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Switzerland, who has decided to work in the laboratories of Professor W. H. Perkin, at Oxford.

THE one hundred and fifth regular meeting of the American Physical Society will be held in Cleveland, at the physical laboratory of Case School of Applied Science on Friday and Saturday, November 26 and 27, 1920. Other meetings for the current season are as follows: December 28-31, Chicago; annual meeting, February 25-26, New York; April 22-23, Washington; time not determined, Pacific Coast section.

THE Society of Biology of Buenos Aires has become a branch of the Society of Biology of Paris.

UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL
NEWS

THE University of Virginia, founded by Thomas Jefferson, is preparing to celebrate its centennial anniversary next June, when it is expected that the alumni and friends will present an endowment fund of three million dollars.

DR. FRANK BILLINGS, who is professor of medicine in the University of Chicago, has given his medical library valued at $25,000 to the university. It will form the nucleus of the clinical library of the Medical School and will be eventually housed in the Albert Merritt Billings Hosiptal.

THE mayor of Frankfurt has announced that an endowment of 1,500,000 marks has been made to the Frankfurt University by James Speyer, the New York banker, in memory of his deceased sister, Mrs. Eduard Beit Von Speyer.

DR. WALTER DILL SCOTT, professor of phychology in Northwestern University and president of the Scott Company, who during the war was director of the committee on personnel and colonel, U. S A., has been elected president of Northwestern University.

MR. R. T. HASLAM, of the National Carbon Company, Cleveland, Ohio, has become di

rector of the School of Chemical Engineering Practice of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

SAMUEL L. BOOTHROYD has been appointed professor of astronomy and geodesy at Cornell University, to succeed Professor O. M. Leland. Professor Boothroyd's appointment takes effect in September, 1921, in order that he may spend the coming year at the Lick Observatory, Mount Hamilton, California.

WILLIAM BERTOLLET PLANK, superintendent of the United States Bureau of Mines Station, Birmingham, Alabama, has been appointed to the George B. Markle professorship of mining engineering at Lafayette College. Other new appointments in the Engineering School the current year are Morland King, of Union College, to be associate professor of electrical engineering, William S. Lohr, of Lancaster, to be associate professor of civil engineering, and Luther F. Witmer, of the United States Bureau of Standards, to be associate professor of metallurgy.

Ar the University of Iowa the following promotions to full professorships have been made: James Newton Pearce, chemistry; Lee Paul Sieg, physics; Ewen Murchison McEwen, anatomy, and John Hoffman Dunlap, hydraulics and sanitary engineering.

Ar the State University of Iowa, Dr. Dayton Stoner has been promoted from associate in zoology to assistant professor of zoology.

ON returning to New York on September 29 from a collecting trip in northern Norway, H. P. K. Agersborg, instructor in anatomy, Long Island College Hospital, was appointed assistant professor of zoology, at the University of Wyoming.

DR. ARDREY W. Downs has been appointed to the chair of physiology in the University of Alberta. Dr. Downs was formerly assistant professor of physiology at McGill University.

DR. GRIFFITH TAYLOR, physiographer in the Weather Service, Melbourne, has been appointed to a specially created position of asso

ciate professor of geography in the University of Sydney.

DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE VISIBLE SOUND WAVES

THE following notes, written by Lieutenant Thomas T. Mackie, 123d Field Artillery, A. E. F., describe a phenomenon which must have been observed rarely, if ever before, and it seems to be very much worth while to put the circumstances on record.

On one or two occasions within recent years the occurrence of sound waves visible to the naked eye under peculiar atmospheric conditions has, I believe, been reported; yet the event is so unusual that I have been persuaded to describe a similar one which I witnessed at the front on the opening day of the Meuse-Argonne offensive.

During the days immediately preceding the attack my regiment moved into position in a wooded area opposite Montfaucon, characterized by the roughness of the terrain, a jumble of high hills cut up by narrow and deep valleys. The battery to which I belonged was sent into position at the head of one of these valleys, enclosed by very steep slopes, and having roughly the shape of a V with the open end to the south. Some four or five hundred yards to our rear and approximately on a line with the extremities of the arms of the V was a battery of six-inch rifles.

For several days the weather had been more or less rainy and wet, and the morning of September 26 found us covered by a very heavy bank of fog which entirely excluded the sun. Soon after the attack opened, I had occasion to go to the top of one of the hills which flanked our position, and at a certain definite level above the battery a very considerable disturbance in the fog was noticeable after each discharge of the heavy rifles behind me. The visibility was such that the flash of the discharge could not be seen, but each time before the report reached us a band of greater density was clearly visible in the fog, moving with great rapidity up the valley toward us in the form of an arc. Its arrival was simultaneous with that of the sound of the discharge. This arc of greater fog density was perhaps six feet from its anterior to its posterior edge, and of about the same depth. It followed closely an altitude of some sixty or seventy feet above the floor of the valley and was clearly visible from both above and below that plane, but no similar phenomena were visible in any other plane.

The recent researches of Professor D. C. Miller, and others have shown that the muzzle wave from a large gun carries in its front a narrow region of compression immediately followed by a relatively wide region of expansion. From the above account, it would appear that the air was saturated with water vapor at a particular level, and that the expansion in the wave produced a visible increase in the fog density, the effect disappearing immediately again, owing to the subsequent re-evaporation when the air regained its normal pressure and temperature. The conditions of the terrain were very favorable to the concentration of a great amount of energy into the wave-front, and this was probably assisted by a sound-mirage effect. The upper layers of air being warmer than the lower the sound wave-fronts would be so bent as to tend to keep the energy near the earth's surface. The "experiment" was thus being conducted under such circumstances and on such a scale as can not readily be reproduced in the laboratory, and would rarely occur anywhere.

FREDERICK A. SAUNDERS
JEFFERSON PHYSICAL LABORATORY,
HARVARD UNIVERSITY,

October, 1920

DRIFT BOTTLES AS INDICATING A SUPERFICIAL CIRCULATION IN THE GUlf of

MAINE

IN his "Explorations in the Gulf of Maine" H. B. Bigelow1 has found evidence of a circulation of the water in the gulf. Since this evidence depends chiefly on the contours of the osohalines and the distribution of plankton, the direction and rate of movement of the drift bottles to be described, obtained incidentally in another investigation may be of importance in adding to this evidence. During the summer of 1919 as part of the hydrographic work in the Bay of Fundy by the Biological Board of Canada, 330 drift bottles were set out in the bay. Sixteen of these bottles have been picked up on the shores of the Gulf of Maine. The 1 Bull. Mus. Comp. Zool., Vol. 58, p. 29; Vol. 59, p. 149; Vol. 61, p. 163

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its entrance. Each bottle contained a Canadian postcard on which was printed besides the address of the Biological Station the offer of a reward to the finder who wrote the time and place of finding and posted the card. The bottles were of two kinds; two-ounce bottles and eight-ounce bottles; to the latter a galvanized iron drag was attached to hang at a depth of three fathoms, the object of the drag being to minimize the direct effect of the wind. Fifty-five of these latter bottles with drags were set out and six have been found and reported from outside the Bay of Fundy, to date (August 6, 1920). Three of these were picked up on the Cape Cod peninsula, the rest on the coast of Maine. Of the two hundred and seventy-five bottles without drags, ten have been reported from outside the bay. Eight of these ten were picked up

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In this interesting little volume Bouvier endeavors to present an up-to-date sketch of insect behavior. In the introduction he quotes the following remarkable passage from Maeterlinck's paper on Fabre and his work:1 The insect does not belong to our world. Other animals and even the plants, despite their mute lives and the great secrets they enfold, seem not to be such total strangers, for we still feel in them, notwithstanding all their peculiarities, a certain terrestrial fraternity. They may surprise or even amaze us at times, but they do not completely upset our thoughts. Something in the insects, however, seems to be alien to the habits, morals and psychology of our globe, as if it had come from some other planet, more monstrous, more energetic, more insensate, more atrocious, more infernal than our own. With whatever authority, with whatever fecundity, unequalled here below, the insect seizes on life, we fail to accustom ourselves to the thought that it is an expression of that nature whose privileged offspring we claim to be. . . . No doubt, in this astonishment and failure to comprehend, we are beset with an indefinable, profound and instinctive uneasiness, inspired by beings so incomparably better armed and endowed than ourselves, concentrations of energy and activity in which we divine our most mysterious foes, the rivals of our last hours and perhaps our suc

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Bouvier's discussion of the psychic life of insects is divided into two parts, a methodical" part, comprising Chapters I. to IX. and a "special" part, comprising the five concluding chapters. The methodical part treats of the tropisms, vital rhythms, differential sensibility, organic, specific and individual (associative) memory, the learning process, the modifications of habits, the evolution of instincts and in the ninth chapter of the comparative or historical method as illus1 Ann. Polit. Lit., 2 Avril, 1911.

trated by a single Hymenopterous family, the Psammocharide (Pompilida). Loeb and Bohn are at first rather rigidly followed, and the author is not very favorable to the position of Jennings. He attributes the "trial and error" activities to differential sensibility and even tries to use this as a partial explanation of "death feigning." But later his treatment of the problems of insect behavior broadens out and he reveals himself as a sane and catholic Neolamarckian, with strong eclectic tendencies and willing to utilize natural selection, Mendelism and mutationism in accounting for certain phenomena such as the sexual differences in instincts and the evolution of the worker and soldier castes in social insects. His general position is summarized at the end of the eighth chapter in the following paragraphs:

Owing to their tropisms, their rhythms, the adaptive manifestations of their differential sensibility, but especially their ability to transform habits into automatisms, the Articulates are essentially creatures of instinct, whose activities are largely made up of automatisms, but automatisms dominated by cerebral control ("puissance cérébrale'). They can not be regarded as simple "reflex machines," because they can adapt themselves to circumstances, acquire new habits, learn to remember, and manifest discernment. They might be regarded as somnambules, whose minds awake and give evidence of intelligence when the need is felt, and this takes us a long way beyond the mechanism of which Bethe has made himself the protagonist.

The activity of insects is characterized by two essential peculiarities: first, the presence of multiple, more or less perfectly adapted appendages, and second, the power very quickly to transform acts originally intelligent into automatic acts. This latter character is without doubt a conse quence of the former, for the appendages are instruments both structurally and functionally almost congealed (figés). At any rate, there can be no doubt that this is the principal factor in the evolution of the Articulates. Owing to this peculiarity, in fact, the automatic activity of the animal can go on enriching itself with new elements borrowed from intelligence and thus adapted to new necessities. A substratum of activity is thus produced and develops, permitting intelli

gence, as Bergson says, to mount on the wings of instinct. It does not soar far, nor very high, because its efforts very soon congeal in automatic form, but with each attempt the instinctive substratum is augmented to give the animal a vaster field of activity. Thus we reach the higher Articulates in which the most complex automatic activities, fringed with intelligence, become concatenated and purposive as if they had been regulated by reason. Hence we repeat here what we said at the beginning of the present work: The Articulates never differ so greatly from us as when they seem to resemble us most closely.

Chapter IX. on the behavior of the Pompilids, drawn very largely from the valuable researches of Pérez and his pupil Ferton, is admirably written and can be recommended to those who are inclined to underestimate the value of ethological and historical methods in comparative psychology. An even more interesting chapter could, however, be compiled from the literature on these solitary wasps. On page 161 Bouvier tells

us that "it is unfortunate that no biologist up to the present time has been able to witness the oviposition of Ceropales," thus overlooking completely the very interesting observations of Adlerz2 on the surreptitious oviposition of this parasite in the lung-books of the spiders that have been captured by the host Pompilid. The extraordinary habits of one of the American Pompilids, described by Needham and Lloyd in their "Life of Inland Waters," 1916, also deserve mention in such a chapter as the one under consideration. According to these authors,

There is a black wasp, Priocnemis flavicornis, occasionally seen on Fall Creek at the Cornell Biological Field Station, that combines flying with water transportation. Beavers swim with boughs for their dam, and water striders run across the surface carrying their booty, but here is a wasp that flies above the surface towing a load too heavy to be carried. The freight is the body of a huge black spider several times as large as the body of the wasp. It is captured by the wasp in a waterside hunting expedition, paralyzed by a sting adroitly placed, and is to be used for provisioning her nest. It could scarcely be dragged across the

2 Bik. K. Svensk. Vet. Akad. Hand., 1902.

ground, clothed as that is with the dense vegetation of the waterside; but the placid stream is an open highway. Out on to the surface the wasp drags the huge limp black carcass of the spider and, mounting into the air with her engines going and her wings steadily buzzing, she sails across the water, trailing the spider and leaving a wake that is a miniature of that of a passing steamer. She sails a direct and unerring course to the vicinity of her burrow in the bank and brings her cargo ashore at some nearby landing. She hauls it up on the bank and then runs to her hole to see that all is ready. Then she drags the spider up the bank and into her burrow, having saved much time and energy by making use of the open waterway.

Additional peculiarities of habit among the Pompilids have been described by other authors, notably by F. X. Williams in a recent work on the wasps of the Philippines.3 In the second part of the work Bouvier discusses certain selected phenomena which have been long and intensively studied by entomologists, the relations of insects to flowers, the homing of bees, ants and other insects, parthenogenesis and the determination of sex among the Hymenoptera and social life among the Articulates. When we consider that the researches on all these subjects have resulted in vast accumulations of observations, often hidden away in inaccessible journals and monographs, and a most bewildering diversity of interpretations, the author deserves high praise for his brief, concise and orderly presentation. Inadequacy of treatment was unavoidable in many cases, as, e. g., the omission of any consideration of the important experimental contributions of Brun (1914) to the subject of the orientation and homing of ants and other animals. Any adequate treatment of even a portion of insect ethology at the present time would, of course, require several volumes and would transcend the powers of any entomologist. Most readers will be delighted with Bouvier's book as it stands, with its lucid diction, its lack of dogmatic assertion, its kindly and

3 Bull. No. 14, Exper. Station Hawaiian Sug. Plant. Assoc., 1919.

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