SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS 3QI 



Captain S. T. Dana has resumed his duties with the Forest Service 

 as Assistant Chief of Forest Investigations. During the war he was 

 on the General Staff as secretary of the Army Commodity Committee 

 on Lumber, and in charge of determining wood requirements of the 

 Army. 



Col. E. Lester Jones, Superintendent of the U. S. Coast and Geo- 

 detic Survey, has been named by the King of Italy an officer of the 

 Order of S. S. Maurizo e Lazzaro. 



Dr. Leonard B. Loeb, formerly of the Bureau of Standards, 

 has been granted a research fellowship in physics by the National Re- 

 search Fellowship Board. 



Major A. O. Leuschner has returned to Washington from a furlough 

 in California and is at present acting chairman of the Division of Phys- 

 ical Sciences of the National Research Council. 



Dr. Samuel C. Prescott, of the Massachusetts Institute of Tech- 

 nology, formerly major in the Sanitary Corps, U. S. A., has been ap- 

 pointed expert in charge of dehydration investigations in the Bureau 

 of Chemistry, Department of Agriculture, and will continue the investi- 

 gations on this subject carried on during the war under the direction of 

 the War Department. 



Mr. Homer P. Ritter, for many years an officer of the U. S. Coast 

 and Geodetic Survey and a member of the Mississippi River Com- 

 mission, died at the Emergency Hospital on April 21, 1 919, in his sixty- 

 fifth year. He was returning from a meeting of the Mississippi River 

 Commission at Memphis and was taken ill on the train. Mr. Ritter 

 was born in Cleveland, Ohio, March 4, 1855. After receiving his tech- 

 nical training at the Columbia School of Mines he was employed for 

 several years on railway surveys. He entered the Coast and Geodetic 

 Survey m 1885, and had been employed on field work in all parts of the 

 United States and in Alaska. He succeeded Henry L. Marindin 

 as a member of the Mississippi River Commission in 1904. He was a 

 member of the Society of Engineers. 



Mr. R. Sano, founder and director of the meteorological observatory 

 of Kanayama, near Sendai, Japan, visited Washington in April. 



Mr. A. H. Smith, of the rubber laboratory. Bureau of Standards, 

 will leave the Bureau on July i, to accept a position with the Goodyear 

 Rubber Company, at Akron, Ohio. 



Mr. Wm. Schaus has recently been appointed as Assistant Curator 

 in the Division of Insects of the National Museum. Mr. Schaus is 

 a student of Lepidoptera and in recent years has spent much time in 

 tropical America where he made large collections which have been 

 given to the National Museum. 



Dr. C. H. T. Townsend sailed, early in April, for Brazil where he 

 has accepted a position as entomologist for the Brazilian government. 

 Dr. Townsend has been with the Bureau of Entomology and has spent 

 most of his time studying the Muscoid Diptera. 



