December 4, 1908] 



SCIENCE 



795 



ment of Vanderbilt Square, now occupied by 

 the two Vanderbilt dormitories, is announced. 



Me. G. H. Kenrick, Lord Mayor of Birm- 

 ingham, has made a gift of £10,000 towards the 

 funds of Birmingham University. This is bis 

 third contribution toward the development of 

 the university, his total gifts amounting to a 

 sum of £25,000. 



The Oakland Tribune, as quoted in the 

 Boston Transcript, says that President Ben- 

 jamin Ide Wheeler, of the University of Cali- 

 fornia, is at Ann Arbor and may accept the 

 presidency of the University of Michigan, to 

 succeed Dr. Angell, who wishes to retire. Dr. 

 "Wheeler's ten-year contract with California 

 will expire on January 1. His salary at 

 Berkeley is $10,000, whereas it is said that 

 Michigan has offered him $15,000. 



By vote of the corporation Harvard Uni- 

 versity will remit the regular tuition fees in 

 all its departments for any students, not ex- 

 ceeding five in any one year, who shall be 

 accredited by the Prussian ministry of educa- 

 tion as students qualified to pursue advanced 

 studies. 



Dr. Arthur L. Dean has been appointed in- 

 structor in industrial chemistry in the Shef- 

 field Scientific School, of Tale University. 



Dr. George Dean, chief bacteriologist at the 

 Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine, has 

 been appointed to succeed Professor D. J. 

 Hamilton in the chair of pathology in the 

 University of Aberdeen. 



DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE 



A REPLY TO THE COMMUNICATION OF MESSRS. 



LOEB, MAXWELL, BURNETT AND ROBERTSON' 



The idea of using temperature coefficients 

 for the analysis of living processes developed 

 in two distinct stages. The first stage was the 

 thought of employing the method whenever 

 chemical reaction was supposed to be the 

 primary cause of a living process. For, if the 

 process were chemical then its velocity must 

 follow changes of temperature as does the 

 velocity of chemical reaction. This was the 

 Cohen-Loeb portion of the idea, as was clearly 

 stated in the present writer's doctor's disserta- 



^ Science, November 6, 1908. 



tion on the subject, from which Professor 

 Loeb himself quotes in his search for evidence 

 on his side, and as has been reiterated by him 

 in his " Dynamics of Living Matter " (1906). 



The second stage was the thought that if 

 primary chemical action can be detected by 

 comparing temperature coefiicients — ^why then 

 primary physical (non-chemical) action can 

 also be detected by comparing temperature 

 coefficients. This part of the idea was ori- 

 ginal with the writer, to the best of his knowl- 

 edge, and was communicated by him as such 

 in a letter to Professor Loeb from Berlin dur- 

 ing the winter of 1906-7 — a letter to which no 

 reply was ever received. The idea was later 

 published and received its first clear and un- 

 mistakable enunciation in April, 1907, in the 

 Archiv fur Anat. und Physiologie, Physiol. 

 Abt., p. 113, in a paper entitled " Der Temper- 

 aturkoeffieient der Geschwindigkeit der Ner- 

 venleitung." 



At no previous time did Professor Loeb or 

 any of his colleagues ever so much as hint to 

 Snyder that they had grasped, to say nothing 

 of having contemplated or having begun work 

 along, this extended line of thought. All the 

 work proceeding from their laboratory up to 

 October, 1907, was, so far as the writer knew, 

 a constant and unswerving effort to obtain 

 chemical reaction temperature coefficients. 



However, in a paper, which the writer has 

 never been able to see, until the present wri- 

 ting, it would appear that Professor Loeb did 

 have an inkling of a thought concerning the 

 further application of temperature coefficient 

 determinations. This paper is entitled, " On 

 Chemical Methods by which the Eggs of a 

 Mollusc, Lottia gigantea, can be Caused to 

 become Mature."^ Here the author says that 

 he wanted to find out whether NaOH, by 

 which he succeeded in removing the chorion 

 (ovarian-membrane ?) of the eggs, had a 

 " physical or chemical action." 



As the title of that paper implies, he de- 

 cided it was chemical action, for, in a single 

 case the velocity of maturation was 105 at 18° 

 and 315 at 8°.' But from the whole tenor of 



2 Univ. of Calif. Public, Physiology, Vol. III., 

 p. 1, 1905. 



° Loc. cit., p. 4. 



