1913] General 117 



objects in connection with medicine as the trustees may determine. 

 The Univ. has also received a legacy of £5,000 by the late Mr. 

 William Weir, ironmaster, the income of which is to pay for an 

 additional assist. to the prof, of materia medica. 



American. Mrs. Russell Sage has given $34,000 to Syracuse 

 Univ., of which $30,000 is for the Joseph Slocum Agric. Col. — The 

 General Educ. Board has announced a gift of $1,500,000 to the 

 med. seh. of Johns Hopkins Univ., to be known as the William H. 

 Welch Endowment for Education and Clinical Research, in recog- 

 nition of Dr. Welch's distinguished Service to the cause of medical 

 education in America. This is the greatest gift ever made by the 

 board to a single Institution of learning. The proposed plan of 

 spending the money opens the way for a new era in med. science. 

 Briefly it is this : To so reorganize the med. seh. as to pay out of 

 the income from the gift such salaries to the men who occupy the 

 chairs of medicine, surgery and pediatrics (and to their assistants) 

 as will enable them wholly to drop their private practices and devote 

 their entire time, ability and lives to the advancement of their par- 

 ticular branches. The departments which it affects are at present 

 presided over by Dr. Lewellys F. Barker, prof. of medicine; Dr. W. 

 S. Halsted, prof. of surgery; Dr. John Howland, prof. of pediatrics. 



Notes on radium. Appreciation of Madame Curie. All 

 the World knows how Madame Curie ( Coming from Warsaw as 

 Marie Sklodowska to work in Paris), inspired by the spontaneous 

 radioactivity newly discovered by Becquerel, began in 1896 a met- 

 rical examination of the radioactivity of minerals of all kinds ; and 

 how, when a uranium residue showed a value larger than could 

 have been expected from its uranium content, she, with exemplary 

 skill and perseverance, worked down some tons of this material 

 (given her by the Austrian government on the instigation of Prof. 

 Suess), chemically dividing it and retaining always the more radio- 

 active portion, until she obtained evidence first of a new dement 

 which she christened polonium, in memory of her own country, and 

 then after months of labor succeeded in isolating a few grains of 

 the other and more permanent substance now so famous — a sub- 

 stance which not only exhibits physical energy in a new form, but is 



