DEPARTMENT OF EXPERIMENTAL EVOLUTION.* 



C. B. Davenport, Director. 



The exigencies of the world war have called for the assistance of 

 every able-bodied man who could be spared from his family and 

 whose ordinary occupation was such that it could be temporarily 

 replaced by work of more immediate aid in the crisis. The response 

 of those in this Institution has been facilitated by the generous action 

 of the Trustees. Consequently, of the staff of this Department, three 

 besides the Director, or over half in all, have at this writing tempo- 

 rarily left their work at the Station to assist in the war. Dr. E. Carleton 

 MacDowell, a member of the Society of Friends, was the first to 

 answer the call. He began to train in June 1917, and later in the 

 summer he sailed for France as one of a reconstruction unit of the 

 Red Cross. In France he helped rebuild homes in the devastated 

 area; sometimes only a few miles back of the trenches. Meanwhile 

 his experiments on the effect of alcohol on the germ-plasm of rats 

 have been continued, along lines planned by him, with the aid of his 

 effective assistant. Miss Emilie Vicari. 



Dr. Charles W. Metz was unable, for physical reasons, to enter 

 the service as a combatant. In the early autumn of 1917 he answered 

 the call sent out first by the Red Cross for assistance with anti-malaria 

 work in the neighborhood of the southern cantonments. He was 

 shortly after transferred to the Public Health Service. He served at 

 Hattiesburg, later at Montgomery, Alabama, and at Lakeland, 

 Florida, making investigations into the problems of elimination of 

 the malarial mosquito. Malaria, formerly so dangerous an enemy of 

 soldiers in semitropical and tropical countries, was reduced in our 

 southern camps last summer to negligible proportions by the work 

 in which Mr. Metz is participating. 



In October 1917 the Director of the Department became a member 

 of the committee on anthropology. National Research Council. This 

 led eventually to his appointment as major in the Sanitary Corps of 

 the Medical Department of the Army. As head of the section of 

 anthropology, division of medical records, he looks after the interests 

 of the physical examination service of the Army, and assists the Army 

 in questions of racial dimensions and differences; he has also partici- 

 pated in the statistical treatment of the data of the division of medical 

 records. 



On August 9, Dr. Oscar Riddle was appointed captain in the Sanitary 

 Corps, U. S. Army, to assist, with his expert knowledge of biochemis- 

 try, in the work of the food division. 



Of those members of the staff who have not, at this writing, entered 

 the Army, two have been unable to do so because of their duties toward 



*Situated at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New York. 



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