SCIENCE 



A WEEKLY JOURNAL DEVOTED TO THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE, PUBLISHING THE 



OFFICIAL NOTICES AND PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ASSOCIATION 



FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE. 



Friday, August 14, 1908 



CONTENTS 

 The Call to Piiblio Health: Pkofessor Will- 

 iam T. Sedgwick 193 



Appropriations for the Department of Agri- 

 culture 202 



Commander Peary's Expedition 205 



Scientific Notes and News 206 



University and Educational News 208 



Discussion and Correspondence: — 



The Annual Appropriation for Salaries of 

 the Instructing Staff at Bryn Mawr Col- 

 lege: Professor David VViLBUB HoKN. Air- 

 ships, Past and Present: Db. Cleveland 

 Abbe, Jr 209 



Scientific Boohs: — 



Thomson's Heredity: J. P. McM. Stvift 

 on Mind in the Making: Professor Ed- 

 ward L. Thorndike 210 



Botanical Notes: — • 



Recent Systematic Publications; The De- 

 velopment of a Great Journal: Professob 

 Charles E. Bessey 213 



Special Articles: — 



Typhoid Fever and the Purification of 

 Public Water Supplies: Professob W. T. 

 Sedgwick and Scott MacNutt 215 



The Thirty-eighth General Meeting of the 

 American Chemical Society — //. ; B. E. 

 Cubby 216 



MSS. intended for publication and books, etc., intended for 

 review should be sent to the Editor of Science, Garrison-on- 

 Hudson, N, Y., or during the present summer to Wood's Hole, 



THE CALL TO PUBLIC HEALTH'- 



One of the most fruitful sequels of the 

 scientific age has been the new and higher 

 valuation which it places upon ordinary- 

 human life. 



As long as this present every-day world 

 and this ordinary human life were held, 

 whether by ancients or by medievals, to 

 be merely the prelude to another and a 

 better, any serious struggle for longevity, 

 any earnest plea for health for health's 

 sake, fell upon deaf ears. As long as a 

 sick man or his friends could honestly ex- 

 claim in the face of sickness or death, "I 

 know that if my earthly house of this tab- 

 ernacle be dissolved I have an house not 

 made with hands, eternal, in the heavens," 

 disease and death lost their terrors, and 

 even became almost attractive. 



Ideals of this kind, full of hope and 

 rich in encouragement for weary mortals, 

 ought never, and need never, to have been 

 divorced from perfect joy and satisfaction 

 in this present life. It was the refusal to 

 consent to any such separation that brought 

 on the warm springtime of the Renaissance 

 after the winter of the Middle Ages. And 

 it must be reckoned the colossal blunder of 

 theology and ecelesiasticism that in their 

 reaction to the Renaissance they blindly 

 turned their backs upon this world and 

 fixed their gaze upon a distant and an un- 

 known world of which they dreamed much 

 but Imew little. It was well that theology 

 should urge man on to the ultimate and 

 the ideal, but it need not, in doing' this, 



^ The annual address in medicine, Yale Uni- 

 versity. 



