Beginning with the summer of 1919 the work of the laboratory will be organized on a research basis, and only those prepared for independent work will be admitted. The laboratory will open June 23, continuing in session ten weeks and closing August 30. Any one interested in the work for the coming summer should address the director, Robert B. Wylie, of the University of Iowa, Iowa City, Iowa.

DISTINGUISHED SERVICE MEDALS GENERAL PERSHING has awarded the Distinguished Service Medal to a number of medical officers including the following:

As

FRANCIS A. WINTER, Brigadier-General. chief surgeon of the lines of communication, American Expeditionary Forces, from June to December, 1917, he organized medical units at the base ports and in camps in France. He established large supply depots from which medical supplies were distributed to the American Expeditionary Forces, and by keen foresight and administrative ability, made these supplies at all times available for our armies.

JOSEPH A. BLAKE, Colonel. As chief consultant for the district of Paris, and commanding officer of Red Cross Hospital, No. 2, he efficiently standardized surgical procedures especially in the recent methods of treating fractures. His remarkable talent has materially reduced the suffering and loss of life among our wounded.

GEORGE W. CRILE, Colonel. By his skill, researches and discoveries, he saved the lives of many of our wounded soldiers. His tireless efforts to devise new methods of treatment to prevent infection and surgical shock revolutionized Army surgery and met with the greatest success.

WILLIAM H. WILMER, Colonel. As surgeon in charge of medical research laboratories, air service, American Expeditionary Forces, since September, 1918, he has rendered most distinguished service. His thorough knowledge of the psychology of flying officers and the expert tests applied efficiently and intelligently under his direction have done much to decrease the number of accidents at the flying schools in France and have established standards and furnished indications which will be of inestimable value in all future work to determine the qualifications of pilots and observers. The data collected by him is an evidence of his ability, his painstaking care and of

his thorough qualifications for the important work intrusted to him. The new methods, instruments and appliances devised under his direction for testing candidates for pilots and observers have attracted the attention and been the subject of enthusiastic comment by officers of the allied services, and will be one of great importance in promoting the safety and more rapid development of aerial navigation.

JOEL E. GOLDTHWAIT, Colonel. As a member of the medical corps he has, by his unusual foresight and organizing ability, made it possible to reclaim for duty thousands of men suffering from physical defects. He has thereby materially conserved for combat service a great number of men who would have been lost to the service.

THOMAS W. SALMON, Colonel. He has, by his constant tireless and conscientious work, as well as by his unusual judgment, done much to conserve manpower for active front line work. He was the first to demonstrate that war neurosis could be treated in advanced sanitary units with greater success than in base hospitals.

SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS, JOSEPH BARRELL, professor of structural geology at Yale University, died on May 4 from pneumonia and spinal meningitis, aged forty-nine years.

THE National Research Council announces the appointment of James Rowland Angell, dean of the faculties, and professor of psychology in the University of Chicago, as chairman of the council for the year commencing July 1, 1919. Dr. Angell succeeds Dr. George E. Hale, director of the Mount Wilson Solar Observatory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, who has directed the affairs of the council during the war, and who resigned as chairman on April 30, to return to California. Dr. John C. Merriam, professor of paleontology in the University of California, who has been acting chairman of the council at various times, will direct its affairs until Dr. Angell assumes office in July.

Ar a meeting of the Franklin Institute at Philadelphia on May 21, the presentation of the Franklin Medals will be made to Sir James Dewar, the distinguished English chemist, and to Major-General George Owen Squier, of the

United States Army. Major Squier will give an address on "Some aspects of the Signal Corps in the World War." The address will be illustrated by still and moving pictures showing signal corps activities in France, and a limited number of signal corps communication devices will be exhibited.

DR. ALBERT CALMETTE, former director of the Institut Pasteur at Lille, now subdirector of the Institut Pasteur at Paris, has been elected an active member of the section on public hygiene and legal medicine of the Paris. Academy of Medicine.

DR. ARCHIBALD P. KNIGHT, for twenty-seven years professor of physiology in Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, plans to tender his resignation, but will retain his position until a successor is appointed.

PROFESSOR DUGALD C. JACKSON, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has returned from France and has been discharged from the Army.

DR. TAMIJI KAWAMURA, of the Imperial University, Kyoto, Japan, author of a work on Japanese fresh-water biology, is spending the spring quarter in the department of zoology of the University of Illinois, studying the methods and equipment of animal ecology in the laboratory of Professor V. E. Shelford.

DR. JOSEPH E. POGUE, formerly associate professor of geology and mineralogy in Northwestern University, has terminated his duties as assisting director in technical matters, Bureau of Oil Conservation, Oil Division, U. S. Fuel Administration, and accepted the appointment of curator in the Division of Mineral Technology, U. S. National Museum, where he will carry on educational work and investigations in industrial economics with special reference to the mineral industries. FORREST E. KEMPTON, who took his Ph.D. degree at Illinois last spring and who was employed as plant pathologist in the Porto Rico Agriculture Experiment Station during part of the past year, is now employed by the U. S. Department of Agriculture Office of Cereal Investigations at the University of Illinois in connection with Barberry eradication.

J. B. NORTON, of the Bureau of Plant Industry, who has been appointed agricultural explorer in the Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction, has left Washington on an expedition to China.

MR. M. B. LONG, of the gas laboratory of the Bureau of Standards, has resigned in order to accept a position in the research laboratory of the Western Electric Company, in New York City.

WISHING to establish a Pasteur Institute, the government of Nicaragua has asked the Mexican government to send, at its expense, a person to establish one at Managua. In compliance with this request, the Mexican authorities have intrusted Dr. G. Leal with this duty, and he will depart shortly with the necessary personnel and equipment. As a courtesy to a sister republic, the Mexican government will bear the expenses connected with the trip.

THE board of trustees of the American Medical Association has elected to the editorial staff of the Archives of Internal Medicine, Dr. George Dock, St. Louis; to the editorial staff of the American Journal of Diseases of Children, Dr. L. Emmett Holt, New York, and Dr. H. F. Helmholz, vice Dr. Frank Churchill, resigned because of removal from Chicago; on the Council of Pharmacy and Chemistry, Drs. C. L. Alsberg, Washington, D. C., Henry Kraemer, Ann Arbor, Mich., and John Howland, Baltimore, each to serve for five years; and Dr. W. W. Palmer, New York, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Dr. J. W. Long, for a term extending to 1922.

Ar the recent meeting of the American Association of Anatomists, held in Pittsburgh. the following resolution was introduced and unanimously adopted: "The American Association of Anatomists expresses to Professor J. McKeen Cattell its grateful appreciation of the ability and unfailing devotion to scientific progress shown in his editorship of SCIENCE and other scientific journals, which, while serving other broader purposes, have been so often of direct benefit to anatomists."

DR. LIBERTY HYDE BAILEY, of Cornell University, will deliver the commencement address at the Kansas State Agricultural College.

THE Silvanus Thompson Memorial Lecture of the British Röntgen Society was delivered by Professor W. M. Bayliss, at the Royal Society of Medicine on May 6.

WILLIAM H. HALE, former superintendent of public baths of the City of New York, died on May 2, at the age of seventy-nine years. Dr. Hale became a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1874 and was a constant attendant at its meetings which he reported for journals and the press.

THE professor of physiology of the School of Medicine of the University of Buenos Aires, Dr. H. G. Piñero, died recently at Mar del Plata.

MR. GEORGE EASTMAN, president of the Eastman Kodak Company, has provided the Dental Dispensary at Rochester, N. Y., with an endowment of $1,000,000. The object of the institution is to provide dental work for the city's school children.

THE third Tuberculosis Sanitorium of the Virginia State Board of Health is now being designed. It will be situated at Charlottesville. In conducting it the State Board of Health will affiliate with the Medical School of the University of Virginia. According to the plan the students from the school and the nurses from the University Hospital Training School will have regular periods of service in the sanatorium. The sanatorium with one hundred beds or more will open next autumn.

THE Utah Experiment Station has received a special $20,000 appropriation from the state legislature for experimental work on underground water development. Investigations conducted by the Experiment Station and the U. S. Department of Agriculture show that vast areas of land in the southwestern part of the state contain sufficient underground water for irrigation. The experimental work to be done under this appropriation will be to determine the best type of well and equipment

for various sections of the state. One well is now being driven in Iron County and others will be started in different sections of the state

soon.

EPSILON chapter of Sigma Gamma Epsilon has been installed recently at the University of Missouri. This is a professional fraternity for those in geology, mining and metallurgy.

M. ALBERT SARRAUT, governor-general of Indo-China, recently announced the establishment of a scientific institute at Saigon, to study the development and utilization of the products of the soil and of the water of IndoChina. An inventory will be made of the natural resources of Indo-China, and the institute will aim to exploit them properly by means of laboratory studies, experimental research and scientific explorations.

THE Journal of the American Medical Association states that the National Association for the Study of Tuberculosis has recently granted $10,000 for an exhaustive scientific study to be made in Baltimore of the underlying causes of tuberculosis, under the direction of a committee consisting of Dr. Henry Barton Jacobs, Baltimore, president of the Maryland Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis; Dr. Raymond Pearl, professor of biometry and vital statistics in the School of Hygiene and Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. William T. Howard, Baltimore, assistant commissioner of health. The grant is intended to defray the expense of the investigation and study for a year and the start will be made as soon as the necessary force of investigators can be organized. Baltimore city makes an annual appropriation of $30,000 to the health department for its tuberculosis work, and yet little progress has been made toward the reduction of the death rate. This is because the department has been unable to make its investigation as far reaching and as effective as the officials in charge have felt that the situation demanded.

THROUGH the aid of a grant made by the Research Committee of the American Medical Association, Roy L. Moodie, assistant professor of anatomy in the University of Illinois, re

cently spent three weeks studying evidences of paleopathology in the principal paleontological museums of the eastern cities. The result is a number of observations which it is hoped will be of assistance in an understanding of ancient diseases. It was found, for instance, that the coalescence of the vertebræ of the huge dinosaurs is caused by the lesions of Spondylitis deformans, a common result of disease among Pleistocene vertebrates, in the ancient Egyptians and in modern man, and not previously known to occur before the Miocene. A large, fractured humerus of a Cretaceous dinosaur presents an interesting subperiosteal abscess, which is of considerable interest in connection with the study of comminuted fractures of limb bones in certain victims of the recent war.

MISS MAUD MARGARET GIBSON has placed in the hands of the Royal Society of Medicine a sum of money sufficient to provide a scholarship of the yearly value of about £250, in memory of her father, the late Mr. William Gibson of Melbourne, Australia. The scholarship will be awarded from time to time to qualified medical women who are subjects of the British Empire. It is tenable for a period of two years, but may in special circumstances be extended to a third year.

UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL
NEWS

THE trustees of Wesleyan University have decided to start a campaign to secure an additional endowment of $2,000,000 for the university. The trustees have voted to make substantial increases in salaries of members of the faculty.

QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY, Kingston, Ontario, reports that an additional endowment of $1,000,000 has been received for the general purposes of the university. It is proposed that several more full-time professors will be secured and the departments of physiology, bacteriology and public health will be developed. A fund of $200,000 is also available to be expended in the reconstruction of the hospital.

AT the University of Virginia, the school of analytical and industrial chemistry and the

school of chemistry have been merged in one. Its affairs will be managed by a committee of the chemical faculty. The following new appointments are announced: Dr. Graham Edgar, of the National Research Council, with the rank of professor, and Mr. J. H. Yoe, of the Chemical Warfare Service, with the rank of adjunct professor. The staff of assistants has been enlarged considerably. Five new research fellowships have been established by the board of visitors. Applications for these should be filed with Dr. George L. Carter, secretary of the chemical faculty.

PROFESSOR EDWARD C. SCHNEIDER (Yale, '01), of Colorado College, has been elected head of the department of biology at Wesleyan University.

DR. M. G. GABA, of Cornell University, has been appointed associate professor of mathematics at the University of Nebraska.

COLONEL WILLIAM DARRACH has been appointed dean of the College of Physicians and Surgeons by the trustees of Columbia University. He succeeds Dr. Samuel W. Lambert, whose resignation takes effect on July 1. Appointments and promotions at the college are announced as follows: William E. Studdiford, M.D., professor of obstetrics and gynecology, to succeed the late Dr. Edwin B. Cragin; Allen O. Whipple, M.D., now associate in surgery, to be assistant professor of pathology; Benjamin P. Farrell, instructor in orthopedic surgery, to be assistant professor in the same branch; Louis Cassamajor, associate professor of neurology, to be professor of neurology; Oliver S: Strong, Ph.D., assistant professor of neurology, to be associate professor of neurology.

DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE

AN IMMUNE VARIETY OF SUGAR CANE

SEVERAL years ago a serious disease of sugar cane appeared in Porto Rico. Owing to certain characters exhibited by this disease it was designated as the mottling disease of sugar cane (sometimes called mosaic). It may

be identical with the yellow stripe disease prevalent in Java and some other cane countries. At the request of the Porto Rican authorities the U. S. Department of Agriculture entered into cooperation with the insular and federal stations on the island, and Professor F. S. Earle, of the Office of Sugar-Plant Investigations, Bureau of Plant Industry, was detailed to take up the cooperative work in Porto Rico in August, 1918.

Among other lines of investigation Professor Earle studied very closely the sugar cane varieties growing in Porto Rico. He noted that among about twenty varieties growing at the federal station at Mayaguez there was one Japanese variety (Kavangire) showed no sign of the mottling disease, while all the other varieties there were more or less seriously affected. In order to carry this study further Professor Earle, through the kind cooperation of Russell & Co., inaugurated an experiment with ninety varieties of cane on their Santa Rita Estate. These varieties were planted and grown under the personal supervision of Russell & Co.'s cane planting expert, Mr. H. Bourne of Barbados. Single rows of cane were planted of the varieties to be tested, and every third row was planted with diseased seed of the Rayada variety (ribbon cane). In this way each variety was uniformly and completely exposed to the infection.

The first planting of the ninety varieties was made on October 1, 1918. Two and one half months later Mr. Bourne reported that all of the varieties except the Kavangire showed the mottling disease, the infection running from 9 per cent. to 96 per cent. This variety has remained free from disease to date, March, 1919, and shows every indication thus far of being immune to the mottling disease.

On January 29 of this year Professor Earle made a careful study of the experiment and found about half of the other varieties in this experiment showing an infection of fully 100 per cent., and in only two cases was it as low as 50 per cent. The degree of infection, however, was decidedly marked in different varieties, a few of them showing the disease but slightly, indicating that they are resistant

though not immune, with the exception of the one variety Kavangire which appears to be entirely immune. In three or four of the least infected kinds close observation is necessary to detect the disease, the only evidence being very faint "watered silk" discolorations. Professor Earle has observed the Kavangire fully matured on the federal station at Mayaguez and in other localities, and in all of the localities in Porto Rico where it is growing it is entirely free from the mottling disease whether the plants are young shoots or mature canes.

The Kavangire cane is tall-growing and very slender, while the Porto Rican planter prefers a thick cane, because it appears to be a better yielder and is handled at less expense. However, the yield of the Kavangire under some conditions at least compares favorably with other varieties, and very greatly exceeding them in some cases. Director May reports a yield at the rate of 70 tons per acre on the Mayaguez plot. No analyses of the Kavangire variety, as grown in Porto Rico, are available, but according to some reports from other countries where it is grown it varies from 14.38 per cent. sucrose to 16.85 per cent. sucrose, while its purity coefficient varies from 84.6 to 89.67.

The Kavangire cane was imported into Porto Rico from the Argentine a few years ago by Mr. May, director of the Federal Experiment Station at Mayaguez. In Argentine it has been planted quite largely on a commercial scale indicating that it is satisfactory from the standpoint of sugar production. It requires a long season for maturity, and for this reason has not been recommended for general planting in Argentine. The sugar per acre is the crucial test, and in this respect the Kavangire generally stands near the top, so far as available records indicate.

After reviewing the available literature in regard to Kavangire Professor Earle raises the practical question as to whether or not Kavangire can be successfully used for general planting in Porto Rico. If it can and it retains its immune characteristic the question of combating the mottling disease is solved.