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POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



without having to so inform consumers. 

 This is wrong. 



It will remain for the courts to ad- 

 just the conflict between such statutes 

 and the general food law. The law 

 itself contains an omnibus joker, in- 

 tended by its friends to exempt certain 

 practises of adulteration or misbrand- 

 ing from the other strict but fair pro- 

 visions relating to deception by arti- 

 ficial color and to misrepresentative 

 labels. This joker appears in the last 

 paragraph of Section 8, in the defini- 

 tion of the word ' blend.' But it can 

 be safely conjectured that when the act 

 goes before the supreme court this 

 paragraph will not be construed out 

 of harmony with the other strong pro- 

 visions. 



A committee consisting of H. W. 

 Wiley, chairman, from the Department 

 of Agriculture, S. N. D. North, from 

 the Department of Commerce and 

 Labor, and James L. Gerry, from the 

 Treasury Department, has been ap- 

 pointed by the secretaries of these de- 

 partments to formulate regulations for 

 the enforcement of the law. This com- 

 mittee began hearings in New York 

 City on September 7. The various 

 manufacturing interests will be heard, 

 and the state departments have been 

 asked to cooperate in suggesting regula- 

 tions. At Hartford, Conn., in July, 

 the association of food-control officials 

 amended its constitution so as to in- 

 clude the food-control officials of the 

 federal government, and an arrange- 

 ment was adopted whereby there will 

 be coalition of the food standard com- 

 mittee from the state analysts and the 

 food standard committee appointed by 

 the United States Secretary of Agricul- 



ture. This action will influence uni- 

 formity between the state laws and 

 the national law, and bring about close 

 cooperation between the United States 

 Department of Agriculture and the 

 state officials in the enforcement of 

 food and drug control legislation. 



SCIENTIFIC ITEMS. 

 We regret to record the deaths of 

 Dr. H. Marshall Ward, F.R.S., pro- 

 fessor of botany at Cambridge Univer- 

 sity; of Dr. Alexander Herzen, pro- 

 fessor of physiology at Lausanne, and 

 of William Buck Dwight, professor of 

 geology at Vassar College. 



Dk. A. A. Michelson, professor of 

 physics at Chicago, has been elected a 

 foreign member of the Accademia dei 

 Lincei, Rome. — Dr. L. A. Bauer, of the 

 Carnegie Institution, and Dr. John M. 

 Clarke, state geologist of New York, 

 have been elected corresponding mem- 

 bers of the Gottingen Royal Academy 

 of Sciences. 



At a conference of the International 

 Geodetic Association to be held at 

 Budapest on September 20, the prin- 

 cipal topics to be considered were the 

 accurate surveying of mountain chains 

 subject to earthquake, with a view to 

 ascertaining whether these chains are 

 stable or whether they rise and sink, 

 and the taking of measures of gravity 

 so as to throw light upon the distribu- 

 tion of masses in the interior of the 

 earth and upon the rigidity of the 

 earth's crust. The drawing up of pre- 

 liminary reports on these two ques- 

 tions has been entrusted to M. Lalle- 

 mand. director of the general survey 

 in France, and Sir George Darwin. 



