Convening at 2 p.m., the Sections on Surgery, General and Abdominal; Ophthalmology; Diseases of Children; Pharmacology and Therapeutics; Dermatology and Syphilology; Orthopedic Surgery; Gastro-Enterology and Proctology; Miscellaneous.

Among the foreign guests will be: Dr. W. Blair Bell, Liverpool; Dr. H. E. G. Boyle, London; Dr. Jacques Calve, Plage, France; Sir George Lenthal Cheattle, London; Dr. Walter W. Chipman, Montreal; Dr. Pierre Janet, Paris; Sir Robert Jones, Liverpool; Professor V. Putti, Bologna, Italy; Dr. Richard G. Rows and Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Smith, London; Professor Soubbotitch, Belgrade, Serbia; and Drs. M. Turin and A. Widmer, Territet, Switzerland.

MME. CURIE'S VISIT TO THE UNITED STATES

THE events in honor of Mme. Curie arranged for last week were carried out in accordance with the program. On Tuesday, May 17, she was given a luncheon in New York by the American Chemical Society, the American Electrochemical Society, the Chemists Club and American sections of the Société de Chimie industrielle and the Society of Chemical Industry. Dr. Edgar F. Smith presided and addresses of welcome were made by Dr. Robert B. Moore, chief chemist of the Bureau of Mines; Dr. Francis Carter Wood, head cf the Crocker Cancer Research Laboratory of Columbia University; and Professor George B. Pegram, dean of the Columbia University School of Mines.

In the evening a reception in honor of Mme. Curie was given at the American Museum of Natural History by the New York Academy of Sciences and the New York Mineralogical Club, at which Dr. Michael I. Pupin, professor of electro-mechanics at Columbia University; Dr. Robert Abbe, Dr. George F. Kunz and Professor Alexander H. Phillips, of Princeton University, made addresses. Mme. Curie's election as an honorary fellow of the American Museum of Natural History was announced by Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn.

On Wednesday afternoon the American Association of University Women, presided over

by Mrs. Edgerton Parsons, welcomed Madame Curie in Carnegie Hall. Dean Ada Comstock, of Smith College, president of the association, extended a welcome on behalf of the college and university women of the United States. Addresses were made by Dr. Florence Sabin, professor of histology at the Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. Alice Hamilton, of the Harvard Medical School. President Pendleton, of Wellesley College, announced the award to Mme. Curie of the special Ellen Richards Research Prize of $2,000.

On Thursday evening, at a dinner given in her honor by the National Institute of Social Science, the gold medal of the society was presented by Dr. Henry Fairfield Osborn, who read the presentation address of Vice-president Coolidge, who was absent on account of illness.

The gram of radium valued at $120,000, a gift from the women of America, was presented to Mme. Curie by President Harding on May 20. M. Jusserand, the French Ambassador, made a brief introduction. After the presentation Mme. Curie responded as follows:

I can not express to you the emotion which fills my heart in this moment. You, the chief of this great Republic of the United States, honor me as no woman has ever been honored in America before. The destiny of a nation whose women can do what your countrywomen do to-day through you, Mr. President, is sure and safe. It gives me confidence in the destiny of democracy.

I accept this rare gift, Mr. President, with the hope that I may make it serve mankind. I thank your countrywomen in the name of France. I thank them in the name of humanity which we all wish so much to make happier. I love you all, my American friends, very much.

In the evening at a meeting held under the auspices of the U. S. National Museum, presided over by Dr. Charles D. Walcott, of the Smithsonian Institution, Miss Julia Lathrop extended to Mme. Curie greetings on behalf of the scientific men and women of Washington and Dr. Robert A. Millikan, of the University of Chicago, gave an address on radium, describing the researches that led to its isolation by Mme. Curie. On the following day

Mme. Curie set in motion the machinery of the new low temperature laboratory of the Bureau of Mines, which is dedicated to her.

The degree of LL.D. has been conferred on Mme. Curie by Smith College, and she received the same degree from the University of Pennsylvania at a special ceremony arranged in her honor on May 23. The Chicago Section of the American Chemical Society has awarded to her the Willard Gibbs Medal which will be presented at a formal banquet on June 14.

SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS

DR. EDWARD BENNETT ROSA, chief physicist of the Bureau of Standards, died suddenly on May 17, aged sixty years.

PROFESSOR S. C. PRESCOTT, the acting head of the department of biology and public health at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,

has sent a letter to the former students of the late Professor W. T. Sedgwick informing them of the establishment of a William T. Sedgwick Memorial Fund and asking for contributions of from five to one hundred dollars. The income of the fund will go to Mrs. Sedgwick during her life, after which the principal will go into the funds of the institute, where it will probably be used to establish a memorial professorship or some other project to encourage public health teaching and general sanitation.

PRESIDENTS of state academies of science have been elected as follows: Professor J. C. Jensen, University of Nebraska, of the Nebraska Academy of Science; Dr. D. W. Morehouse, of Drake University, of the Iowa Academy of Science; and Dr. Frank L. West, of the Utah Agricultural College, of the Utah Academy of Sciences.

DR. F. B. SUMNER, of the Scripps Biological Institution, at La Jolla, has been elected president of the San Jacinto Section of the Western Society of Naturalists.

PROFESSOR AUGUST KROGH, professor of physiology in the University of Copenhagen, recently awarded the Nobel Prize, and Dr.

Clemens von Pirquet, professor of children's diseases in the University of Vienna, have been appointed Silliman lecturers at Yale University. Dr. Krogh's lectures will be connected with his recent work on the physiology of capillaries, and those of Dr. von Pirquet on undernutrition, with reference to tuberculosis in children and its treatment.

A NUMBER of engineers of the United States will hold a joint meeting with British engineers in London in July. The American engineers will present Sir Robert Hadfield on June 29 with the John Fritz medal, awarded to him in recognition of his invention of manganese steel.

WE learn from Nature that Mr. J. E. Sears, Jr., has been appointed deputy warden of the standards in succession to Major P. A. MacMahon, who has retired under the age-limit. Mr. Sears is superintendent of the metrology department at the National Physical Laboratory, and will continue to hold this post in addition to that at the Standards Department of the Board of Trade.

IN recognition of the successful laboratory research accomplished by Dr. Esmond R. Long, of the department of pathology at the University of Chicago, on "The fundamental problems in the nutrition of the tubercle bacillus," the National Tuberculosis Association, with headquarters in New York, has appropriated $4,000 for the further prosecution by Dr. Long of this work.

PROFESSOR W. H. STEVENSON, head of the department of farm crops and soils in the Iowa State College and chief in agronomy and vicedirector of the Iowa Agricultural Experiment Station, has been granted a year's leave of absence to accept an appointment as the representative of the United States on the Permanent Committee of the International Institute of Agriculture at Rome, to succeed Dean Thomas F. Hunt, of the University of California. Dr. P. E. Brown will be the acting head of the department in Professor Stevenson's ab

sence.

DR. MAURICE H. GIVENS has resigned as chief of the department of biochemistry in the research laboratories of the Western Pennsylvania Hospital, Pittsburgh, Pa.

MONSIEUR BÉHAL, professor in the Paris School of Pharmacy, has been elected a vicepresident and president for 1922 of the Paris Academy of Medicine to fill the vacancy caused by the death of M. Bourquelot. Professor Bénal has been a member of the Academy of Medicine since 1907, and was lately elected a member of the Academy of Sciences.

THE Council of the Institution of Civil Engineers has made the following awards for papers read and discussed during the session 1920-21: A Telford gold medal and a Telford premium to Mr. George Ellson (London); Telford gold medals to Sir Murdoch MacDonald (Cairo) and Dr. T. E. Stanton (Teddington); a George Stephenson gold medal to Mr. R. G. C. Batson (Teddington); a Watt gold medal to Mr. S. A. Main (Sheffield); and Telford premiums to Mr. Algernon Peake (Sydney, N. S. W.), Mr. L. H. Larmuth (London), Mr. H. E. Hurst (Cairo), Professor T. B. Abell (Liverpool), and Mr. Percy Allan (Sydney, N. S. W.).

THE observatory founded in 1913 by Sir Norman Lockyer and Lieutenant-Colonel F. K. McClean on Salcombe Hill, above Sidmouth, is henceforth to be called "The Norman Lockyer Observatory." It is proposed to place in the observatory a portrait of Sir Norman Lockyer, in the shape of a medallion, to be executed by Sir Hamo Thornycroft.

IT is announced in Nature that the annual meeting of the British Medical Association will be held at Newcastle-upon-Tyne on July 15-23, under the presidency of Professor David Drummond. On the occasion of the president's address on July 19 the gold medal of the association will be presented to Sir Dawson Williams, editor of the British Medical Journal since 1898, in recognition of his distinguished services to the association and the medical profession. In connection with the annual meeting in 1922, to be held at Glasgow, Sir William Macewen, Regius professor of sur

gery in the University of Glasgow, is announced as president-elect. The council of the association has recommended that the annual meeting in 1923 be held at Portsmouth.

UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL
NEWS

THE Connecticut legislature is being asked for $625,000 for the State College, of which $400,000 is for a new science building for the chemical, botanical, physics, and bacteriological departments. The remainder is for maintenance during the ensuing biennium, and would be an increase from $150,000.

THE University of Virginia has received the promise of a gift of $100,000 from the Carnegie Corporation of New York on condition that the money shall be used for the purposes of permanent endowment, and that it shall be payable after there has been raised not less than $500,000 for permanent endowment from other sources.

PROFESSOR PAUL H. M.-P. BRINTON, head of the department of chemistry at the University of Arizona, has accepted appointment as professor of analytical chemistry in the school of chemistry at the University of Minnesota.

DR. CHARLES F. BROOKS, of the U. S. Weather Bureau, has been appointed associate professor of meteorology and climatology at Clark University.

DR. MEYER SOLIS-COHEN has been appointed assistant professor of internal medicine in the Graduate School of Medicine of the University of Pennsylvania.

DR. KLOTZ, of the chair of pathologic anatomy at the University of Pittsburgh, has accepted a call to the similar chair at São Paulo.

Long life to the moon for a dear noble cratur Which serves for lamplight all night in the dark, While the sun only shines in the day which by natur

Wants no light at all as ye all may remark.

was merely a manufactured story" without antecedent, it seems pertinent to remark that this idea of the independence of daylight and the sun is of great antiquity and somewhat common in early civilization.

For example, in the Hebrew story of creation we find:

... God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good; and God divided the light from the darkness. And God called the light day, and the darkness he called night. And the evening and the morning were the first day. (Genesis I., 3-5.)

On the second day God created the land and water and on the third day the flora. Not until the fourth day did God create the sun (Genesis I., 14-18) "to divide the day from the night," "to be for a sign," "to rule the day" and incidentally "to give light upon the earth." Also, God set the "lesser light (the moon) to rule the night." It also gave light upon the earth. Evidently, the "Irishman's " and that of the South American astronomy Indians are in strict and complete accord with the concepts of the author of Genesis. Quite clearly, the day was light before the sun was set to "rule" it, but the night was dark before the moon lighted it. It is not to be presumed that we can attribute any Irish wit to the author of Genesis, but it may be that the Irishman was a good orthodox churchman and, in common with many others, accepted the scripture as his authority in science. However, the Indians' concept must have been of independent origin.

Seriously, does it not appear that the ancients, even in a high degree of civilization, had only very vague and confused ideas of the relation between light and the sun?

Simple as it may appear to us to regard a luminous body as the source of some influence, which, acting on the eye, excites the sense of sight, much doubt appears to have existed among those who

first investigated the subject as to whether objects become visible by means of something emitted by them, or by means of something issuing from the eye of the spectator.1

Some of the Greeks conceived vision as due to something (light?) projected from the eye.

They all [some of the Greeks] had a confused notion that as we may feel bodies at a distance by means of a rod, so the eye may perceive them by the intervention of light. It is very remarkable that this strange hypothesis held ground for many centuries, and little or no progress was made in the subject till it was established on the authority of Alhazen . . . in the eleventh century A. D., that the cause of vision proceeds from the object and not from the eye.2

Aristotle maintained that light was not an emission from any source, but a mere quality of a medium.3 This concept appears to be in substantial accord with the first light of the author of Genesis.

In spite of the existence of sun worship among many savages, it appears that our everyday commonplace concept of the sun as the primary source of light is of very recent origin among civilized peoples, and no astonishment need be occasioned by finding savages who have not grasped it.

WASHINGTON, D. C., April 20, 1921

IRWIN G. PRIEST

A SECTION OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION ON THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE TO THE EDITOR OF SCIENCE: As one of a group interested in the formation of a section on the history of science, I would venture to suggest that the inclusive nature of the designation-History of Science is well illustrated by the use of the word "science" by the parent organization. Surely a section has the same right to include historical, philological, and other sciences, which touch the history of science under the designationHistory of Science as the parent organization has in its use of the term. The history of science touches diverse fields, and as this 1 Preston, Theory of Light, 3rd Ed., p. 2.

2 Preston, p. 5.

3 Preston, p. 4.

subject becomes more intensely pursued in American Universities the contact with philology, anthropology, history, and allied subjects will increase. To group "philological science" with "history of science" is absolutely unnatural; it has an implication, apparently, that the history of science is to be studied from the philological standpoint. No one would question that philology does frequently contribute, but it can hardly be said. to represent a fundamental method in the history of science.

History of science, using science with the inclusive meaning as in the title A. A. A. S., is surely the proper name for the new section now under way.

LOUIS C. KARPINSKI.

SCIENTIFIC BOOKS

The Crisis of the Naval War. By Admiral of the Fleet, VISCOUNT JELLICOE OF SCAPA, G.C.B., O.M., G.C.V.O. 259 pages; 8 plates, 6 charts and appendices. George Doran Co. 1921.

This is a companion volume to Admiral Jellicoe's "The Grand Fleet, 1914-1916" which was reviewed in these columns.1 The meeting in battle of the fleets of Great Britain and Germany was in its essence, a try-out of scientific methods of annihilation, as developed by the leading scientific nations of the world. It was said of the earlier volume that the book might aptly carry as a sub-title Science Afloat up to 1916."

66

The present volume gives developments during 1917. It is not the story of a great fight like Jutland; but of undersea warfare, in which the submarine, like an assassin, struck from behind or below. Warfare on the sea had changed materially; and battleships needed screening from torpedo and mine, equally with transport and merchantman. One may well ask at this point, "Was Jutland" (in some respects the greatest naval battle ever fought; but on the whole the least decisive and most unsatisfactory) "the last great sea

1 SCIENCE, N. S., Vol. L., No. 1279, pp. 21-23, July 4, 1919.

fight?" It seems likely; and the long line from Salamis down, draws to an end. The decisive conflicts of the future will be fought by aerial squadrons.

The present volume contains 12 chapters. The first deals with Admiralty organization. and tells of the changes made in 1917. The Admiral believes that specialists (which means scientific experts) should be part of the staff, not just attached. He says:

In the Army there is, except in regard to artillery, little specialization. The training received by an officer of any of the fighting branches of the Army at the Staff College may fit him to assist in the planning and execution of operations, provided due regard is paid to questions of supply, transport, housing, etc. This is not so in the Navy.

He proceeds to show that naval officers are quite a different order of being from land officers. Further discussion of this view may be omitted here. But the Admiral preaches sound gospel, so far as men of science are concerned, when he says:

Human nature being what it is, the safest procedure is to place the specialist officer where his voice must be heard, that is, give him a position on the staff.

Some rather forceful remarks follow to the effect that various divisions are not to work in water-tight compartments, but must be in close touch with one another.

We notice that in the Admiralty reorganization,

The well-known electrical consulting engineer ... has consented to serve as director of Experiments and Research, at the Admiralty—unpaid. We italicize one word and refrain from comment.

Chapter II. gives the general features of the Submarine Campaign in the early part of 1917. We are let in on certain state secrets; such as,

"Experienced British officers aware of the extent of the German submarine building program, and above all aware of the shadowy nature of our existing means of defense against such a form of warfare" realized that the Allies "were faced with a situation fraught with the very gravest possibilities."'