Makch 4, 1921] 



SCIENCE 



211 



with a commercial wood products utilization 

 company. 



Dr. Edward A. Spitzka assumed his new 

 work in the neuro-psycliiatric section, med- 

 ical division, War Eisk Insurance Bureau, 

 Washington, D. C, on March 1. 



Dr. Horace W. Frink, assistant professor 

 of neurology at the Cornell Medical College, 

 has sailed to work in psycho-analysis with 

 Professor Freud at Vienna. 



Professor Selskar M. Gunn, formerly as- 

 sociate professor of public health at the 

 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who 

 has served for three years as associate director 

 of the Commission for the Prevention of 

 Tuberculosis in France, has left for Prague, 

 Czechoslovakia, where he is to act as adviser 

 in Public Health to the Ministry of Public 

 Health. This appointment is in connection 

 with the program of cooperation between the 

 International Health Board of the Rockefeller 

 Foundation and the Ministry of Public 

 HeaM. 



A MEMORIAL lecture on the life and work of 

 the late Sir William Abney will be delivered 

 before the Eoyal Photographic Society of 

 Great Britain by Mr. Chapman Jones. 



As a tribute to the services and character 

 of the late General WiUiam C. Gorgas, the 

 Senate has ordered that the remarks made at 

 the memorial services in his honor, held at 

 Washington, D. C, January 16, be printed. 



UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL 

 NEWS 



The sum of $1,000,000 has been given to 

 the new School of Medicine and Dentistry of 

 the University of Rochester, by Mrs. Gertrude 

 Strong Achilles and Mrs. Helen Strong Carter, 

 daughters of Henry A. Strong, who died in 

 Rochester in 1919. The money will be used 

 toward the erection of a clinical hospital as a 

 memorial to the father and mother of the 

 donors. 



' The Bulletin of the American Mathematical 

 Society announces that in the department of 

 mathematics at the University of Illinois, As- 



sociate Professor R. D. Carmichael has been 

 promoted to a full professorship; Dr. C. F. 

 Green, Dr L. L. Steimley, and Dr. B. Mar- 

 garet Turner have been appointed instructors; 

 Professor E. R. Smith, on leave of absence 

 from Pennsylvania State College, has been 

 appointed associate. 



Dr. Rhoda Erdmann, formerly lecturer at 

 Tale University, has been appointed lecturer 

 on experimental cytology in the University of 

 Berlin. 



At the University of Cambridge Dr. W. L. 

 H. Duckworth, Jesus College, has been ap- 

 pointed to the newly created readership of 

 anatomy, Mr. F. A. Potts, Trinity Hall, 

 demonstrator of comparative anatomy, V. 

 C. Pennell, Pembroke CdU^e, an additional 

 junior demonstrator in anatomy and Dr. C. S. 

 Myers, Gonville and Caius Collie, has been 

 appointed reader in experimental psychology. 



DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE 



HUMAN NATURE AS A REPEATING FACTOR: 

 THAT THRICE TOLD TALE 



The following comments on Professor 

 Wood's " Thrice Told Tale," Science, January 

 14, 1921, are based upon my long experience in 

 showing celestial objects through a great tele- 

 scope to tens of thousands of Saturday-night 

 visitors, and in explaining photographs of star 

 clusters, the Milky Way, spiral nebulse, etc., to 

 thousands of others. Perhaps these comments 

 will be of interest to the psychologists. 



I fear that Professor Wood is unduly con- 

 cerned about the victimization of present-day 

 expositors of the universe, including himself. 

 Contrary to his implication that the response 

 to his (Wood's) explanation of the universe, 

 made by the chance visitor to his ingenious 

 telescope, could never be made again, I would 

 say that the incident in all its essentials has 

 certainly happened many times, and it will 

 doubtless occur many times in the future, for 

 human nature is a first-class repeating factor. 



When visitors to an observatory get a sud- 

 den appreciation of the bigness of our sun and 

 other stars, of the number of suns in our 

 stellar system, of the possible number of 



