June 13, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



903 



years of service, and for widows and orphaned 

 children, at one half the scale upon which 

 members of the staff are pensioned. 



SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS 



At its commencement exercises last week 

 Columbia University conferred its doctorate of 

 science on Colonel William C. Gorgas, Assist- 

 ant Surgeon General U. S. A., and Dr. Alexis 

 Carrel, Eockefeller Institute for Medical Re- 

 search. 



The Medical Society of London, at its meet- 

 ing on May 19, elected Sir David Terrier, 

 r.E.S., president, in succession to Sir Watson 

 Cheyne. 



Dr. V. F. K. Bjerknes, professor of geo- 

 physics in the University of Leipzig, and Dr. 

 Hugo Hergesell, president of the International 

 Commission for Scientific Aeronautics, Stras- 

 burg, have been elected honorary members of 

 the Royal Meteorological Society. 



Professor George F. Swain, professor of 

 civil engineering in the Graduate School of 

 Applied Science at Harvard University, has 

 been chosen chairman of the Boston Transit 

 Commission to succeed the late George G. 

 Crocker. 



Professor Charles J. Smith, for forty- 

 three years head of the department of mathe- 

 matics in Western Reserve College and Adel- 

 bert College, has presented his resignation and 

 will retire from the faculty at the close of the 

 present college year. He served as professor 

 of mathematics and Perkins professor of nat- 

 ural philosophy and astronomy in Western 

 Reserve College from 1870 to 1882, and as 

 professor of mathematics in Adelbert College 

 from 1882 to the present. 



Assistant Professor J. E. Readhimer, 

 superintendent of experiment fields at the 

 University of Illinois since 1901, has entered 

 on his duties as agricultural adviser in Kane 

 County, Illinois. Professor Readhimer began 

 his work at the university when there were no 

 experiment fields in the state outside of Ur- 

 bana. He has had a part in a great agricul- 

 tural development in Illinois. As superinten- 



dent he has been intimately connected with the 

 development of the experiment fields. He haa 

 seen them increase from one (in Url?ana) to 

 thirty-five, scattered over the entire state. 



Gardner C. Basset, Ph.D., of the Johns 

 Hopkins University, in psychology (1913), has 

 been appointed research assistant in the Eu- 

 genics Record Office of the Station for Ex- 

 perimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, 

 and will continue the work on the intelligence 

 of inbred white rats begun at Johns Hopkins. 



Dr. Harrison J. Hunt, of Island Falls, 

 Maine, has been appointed surgeon to the 

 Crocker Land Expedition which is leaving for 

 the north polar regions on July 2 next, under 

 the auspices of the American Museum of Nat- 

 ural History, the American Geographical So- 

 ciety and the University of Illinois. Dr. 

 Hunt is a graduate of Bowdoin College and 

 medical school and has had eight years' private 

 practise. 



The C. M. Warren committee of the Ameri- 

 can Academy of Arts and Sciences has in- 

 creased to two hundred dollars the award to 

 Professor E. W. Washburn, University of Illi- 

 nois, for his work on the design of an adia- 

 batic calorimeter. Professor H. B. Byers, 

 University of Washington, has recently pub- 

 lished two papers on the passivity of iron, 

 dealing with researches which were in part 

 made possible by grants from the Warren 

 fund. This fund was bequeathed to the acad- 

 emy " for the encouragement and advance of 

 research in the science or field of chemistry" 

 and the committee in charge is glad to know 

 of investigations which may properly be aided 

 by it. Professor H. P. Talbot, Massachusetts 

 Institute of Technology, Boston, Mass., is 

 chairman of the committee. 



Dr. F. D. Barker, of the department of zo- 

 ology of the University of Nebraska, has been 

 voted a grant by the trustees of the Bache 

 fund to enable him to continue his study of 

 the parasitic fauna of the Bermudas. Dr. 

 Barker will spend the latter part of this sum- 

 mer and next summer collecting material at 

 Bermuda. 



