NOVEMBEE 20, 1908] 



SCIENCE 



721 



Colonel George H. Torney will succeed 

 Brigadier General Robert M. O'Reilly as sur- 

 geon general of the army on January 14. 



It is unofficially stated that Mr. William 

 Marconi is to be awarded the next Nobel prize 

 in physics. 



A LIFE-SIZED portrait of Dr. John Galbraith, 

 professor of engineering at the University of 

 Toronto, has been presented to the university 

 on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary 

 of his appointment. 



The Institution of Civil Engineers, London, 

 has made the following awards for the year 

 1907-8 : Telford gold medals to W. B. Parsons 

 and Dr. H. Lapworth; a Watt gold medal to 

 Sir Whately Eliot; George Stephenson gold 

 medals to Sir John W. Ottley, K.O.I.E., Dr. A. 

 W. Brightmore, J. S. Wilson and W. Gore. 



The Bisset Hawkins gold medal of the 

 Royal College of Physicians has been awarded 

 to Sir Shirley Murphy, medical officer of 

 health of the County of London, for his dis- 

 tinguished services in the cause of public 

 health. 



Provost Charles C. Harrison will repre- 

 sent the University of Pennsylvania at the 

 Darwin celebration at Cambridge University 

 in June next. 



Dr. Ostwald Schmiedeberg, director of the 

 Pharmacological Institute at Strasburg, has 

 celebrated his seventieth birthday. 



Dr. Ludwig Mono, F.R.S., has been deco- 

 rated with the Grand Cordon of the Crown 

 of Italy. 



Dr. Carl L. Alsberg has resigned his posi- 

 tion in the department of physiological chem- 

 istry of the Harvard Medical School, to take 

 charge of the poisonous plant investigations in 

 the Bureau of Plant Industries of the U. S. 

 Department of Agriculture. 



Professor Dorsey A. Lyon, of the depart- 

 ment of metallurgy in Stanford University, 

 has resigned to become manager of an elec- 

 trical smelting plant. 



Dr. H. Hergesell, director of the Meteor- 

 ological Bureau for Alsace-Loraine, has been 

 transferred to the Department of the Interior, 

 Berlin. 



King Haakon has headed the piiblic sub- 

 scription for Captain Amundsen's polar ex- 

 pedition with a donation of $5,000. 



Dr. Siebers, of Giessen, is in charge of an 

 expedition to Peru, supported by the Karl 

 Ritter foundation of Leipzig. 



Professor V. L. Kellogg, of Stanford Uni- 

 versity, now in Italy, has been granted leave 

 of absence for the remainder of the year. 



Kuo Feng-ning, of Shanghai, China, a dele- 

 gate of the Chinese Fisheries Company to the 

 recent International Fisheries Congress at 

 Washington, and Kohang Yih, who is in- 

 vestigating tobacco growing in this country, 

 are visiting our colleges of agriculture and 

 experiment stations. 



Sir Horace Plunket, formerly of the agri- 

 cultural department in Ireland, has left for 

 the United States, on invitation, to confer 

 with the Commission on Country Life, ap- 

 pointed by President Roosevelt. 



Dr. F. M. Smith, head of the department of 

 agriculture of the Transvaal, South Africa, is 

 visiting this country to gather information in 

 agricultural education in view of a con- 

 templated college of agriculture at Prsetoria. 



The Pathological Society of Philadelphia, 

 at its meeting on October 22, elected the fol- 

 lowing officers: President, Dr. Joseph Mc- 

 Farland; Vice-Presidents, Drs. Edsall, Reis- 

 man, Kelly and Smith; Secretary, Dr. R. S. 

 Lavenson; Treasurer, Dr. C. Y. White; Ee- 

 corder. Dr. F. H. Klaer ; Curator, E. H. Good- 

 man. 



Dr. E. E. Slosson, of the New York Inde- 

 pendent, is collecting material for a series of 

 articles on the leading universities of the 

 United States. He has spent the past two 

 weeks at Stanford University and the Univer- 

 sity of California. 



In view of the development of ilying ma- 

 chines and airships during the past few 

 months, the American Society of Mechanical 

 Engineers have arranged for an exhaustive 

 paper on aeronautics by Major George O. 

 Squier, of the Signal Corps, U.S.A., Wash- 

 ington, D. C, to be read at the annual meet- 

 ing in New York, December 1-4. An evening 

 lecture upon aeronautics will be given by 



