rainfall. This is an emphasis on the cyclonic unit which we have long hoped to see.

R. DEC. WARD.

SOME STATE CENSUS FIGURES FOR 1905. THE state censuses for 1905 are showing some instructive returns. Iowa, for instance, shows a loss of 15,000 persons since 1900. The cities of 5,000 population and over gained 77,000 people in all; the towns under 5,000 and the rural districts together report a loss of 92,000. In Minnesota, where the gain during the decade, 1890 to 1899, inclusive, was 33.7 per cent., there has apparently been a slowing up. The decennial rate was 3.37 per cent. a year; but for the past five years, 1900 to 1905, there was a gain of only 13 per cent., or 2.6 per cent. a year. As the basis broadens the rate of accretion necessarily becomes slower, while in Iowa the rate indicates even retrogression. The indications are that, either from urban migration or from other causes, or from all combined, the farming population even in the most prosperous portions of the west has practically ceased to grow.

One reason for this, if the view of arrested growth be accepted, is to be found in the rapidly rising price of farming land. For the past several years or more the trend of prices of land has gone upward with the prices of farm produce. Iowa, being a dairying and stock-growing state, has come to put such values upon her farm lands as to dislodge the old style of farming for a family home, in favor of the capitalistic farmer-the farmer who puts surplus income back into land, into better methods of cultivation, better stock and better facilities. The old-style farmer moves off to Canada for frontier lands, or to the southwest or northwest, where land is cheaper, after having reaped the reward of waiting, in the form of the unearned increment.

Kansas took her fifth decennial census on March 1, 1905, and found the insignificant increase of 8,658 persons in one year, the total population being 1,543,868. This gives an average of 14,703 people for each of the 105 counties. Of these counties 58 report an increase, and 47 a decrease, compared with

March 1, 1904. The highest increase is 2,987 persons out of a total of 48,058, or 6.6 per cent. gain in one year. The largest decline is one of 2,087 persons, leaving a population of 24,907, or 9.1 per cent. less than a year earlier. These are marked changes to occur in so small a population in the course of twelve months from ordinary causes in times of prosperity in city and country alike.

on.

Turning from country to city, we see that in Kansas towns the same shifting is going One might think that towns have been the gainers of country losses; but this is not always the case. The changes are due to a wider range of influences than urban attraction. Of 119 cities of a thousand inhabitants and over, 61 gained in the last year and 58 lost in numbers. Only four gained over one thousand each, and five of the cities lost each a thousand or over; but none so much as two thousand. While these are small numbers, they indicate the presence of some active influences which are responsible for a great deal of readjustment. Kansas is eminently the commonwealth of comparatively small towns. How emphatically this is the case is apparent from the following table of towns of 1,000 people and over, which may or may not suggest some explanation of the gain and loss account within its borders:

The rate of increase, 6.9 per cent., is half that for twenty years back. It was 7.9 per cent., 1875 to 1880; and 8.9 per cent., 1880 to 1885; but this is the only time it has ever been as low; and of the earlier decade, the first five years, 1875 to 1880, were years of great financial depression.

The past five years have been years of overflowing prosperity. Yet the increase in population in Massachusetts drops to one half the earlier rate. The addition to population in the latest five years is no larger than it was thirty years ago, when the inhabitants of the states numbered only half as many as now.

"This same arrest of population," says the Philadelphia Press, " is in progress all over the country. No state is likely to show in this decade the increase of the past. Our national increase, which has been jogging along at about 25 per cent., in ten years, is about to make a drop to 12 or 15 per cent. in ten years, a little above the average of thriving European countries like Germany and England." JOHN FRANKLIN CROWELL. WASHINGTON, D. C.

THE MUSEUMS ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA. AN informal meeting of a few of the administrative heads of some of the greater museums of America was held at the United States National Museum in Washington on December 21. There were present Dr. Richard Rathbun, the director of the National Museum, Dr. H. C. Bumpus, director of the American Museum of Natural History, New York, Dr. N. L. Britton, the director of the New York Botanical Garden, Dr. F. A. Lucas, the curator-in-chief of the Brooklyn Institute, Dr. W J McGee, the director of the St. Louis Public Museum, Dr. W. P. Wilson, the director of the Philadelphia Museums, and Dr. W. J. Holland, the director of the Carnegie Museum. Dr. Samuel Henshaw, the curator of the Cambridge Museum of Comparative Zoology, and Dr. F. J. V. Skiff, of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, were not present, but were represented by letter.

The meeting had been called for the purpose of considering whether it might be advisable to take preliminary steps looking toward the

organization in America of a Museums Association somewhat analogous to that which exists in Great Britain. It was finally unanimously decided that the gentlemen represented in this informal gathering should over their names issue a call to the representatives of a number of the larger and more important museums of the United States to convene for the purpose of organizing The Museums Association of America.

In the informal discussion which took place it was decided that the movement should not be restricted to natural history museums, but that museums representing art, as well as the sciences, should be included in the call, and that the invitations should be made to cover the institutions of America, using the word. in its widest sense, so as to include all of North America and South America and the various insular possessions of the United States and Great Britain in the western hemisphere.

In accordance with a resolution adopted invitations to attend a preliminary gathering for the purpose of organizing The Museums Association of America will shortly be issued to a number of institutions and individuals who are thought to be likely to be interested in such a movement. This conference will be held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York on May 15, 1906.

PITTSBURGH, Pa.,

December 23, 1905.

SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS. THE New Orleans meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the societies affiliated with it begins today. This evening Professor W. G. Farlow, of Harvard University, will give the presidential address, his subject being 'The Popular Conception of the Scientific Man at the Present Day.' We hope to publish this address next week.

THE Paris Academy of Sciences has awarded the Lalande prize to Professor William Henry Pickering, of Harvard University, for his discovery of the ninth and tenth satellites of Saturn.

DR. WILLIAM H. WELCH, professor of pathology in the Johns Hopkins University, has been elected a trustee of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of John Hay.

PROFESSOR F. E. LLOYD, of Teachers College, Columbia University, has accepted the position of resident investigator at the Desert Botanical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution, at Tucson, Arizona.

DR. PEHR OLSSON-SEFFER, for the past two years instructor in botany in Stanford University, has been selected to take charge of a botanical station in tropical Mexico for the investigation of problems connected with the cultivation of rubber and coffee. The station is established by the Hidalgo and La Zacualpa Companies, which own twelve large plantations in the region in question devoted to the raising of rubber and coffee.

PROFESSOR HAROLD HEATH, associate professor of zoology in Stanford University, will be absent from the university during the coming semester on sabbatical leave. He will occupy the Smithsonian table at the Naples Aquarium for two months, visiting Egypt, India and spending two months in Japan, returning to take up his work September, 1906. DR. L. RADLKOFER, professor of botany at Munich, has celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his doctorate.

SIR WILLIAM THISELTON-DYER, whose resignation of the post of director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew we announced last week has held that appointment since 1885, and for ten years-1875-1885—before his promotion he was assistant director. His successor, Lieutenant-Colonel David Prain, had a distinguished university career at Aberdeen and Edinburgh before he entered the Indian Medical Service in 1884. Three years after his arrival in India he was nominated curator of the Calcutta Herbarium; in 1895 he became professor of botany at the Medical College, Calcutta, and superintendent of the Royal Botanic Garden there, and in 1898 he was appointed director of the Botanical Survey of India. He is forty-eight years of age.

DR. RICHARD HODGSON, secretary of the American Branch of the American Society for Psychical Research, died suddenly at Boston on December 20.

PROFESSOR HEINRICH MEININGER, formerly professor of technical physics, at Karlsruhe, has died at the age of eighty-four years.

WE are requested to state that owing to a strike in the printing office at Easton, Pa., the issue of the December number of the Journal of the American Chemical Society has been delayed, and the issue of that journal and of the American Chemical Journal for January will also be delayed.

THE engineering students of Washington and Lee University met on December 4 for the purpose of organizing a local scientific society. Addresses were made by Professors Stevens, Humphreys, Campbell and Howe.

THE Council of the Iron and Steel Institute has arranged that the annual general meeting of the institute shall be held in London on May 10 and 11, 1906. In place of the usual autumn meeting, a joint meeting with the American Institute of Mining Engineers will be held in London on July 23 to 28. It is intended during the week following to give the American visitors an opportunity of seeing some of the ironmaking districts. It is anticipated that the visiting party will include many of the leading ironmasters who entertained the Iron and Steel Institute in America in 1890 and 1904. The Lord Mayor has consented to act as chairman of the London reception committee, and to give an evening reception at the Mansion-house.

THE sixth International Congress of Criminal Anthropology will open at Turin on April 28, 1906. The following questions are proposed for discussion, and the communications presented will, as far as possible, be grouped round these as central themes: (1) the treatment of juvenile criminality according to the principles of criminal anthropology, to be introduced by M. von Hamel; (2) the treatment of female criminality, to be introduced by Dr. Pauline Tarnowsky; (3) the relations of economic conditions to criminality, to be introduced by Professor Kurella; (4) the

equivalence of the various forms of sexual psychopathies and criminality, to be introduced by Professor C. Lombroso; (5) criminal anthropology in police organization, to be introduced by Professor Ottolenghi; (6) the psychological value of evidence, to be introduced by Dr. Brusa; (7) prophylaxis and treatment of crime, to be introduced by Dr. Ferri; (8) establishments for the perpetual detention of criminals declared to be irresponsible on account of mental defect, to be introduced by Professor Garofalo.

THE New Haven correspondent of the N. Y. Evening Post states that a collection of Central American antiquities, the value of which was not suspected, has just been brought to light in the Peabody Museum and, when arranged, will be put on exhibition in the anthropological department. Beginning as early as 1860, A. De Zeltner, French consul at Panama, and Mr. J. E. McNeil, for many years a resident of Panama, collected in that province antiquities of the Chiriqui Indians, who ranked next in culture to the Aztecs and to the Peruvians under the Incas. The collections, chiefly secured from prehistoric graves, were brought down from the interior on horses, but, as the result shows, with only slight breakages. The late Professor O. C. Marsh bought the collections from time to time, and down to the year 1879, storing the boxes away in a remote part of the museum building, where they have remained unopened for twenty-six years.

MR. CHARLES S. SPANG, formerly of Pittsburg, who recently died in Paris, where he spent the latter half of his long life, before his death requested his heirs to turn over to the Carnegie Museum his collection of Etruscan pottery and Egyptian antiquities. In accordance with his wish these collections have come into the custody of the museum. The collections were made nearly fifty years ago by a gentleman whom Mr. Spang employed to make excavations, and the specimens are remarkably fine and such as could not well be obtained to-day.

DR. ZAMBACO PACHA has devoted the sum of 10,000 francs towards the organization of a

medical congress to be held every three years at Athens.

THE liabilities of the Royal Botanical Society of London now exceed £30,000. It is proposed to increase the dues from two to three guineas.

AN Association of Municipal Engineers, Architects and Hygienists of France, Belgium and Switzerland held its first meeting in Paris from November 22 to 25.

THE New York Academy of Medicine announces that the Edward N. Gibbs memorial prize, of the value of $1,000, will be awarded to the author of the best essay on 'The Etiology, Pathology and Treatment of Diseases of the Kidney.' Essays must be received on or before January 1, 1907, by the recording secretary at 17 West Forty-third Street, New York City.

THE Senckenburg Natural History Society at Frankfort offers a prize of 1,000 Marks for a research on the paleontology of the region about Coblentz and Ems.

THE British Medical Journal states that the trustees of the Pilkington Cancer Research Fund are about to appoint a graduate in medicine, or other qualified person, to carry out a research into the cause, prevention and cure of cancer, under the supervision of the professors of general pathology and of systematic surgery in the Victoria University of Manchester (Professor Lorrain Smith and Professor G. A. Wright). The appointment will be for one year, but may be renewed for a further period of one or two years, and the holder of the post will receive an income of £300 per annum with a grant for laboratory

expenses.

ACCORDING to Nature an archeological museum, which will devote special attention to Indo-Chinese matters, has been established by the French government at Pnompenh. The museum will be under the scientific control of the Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient, the chief of the archeological department of which school will act as director of the new museum.

ACCORDING to the statistics collected by Mr. Waldemar Lindgren for the U. S. Geological

Survey, the production of gold in the United States during 1904 amounted to 3,910,729 fine ounces, valued at $80,835,648. This represents an increase of $7,243,948 over the production of 1903. After a period of very rapid advance in the gold production from 1892 to 1900, during which an increase from $33,000,000 to $79,171,000 took place, there followed two years of nearly stationary output and one year, 1903, of very decided decrease. It is, therefore, very gratifying to find that the production has risen again with a bound to record figures, the largest previous output in 1902, amounting to $80,000,000. The production of silver in 1904 amounted to 55,999,864 fine ounces, valued at $32,035,378. This represents an increase of 1,699,864 ounces over the production of 1903, and an increase in value of $2,713,378. There is, therefore, a total increase of $9,957,326 in the value of gold and silver produced in 1904 over that of 1903. The record output of silver in 1892, amounting to 63,500,000 fine ounces, has not been reached in late years, nor has the commercial value attained the figures of that year, which amounted to $82,101,000. The price of silver in 1904, according to the director of the mint, varied from 55 to 61 cents per fine ounce, representing a decided increase over the prices of 1903, which varied from 48 to 59 cents and only exceptionally rose to 61 cents in October, 1903.

UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL NEWS.

THE Council of Columbia University has adopted resolutions as follows:

Resolved, (1) That in the opinion of the University council the present game of football should be prohibited at Columbia University and the council recommends that the president take immediate action to that end.

(2) That the president be advised to take such further steps as may seem to him proper to correct the conditions at Columbia, which have produced the demoralization of sentiment above referred to and to restore the athletics to their proper place in the life of the university, with the view,

(a) Of encouraging the widest possible participation of the student body in athletic sports, instead of leaving them, as at present, in the hands of a small class of trained athletes.

(b) of substituting, as far as possible, competition in sports among the students at Columbia in the place of intercollegiate competitions, and of restricting the latter, with the exception of rowing, as far as possible, to the home grounds of the Columbia teams.

(c) Of eliminating the professional aspects of athletic sports by reducing to a minimum the time devoted to training and by placing the sports and the training therefor under the immediate direction of the university authorities.

ant

(d) of suppressing the commercialism attendon intercollegiate competitions in certain sports by a radical reduction of expenses and the elimination of gate receipts.

AT a meeting of the presidents of the two California universities with the committee on athletics of each institution held recently in San Francisco the following action was taken:

Resolved, by the joint athletic committees of the University of California and the Leland Stanford Junior University, that we recommend to the faculties of the two universities in question that the intercollegiate football contest shall be no longer held under the regulations of the present football rules committee. We recommend as a substitute the present English Rugby game, or else the present American game with such modifications as shall promise to eliminate the existing evils.

A committee of men prominent as coaches and players of the game from among the alumni of the two institutions was selected to work with the faculty committees in framing a final decision in the matter.

DR. HENRY T. EDDY, professor of engineering and mechanics in the University of Minnesota, has been elected dean of the Graduate School at that university; and Dr. George F. James, professor of pedagogy, has been elected dean of the School of Education, just established.

PROFESSOR SIMON J. MCLEAN, for three years associate professor of economics and acting head of the department in Stanford University, has accepted a call to a chair in his alma mater, Toronto University, and will take up his duties there in January.

JAS. R. WITHROW, Ph.D. (Pennsylvania), has accepted an instructorship in chemistry in the University of Illinois.