General 



53 



For the present, it is planned that eight or nine numbers shall con- 

 stitute a volume. 



Miscellaneous items. Endowed professorship and fellow- 

 SHiP IN PHYSiOLOGY. Dr. Isaac Ott, prof. of physiol., Medico-Chi 

 Coli, of Phila., died at Easton, Pa., Jan i, 1916. He was a for- 

 mer President of the Amer. Neurol. Sog., and noted for his work 

 on ductless glands and on the heat centers of the brain. By his 

 death, under the will of his mother, a sum of money becomes avail- 

 able for the endowment of the Isaac Ott Prof. of Physiol. in the 

 Medico-Chi. Coli. Under his own will, the Univ. of Penn, will 

 ultimately receive an endowment for the foundation of the Isaac 

 Ott Research Fellowship in Physiology. 



Function of milk. The milks of difTerent species are not 

 readily interchangeable because the proteins have functions in help- 

 ing to develop such radically different digestive apparatuses. From 

 a nutritional Standpoint milks do not differ very markedly, but in 

 developmental quality they are far apart. This fonns a very good 

 additional reason why every human mother should, if possible, 

 nurse her own Infant. The higher mortality following artificial 

 feeding is thus not the only reason in favor of maternal nursing. 

 In the former case by using milk of another species — the cow — we 

 put a hard-curdling milk into a stomach intended and adapted for a 

 soft, flocculent curd. This is not only the cause of much Indigestion, 

 but such Substitution falls adequately to carry out one of the func- 

 tions that milk was intended ( !) to per form in the scheme of evolu- 

 tion — namely, in each species specially to develop certain parts of 

 the gastro-intestinal tract that must later perform most of the work 

 of digestion. H. D. Chapin : Scientific Monthly, 1916, Ixxvii, p. 2. 



Dr. C. W. Eliot on the importance of biological chem- 

 ISTRY. The fruits of the biological sciences — botany, zoology, physi- 

 ology and biochemistry, applied to curative medicine and surgery 

 and to preventive medicine and sanitation — have been direct contri- 

 butions to human weif are; because they have provided defenses 

 against disease, premature death, and individual and family distress 

 and suffering. The beneficent appHcations of biological science, 

 unlike most of the large results of applied chemistry and physics, 

 take effect in the field of human afifections and family experiences, 



