578 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. LII. No. 1355 



SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS 



Dr. Edward Ehodes Stitt, head of the 

 Naval Medical School at "Washington, D. C, 

 has been appointed Surgeon General of the 

 liTavy, to succeed Surgeon General Braisted 

 who retired on lQ"ovember 26. 



Dr. Whitman Cross, of the U. S. Geo- 

 logical Survey, has been appointed honorary- 

 associate in petrology at the National Mu- 

 seum, succeeding the late Dr. J. P. Iddings. 



Dr. 0. L. Alsberg, chief of the Bureau of 

 Chemistry, U. S. Department of AgTiculture, 

 was elected president of the Association of 

 American Dairy Food and Drug Officials at 

 the recent convention of the Association at 

 St. Louis. 



In the issue of Science for November 26 

 ,(p. 505), Dr. I. C. White should have been 

 given as president of the Geological Society 

 of America. 



Arrangements have been made by the fac- 

 ulty and trustees of the University of Chicago 

 for the painting of the official portrait of 

 James Rowland Angell, formerly dean of the 

 faculties and head of the department of psy- 

 chology at the university, who is now head of 

 the Carnegie Corporation of New York. Mr. 

 Ralph Clarkson, the Chicago painter who 

 made the highly successful portraits of Pro- 

 fessor Thomas C. Chamberlin, former head 

 of the department of geology, and Professor 

 Rollin D. Salisbury, dean of the Ogden Grad- 

 uate School of Science, has been engaged to 

 paint Mr. Angell's portrait and is now in 

 New York for that purpose. Dean Angell 

 was connected with the University of Chicago 

 for twenty-five years. 



Dr. B. Laufer, curator of anthropology in 

 the Field Museum of Chicago, was elected an 

 honorary member of the Finnish Archeolog- 

 ioal Society of Helsingfors on the occasion of 

 the fiftieth anniversary of this society on 

 November 6, 1920, and a corresponding mem- 

 ber of the Societe des Amis de I'Art Asiatique, 

 Hague, Holland. He has recently been ap- 

 pointed honorary curator of Chinese antiqui- 

 ties in the Art Institute of Chicago. 

 , The recipient of the Alvarenga prize 



awarded by the Swedish Medical Association 

 this year was Dr. E. Hammarsten for his work 

 describing the isolation from the pancreas of a 

 " coupled " nucleic acid. 



Dr. C. M. Woodworth, who has been making 

 a study of the inheritance of disease resistance 

 in flax with the Office of Cereal Investigations, 

 U. S. Department of Agriculture, with head- 

 quarters at Madison, Wisconsin, has resigned 

 to take charge of the plant breeding work in 

 the agronomy department of the University 

 of Hlinois. 



Dr. Carl 0. Johns, chief of the color labora- 

 tory at the Bureau of Chemistry, U. S. De- 

 partment of Agriculture, resigned in Novem- 

 ber to become director of a newly-established 

 department of general researcih for the Stand- 

 ard Oil Company of New Jersey. 



Dr. Swarna Kumer Mitra, B.S., M.S. (Cali- 

 fornia), Ph.D. (Ohio State), a native Hindu 

 from Calcutta, has been appointed in the Im- 

 perial Agricultural Department of India as 

 provisional economic botanist of Assam. Dr. 

 Mitra sails for India early in January. 



We learn from the Journal of the Washing- 

 ton Academy of Sciences that Mr. H. Pittier, 

 of the U. S. Department of Agriculture, who 

 is at present in Venezuela, will accompany a 

 party of Swiss engineers who are expected in 

 Venezuela in January for the purpose of in- 

 vestigating doubtful points of the Venezuela- 

 Colombia boundary as recently arbitrated by 

 the King of Spain. The commission will tra- 

 verse the territory extending from a point on 

 the Rio Meta to the headwaters of the Guainiia 

 in the Rio Negro basin, a region which has 

 probably never been visited by naturalists. 



Professor Simon H. Gage spoke on Novem- 

 ber 30 before the Cornell University chapter of 

 the Society of Sigma Xi at its first public lec- 

 ture of the year. He described his recent in^ 

 vestigations on the determination of the di- 

 gestion and assimilation of fatty foods by a 

 study of the blood with the dark-field micros- 

 cope. 



Baron Gerard de Geer addressed the Geo- 

 logical Society of Boston on November 30, on 



