a warning against the grave danger of an overburden of inference in the guise of proven fact. Even that big and valuable word diastrophism might suffer. And the aggrading of the continents, with their reappearance, mountain bulwarked as regularly as Chladni figures, might fail of demonstration. The Knowlton defense has already functioned in bringing out the two accentuations of the value of the physical and paleozoologic factors herein noted. Yet, the lower-most Cretaceous floras of the mid-west are not truly tropic. We may doubt if there is a single North American dicotyledonous flora, unless it be that associated with the Vicksburg Oligocene, that by any possibility merits the term tropical in a strict sense. “ "Many of the floras indicate warmer or wetter conditions than now prevail in correspondent latitudes; but most are far from tropical."

All evidence must eventually be coordinated, and the paleobotanists will lay ears to the rocks. To use exactly the witticism of Voltaire, let our conchiferous brethren be reassured.

G. R. WIELAND

HAVE BIRDS AN ACUTE SENSE OF SOUND LOCATION?

THERE can be little doubt that the drum membrane picks up very minute energies in the form of sound vibrations. There can be no question that a certain amount of the energy impinging on the outer surface of the drum membrane passes through it into the air of a cavum tympani. It may also be conceded that energies entering the middle ear area are fairly well dampened out in so far as a reflection back toward the drum membrane is concerned. This is true for the mammals. The bird, however, has but a single middle ear

which is flanked on either side by a drum membrane. The energies transmitted to the air of the middle ear from the deep surface of one drum membrane may pass directly to the deep surface of the other membrane.

The ability to locate a sound may be partly due to its intensity. It may also be due to a differential registration of fundamental and overtones on the two sides. A pure tone may not be located. Overtones are less readily dampened out than fundamentals as Mach's experiments seem to indicate. The relation of the position of the sound source to the head-form and diffraction into the two external canals would therefore play an important rôle in relation to the differential registration of fundamental and overtones. This was I believe worked out in part by Fite of Princeton University.

It would seem that the evidence in birds points not only to a great acuteness in hearing but also to a definite ability in determining the direction of the sound source. This in spite of the fact that birds do not possess the functional auricle of the mammal. If it be true that the sense of location for sound is so well developed in owls, woodpeckers and possibly robins, then a special significance may be attached to a confluence of the middle ear cavities. It may be that a more definite analysis of the fundamental and its overtones is due to a greater efficiency of the two drum membranes applied to a single middle ear.

The writer will appreciate and acknowledge any direct observational data on this problem of the acuteness of hearing in birds and in particular the evidence for the definiteness with which a bird may locate a sound source. A. G. POHLMAN

ST. LOUIS UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE

QUOTATIONS

SCIENTIFIC ORGANIZATION

PROFESSOR W. M. WHEELER, a learned and witty American biologist, has recently addressed a genial remonstrance to his scientific fellow-citizens on their devotion to resounding

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phrases. His remarks deserve a wider application, and are very pertinent to ourselves. The current watchword of the elect, he says, the "highbrow" toast of the moment, is "organization." Wayward, individual pursuit of knowledge is out of fashion. It is distasteful to the bureaucratic spirit of the age, it tends to overlapping of effort, and it exalts personal reputations, possibly and regrettably those of obscure unofficial people. The committee is the thing. The problem must be set, the parts allotted, the results received, edited, and issued by the authority of men sitting round a table. There must be sub-committees and super-committees, joint committees and special committees. How else shall we control genius, encourage mediocrity, and secure team-work" "? How better can science present a respectable front to governments or offer responsible hands for grants-in-aid? A detached individual is an unstable creature ; he may die, neglect to report, get off the lines, or make discoveries of a very upsetting kind. A committee is safe; its existence secures continuity and is a guarantee against the precipitate production of uncomfortable truths. But the professor fears that the child product of organization is organizers, and that in elaborating our machinery we forget its purpose. Fortunately, however, mankind is wiser than any of its generations and has a knack of creeping out of the hard shells it continues to secrete. "Organization" is the fad of to-day, and will be as ephemeral as its predecessors. "Culture" was one of these. But "culture" died, and its corrupt body became decadence when, ceasing to be a mental attitude, it became an intonation and a set of opinions. Progress was another; but that has hardly recovered from the shock of the war, which gave us good reason to distrust some aspects of modern civilization. Now even popular preachers find it safe to mock at "progress." The truth is that a conception seldom becomes crystallized in a phrase until it has outgrown its most fertilizing activity. Ideas have their cycle of life; they are born of the great, named by the dull, and killed by common usage.-The London Times.

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