492 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LII. No. 1351 



Cisidse with others. Personally, I would much 

 prefer the latter as the permanent form for the 

 word. 



Thos. L. Casey 



research problems "assigned to" uni- 

 versity professors and their 

 students 



A PAPER on North American Forest Re- 

 search^ has recently been issued, giving a 

 resume of the " Investigative Projects in 

 Forestry and Allied Subjects Conducted by 

 National, Stat© and Provincial Governments, 

 Schools of Forestry, Scientific Schools and 

 Private Interests in Canada, Newfoundland 

 and the United States for 1919-20." 



More than five hundred projects are enu- 

 merated, nearly half of them under investiga- 

 tion by persons in departments of the United 

 States government. Many of the remainder 

 are concerned with the activities of various 

 state agencies and institutions, while a num- 

 ber represent research undertaken by pro- 

 fessors and their students in various colleges 

 and universities. 



The compilers of this list have very care- 

 fully indicated in connection with each 

 project, by whom it is being investigated, 

 nearly always stating that it is " assigned to " 

 some individual or group of persons. For ex- 

 ample, under certain universities and colleges, 

 we find numerous projects " assigned to " 

 various members of their faculties and in 

 certain cases secondarily to their students. 



I think we may legitimately inquire by 

 whom these problems have been assigned to 

 the persons named. Certainly not by the Na- 

 tional Research Council, not by the Society 

 of American Foresters, not by our colleagues, 

 and usually not by any of the governing 

 boards of the universities and colleges. 



Such wording, like the repeated use of 

 " control " and " direction," conveys the im- 

 putation that men of science do not select 

 and elaborate their own lines of research, and 



• 1 Compiled -by the Committee on American Forest 

 Research, Society of American Foresters, and pub- 

 lished as Vol. 1, Ft. 4, of the Bulletin of the Na- 

 tional Research Council, August, 1920. 



it is very unfortunate that it should appear 

 in such a journal as the Bulletin of the Na- 

 tional Research Council. Let us hope that 

 the council does not stand sponsor for it, for 

 it does not seem likely that it will aid in 

 attaining the closer cooperation which inde- 

 pendent workers hope to see as a result of the 

 operations of the Research Council. It is 

 better to believe that the printer or the proof- 

 reader has inserted this stereotyped phrase as 

 it appears quite regularly, and no doubt 

 properly so, in connection with many of the 

 bureaus and governmental agencies. In view 

 of the increasing extension of the bureau- 

 cratic spirit into scientific work, perhaps all 

 research must be assigned by some one other 

 than he who performs it, and possibly prob- 

 lems should not be outlined by those who in- 

 vestigate them. Until such comes to pass, 

 however, it seems unjustifiable that research 

 in forestry or in any other subject should be 

 thrust into the lime-light with such carelessly 

 worded captions attached. 



C. T. Brues , 



THE LAWS OF HYBRIDIZING DIS- 

 COVERED BY RICHARD DIENER 



The above is the title of a booklet of some 

 sixteen pages, dated (with a rubber stamp) as 

 issued July 1, 1920, and coming, appropri- 

 ately, from California, the home of plant 

 wizardry. The discoverer states that it has 

 taken thousands of crosses and fifteen years 

 of time to perfect the laws which he is now 

 giving to mankind — for a consideration. Their 

 presentation is a delightful example of sim- 

 plicity; the reader is not troubled with tire- 

 some descriptions of methods or measures 

 taken to check the results; the pages are not 

 rendered unsightly by arrays of tables, nor is 

 the intellect taxed by incomprehensible statis- 

 tics, as is so often the case in present-day 

 treatises on this subject. On the contrary the 

 author has not needed all of his sixteen pages 

 for the exposition; besides the title page he is 

 able to spare one for a full-page portrait of 

 himself, five pages are given to photographs 

 of results of his labors, while a double-page 

 diagram sets forth his laws so clearly that 



