Januaby 2, 1920] 



SCIENCE 



11 



to the funds needed for the field work of the 

 bureau, larger funds than are now available 

 are required for carrying on the office work, 

 for it is necessary to have highly trained men 

 to prepare and care for the data used in 

 making up these charts. 



Lack of money prevents the bureau from 

 obtaining a sufficient number of such men, 

 and many of those at present in the service 

 are leaving for better salaried positions else- 

 where. There have been large numbers of 

 resignations from the commissioned personnel 

 and other scientific arms of the bureau, in 

 fact, from all classes of the service, and it is 

 expected that these conditions will continue 

 until something is done to meet the situation. 



The superintendent points out that the con- 

 dition is so serious that it threatens to jeop- 

 ardize public welfare, for, he says : 



The commissioned officers are the lowest paid 

 men of their training in the federal service. Their 

 salaries, compared to those paid in the army and 

 the navy for similar qualifications, are 30 to 50 

 per cent. less. Much of their work is more hazar- 

 dous, requires special training, and takes them into 

 all our country's possessions as the pioneer workers 

 or navigators — surveyors who ' ' blaze the trail ' ' on 

 land and sea. And no army or navy officer has 

 greater qualifications, nor do they sacrifice more 

 than the officer of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, 

 yet the latter works for much the lowest salary, 

 gets no longevity pay, no emoluments, and after he 

 has given his best years to the service of his coun- 

 try he must retire without pay. 



Too few persons realize the sacrifices a man of 

 ability is making at the present time by remaining 

 in the Coast and Geodetic Survey. Before this 

 country entered the war conditions had grown to 

 a serious stage, but since the signing of the armis- 

 tice steady disintegration has gone on, and the 

 situation has reached a point where the quality of 

 the Survey's employees is declining principally 

 under the stress of present economic conditions. 

 Unless proper relief is forthcoming at once, and 

 the present salaries are materially advanced, this 

 important branch of the federal government, which 

 has so much to do with the protecting of human 

 lives, will, in a measure at least, be stripped of its 

 best brains. 



THE ROYAL MEDALS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY 



As has been noted in Science these medals 

 were awarded to Professor John Bretland 



Farmer and Mr. James Haywood Jeans. In 

 conferring them on November 30 Sir Joseph 

 Thomson, the president of the society, said: 



Professor Farmer 's work is eiharaeterized by the 

 fundamental importance of the problems worked 

 upon; thus his memoirs on the meiotic phase (re- 

 duction division) in amimals and plants are of as 

 great value to zoologists as to botanists, and his 

 conclusions and interpretations of the complex 

 nuclear changes which precede the differentiation 

 of the sexual cells have stood the test of criticism, 

 and remain the clearest and most logical account 

 of these very important phenomena. His papers, 

 in collaboration with his pupil, Miss Digby, on the 

 cytology of those ferns in which the normal alterna- 

 tion of generations ds departed from has thrown 

 new light on problems of the greatest biological 

 interest, and especially on the nature of sexuality. 

 In his cytological work on cancerous growths Pro- 

 fessor Farmer has established the close similarity 

 between the cells of malign-ant growths and those 

 of normal reproductive tissue. 



Mr. Jeans has successfully attacked some of the 

 most difficult problems in mathematical physics and 

 astronomy. In the kinetic theory of gases he has 

 improved the theory of viscosity, and, using gen- 

 eralized coordinates, has given the best proof yet 

 devised of the equipartition of energy and of Max- 

 well 's law of the distribution of molecular veloci- 

 ties, assuming the validity of the laws of Newton- 

 ian dynamics. In dynamical astronomy he took up 

 the difficult proiblem of the stability of the pear- 

 shaped form of rotating, incompressible, gravita- 

 ting fluid at a point where Darwin, Poincarg and 

 Liapounoff had left it, and obtained discordant re- 

 sults. By proceeding to a third order of approxi- 

 mation, for which very great mathematical skiU 

 was required, he showed that this form was un- 

 stable. He followed this np by the discussion of 

 the similar problem when the fluid is compressible, 

 and concluded that for a density greater than a 

 critical value of about one quarter that of water 

 the behavior is generally similar to that of an in- 

 compressible fluid. For lower densities the be- 

 havior resembles that of a perfectly compressible 

 fluid, and with increasing rotation matter will 

 take a lenticular shape and later be ejected from 

 the edge. 



MR. ROCKEFELLER'S GIFTS 



There were announced on Christmas day 

 two large gifts by Mr. John D. Eockefeller, 

 $50,000,000 to the Eockefeller Foundation and 

 $50,000,000 to the General Education Board, 

 the money to be available for immediate use. 



