The report notes the over-zealous interference of the Game Commission of Pennsylvania with the collecting of native birds. It has repeatedly been shown that it is not the scientific collector who wreaks havoc among birds, but those who destroy for commercial purposes, or for pure love of killing. With some

hesitation we question the entire accuracy of the statement that 'This museum was probably the first institution of its kind to put into practical effect the idea of sending out through the schools small collections illustrating the truths of natural science.' Our English friends may have something to say regarding this rather sweeping claim.

The Report of the Museums of the Brooklyn Institute for 1904, is seven months after date, but, being the first of its kind, should not be too severely criticized. It notes the restrictions on the work of rearrangement due to the delay in receiving the central section of the building, but as noted in SCIENCE this restriction was removed in March and the section opened in June. There is a somewhat detailed list of the collections of art and ethnology and an account of the libraries of the Central and Children's Museums. The latter now contains over 3,500 volumes and is possibly the most complete of its kind, containing a very large proportion of popular works on natural history and nature study, history and geography, and many selected with special reference to their use by teachers. The number of readers for 1904 was 26,899, including 105 teachers with their classes.

To a

To generalize a little it may be said that these reports emphasize the amount of attention that is properly being given to the display of specimens so that they may be both. attractive and of educational value. great extent these things go hand in hand, for if specimens are not attractive, the visitor will not look at them closely and their educational influence is lost. The old museum idea was the exhibition of specimens only, now the specimens are used to aid in the teaching of facts.

SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS. PROFESSOR E. RAY LANKESTER, director of the British Museum of Natural History, was

elected president of the British Association for 1906 at the final meeting of the association held at Johannesburg on September 1. After the adjournment, most of the members of the association left for Kimberly, Bulawayo and Victoria Falls.

THE advisory board of engineers upon plans for the Panama Canal, consisting of American and foreign experts, held their first meeting in Washington on September 1. They will later go to Panama. The members of the board are: Mr. Henry Hunter, nominated by the British government; M. Adolphe Guérard, nominated by the French government; Herr Eugene Tincauser, nominated by the German government; Herr J. W. Welcker, nominated by the government of the Netherlands; M. L. Quellennec, consulting engineer of the Suez Canal; General George W. Davis, U. S. A., retired; Alfred Doble, chief engineer of the Pennsylvania Railroad; William Barclay Parsons, formerly of the New York Rapid Transit Commission; Professor William H. Burr, of Columbia University; Frederick P. Stearns, of Boston; General Henry L. Abbott, U. S. A., retired; Joseph Ripley, engineer of the Sault Ste. Marie Canal, and Isham Randolph, engineer of the Chicago Drainage Canal.

DR. D. E. SALMON, for twenty-one years head of the Bureau of Animal Industry of the Department of Agriculture, handed his resignation to Secretary Wilson on September 6. The secretary accepted it, to take effect on October 1. Dr. Alonzo D. Melvin, assistant chief of the bureau, will be designated acting chief.

PROFESSOR O. LUMMER, director of the physical laboratory at Breslau, has accepted an invitation to lecture at Columbia University during the year 1906–7.

PRESIDENT DAVID STARR JORDAN, of Stanford University, has returned from Europe by way of Canada, and was expected to reach home this week.

Ir appears that Professor Ronald Ross did not, as has been stated, accompany Professor Rubert Boyce on his visit to New Orleans in connection with the outbreak of yellow-fever.

IT is stated in American Medicine that Lawrence F. Flick, of the Phipps Institute, Joseph Walsh, Mazyck P. Ravenel and D. J. McCarthy, of Philadelphia, will sail on September 16 to attend the third International Congress on Tuberculosis in Paris, where they will read papers.

DR. EDMUND NEUSSER, professor of medicine in the University of Vienna, has received from the emperor a life patent of nobility.

DR. ROBERT KOCH, who is still in east Africa, has been appointed an honorary member of the Royal Institute for Infectious Diseases, Berlin.

DR. JULIUS KUHN, known for his contributions to scientific agriculture, will celebrate his eightieth birthday on October 23.

DR. J. A. MAYER has retired from the curatorship of the Bavarian National Museum at Munich and is succeeded by Dr. P. Halm, hitherto librarian of the museum.

DR. H. FISCHER has been appointed director of the Bacteriological Station in the Agricultural School at Berlin.

DR. WM. E. RITTER, director of the San Diego Marine Biological Laboratory, has been granted a leave of absence for the current academic year from his duties as professor of zoology at the University of California. He will spend the first half, at least, of the period at La Jolla, where the new laboratory of the San Diego Marine Biological Association is located, in study and in looking after the interests of the biological survey being carried on by the laboratory.

MR. ALVIN SEALE, who is about to graduate from Stanford University, after special work in zoology, has been employed by the government of the Hawaiian Islands to make experiments with certain fishes from the southern states to determine whether these will exterminate the mosquitoes that have been introduced into the Hawaiian Islands.

DURING the field season just closed, a number of men from the department of geology, of the University of Oklahoma, have been in the field. Professor Charles N. Gould, with two advanced students, T. B. Matthews and

E. F. Schramm, spent two months in the Texas Panhandle studying the geology and water resources of the region for the Division of Hydrology of the U. S. Geological Survey. Professor E. G. Woodruff during the same time has been a member of the survey party of Mr. N. II. Darton in the Big Horn Mountains, Wyoming.

Mr. Ira Montgomery and Mr. L. L. Hutchinson were members of the field party of the Oklahoma Geological Survey and with Professor A. H. Van Vleet spent a number of weeks in the field in the northwestern part of Oklahoma.

MR. CHESTER A. REEDS, B.S. ('05, Oklahoma), spent the summer collecting fossils from the Hunton (Helderbergian) limestone in the Arbuckle Mountains for the department of paleontology at Yale, where he has an assistant's position with Professor Schuchert the coming year.

CAVENDISH HOUSE and grounds, situated on the south side of Clapham, where Henry Cavendish made his remarkable experiments, has been sold at auction.

A MONUMENT in honor of Professor B. Maerckers, known for his contributions to agricultural science, will be unveiled in Halle on October 24.

DR. ERNST THEODOR SCHWEIGER, professor of ophthalmology at Berlin, died on August 26, at the age of seventy-five years.

DR. H. LAEHR, a leading German psychiatrist, has died at the age of eighty-six years.

THE health commissioner of the state of Pennsylvania has posted an entomologist at the harbor to watch fruit vessels from foreign ports, and make a collection of mosquitoes that come with the fruit. These mosquitoes will be carefully examined to ascertain if any of the yellow fever variety are reaching Philadelphia.

M. MEDEIROS, of Rio de Janeiro, a member of the Brazilian legislature, has submitted to the chamber of deputies the offer of a prize of £400,000 to be awarded to the discoverer of a certain means of stamping out consumption.

SIR ALFRED JONES and Mr. W. H. Lever have both promised £1,000 a year for four years

towards the expenses of the proposed school of research in connection with the university. The school is to inquire into the natural resources of the tropical possessions of the empire. Lord Mountmorres is to be the first director.

THE city of Hamburg will reestablish the old astronomical observatory at Bergedorf. The observatory has been presented with 50,000 Marks for the purchase of a photographic tele

scope.

ments.

THE Landmarks Club for more than ten years has been safe-guarding and preserving the old missions of southern California. It has raised over $7,000 and applied these moneys in protective repairs to these monuIt has reroofed about 60,000 square feet of the principal buildings at four missions; and by these and other repairs has saved them from destruction. If this work had not been done when it was these buildings would by now be hopeless mounds of adobe. There is far more of this work still to be done, which the Landmarks Club will do. It has long leases on three of the missions.

THE Committee of the British Association of Botanical Photographs reports that forty photographs have been added to the register since the last meeting. They have been received from various persons, but it would mention in particular a series of photographs by Mr. R. Welch illustrating the coast flora of Ireland, and a number of photographs by Professor Yapp, of Aberystwyth, illustrating some aspects of the vegetation of the Malay Peninsula. A printed list has been prepared of the photographs so far contributed to the register, and this will be ready for circulation in July. The recently established committee for the Botanical Survey of Great Britain contemplates the establishment of a collection of botanical photographs of British vegetation, and it is hoped that that committee will collaborate with the committee of the British Association by taking over the work of collecting and arranging photographs relating to British vegetation.

The Experiment Station Record states that the Minnesota legislature at its recent session

passed two laws of considerable importance to the agriculture of the state. One of these provides for the establishment of a branch school of agriculture at Crookston, to be a department of the University of Minnesota under the direction of the board of regents of the university. The other provides for local option in the establishment and maintenance of county schools of agriculture and domestic economy, limiting to $20,000 the amount that any county may appropriate for this purpose in one year. The initiative in the matter of establishing such schools may be taken by the people or by the county commissioners, but the county commissioners can not finally establish a school until the question has been submitted to the electors in the county. Two or more counties may unite to establish a school of agriculture and domestic economy. The schools are to be under the control of a county school board of three members, the secretary of which shall be the county superintendent of schools, and the other two members are to be elected by the county commissioners. Each school must have connected with it a tract of land, suitable for purposes of experiment and demonstration, of not less than ten acres. Tuition is to be free to residents of the county or counties contributing to its support. The state superintendent of public instruction is to have general supervision over the schools, and with the advice of the dean of the College of Agriculture is to prescribe the courses of study to be pursued.

The British Medical Journal says times have greatly changed in France, as elsewhere, since the days when Claude Bernard had for his laboratory in the Collège de France, something little better than an indifferent cellar, and Pasteur a kind of something that might have served as a granary in the Ecole Normale. But since no rule lacks an exception, we find some of the most distinguished scientists still without that provision for scientific work which would enable them to follow the bent of their genius without having to think of ways and means. Thus, in Paris, the center of academic and scientific institutions, we find M. Becquerel making with his own hands the apparatus by means of which he observed the

phenomena of radioactivity, and even until quite a short time ago M. Curie was forced to prosecute his studies in radium in a shed which, in its poverty of mechanical or other equipment, rivaled even the room under the roof in which Pasteur did some of his epochmaking work. An examination of the budget for 1904 reveals the fact that for scientific purposes the sum voted for the universities of France is over 13,000,000 francs. Besides this there is a credit of 556,500 francs for the Collège de France, with its forty professors, and, in addition, for the Museum of Natural History in the Jardin des Plantes one of over 1,000,000 francs; so that the budget for science for the past year reaches a sum of something less than £600,000. In France, as in England, the great difficulty appears to be the combination of teaching duties with those of research. The budget draws no distinction between money allocated for teaching purposes and that for research. The chief exception, perhaps, in a modified way, is that for the Collège de France. Each professor must give forty lectures per annum, but it is not possible to go on, year in year out, giving something new at every lecture. The same obtains at the museum. A professor at the Sorbonne or at the Faculty of Medicine, during six months has to devote his time to giving instruction to the students who attend his course, while a very large part of his time is necessarily consumed in the examination of the numerous candidates in the Paris Faculty.

UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL NEWS.

THE University of Pennsylvania will receive $60,000 from the estate of the late Professor Maxwell Sommerville, who held a chair of archeology in the university.

PRESIDENT THWING, of Western Reserve University, has announced that Mr. Andrew Carnegie had given $25,000 towards the establishment of a fund of $100,000 for the endowment of a chair of political economy at Western Reserve University, to bear the name of the late Senator Hanna.

THE Dominion government has made a

grant of £500 to the McGill University for work in railway engineering and transportation. This is the government's contribution, as owner of the Inter-Colonial, to a scheme to which the Grand Trunk and Canadian-Pacific have given £1,000, and the Canadian Northern £400, for the instruction of young men in railway construction and operation.

THE Board of Trustees of the University of the Pacific has ordered the museum moved from West Hall to East Hall where it will have more commodious quarters. New cases will be constructed for collections not now on exhibition. Funds have also been appropriated with which to purchase additional apparatus for the geological and chemical laboratories to meet the demand of an increasing number of students in these departments.

OWING to the interruption of travel caused by the quarantines against New Orleans and other infected points, it has been decided to postpone the opening of the session of the Louisiana State University until October 18. By that time the yellow fever will, it is hoped, be under such complete control and the quarantines so relaxed that unrestricted travel may be resumed on all railroads. There is no yellow fever in Baton Rouge, and there is every reason to believe that the efforts of the health authorities to prevent its introduction there will continue to be successful.

MR. CLARENCE E. REID, of the National Bureau of Standards, has been appointed assistant professor of electrical engineering in the Case School of Applied Science.

MR. ARTHUR H. FORD, professor of electrical engineering at the Georgia School of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia, has been appointed professor and head of the department of electrical engineering in the College of Applied Science of the State University of Iowa.

The Experiment Station Record states that Professor F. Wohltmann, for ten years director of the agricultural experiment station at BonnPoppelsdorf, and professor of agriculture in the academy, has accepted a call to Halle. In his lectures at Halle Professor Wohltmann will include a course in tropical agriculture with special reference to the German colonies.