SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLVII. No. 1225 



New members were elected as follows: 



Eesidents m the United States 

 Henry Andrews Bumstead, A.B., Ph.D., New 



Haven. 

 Philip Powell Calvert, Ph.D., Philadelphia. 

 Clarence Griffin Child, Ph.D., L.H.D., Philadelphia. 

 William T. Councilman, A.M., M.D., LL.D., Boston. 

 Victor George Heiser, M.D., New York. 

 Herbert C. Hoover, B.A., LL.D., Washington. 

 Ales Hrdlidka, M.D., Washington. 

 Gilbert Newton Lewis, A.M., Ph.D., Berkeley, 



Calif. 

 Theodore Lyman, Ph.D., Cambridge. 

 J. Percy Moore, Media, Pa. 

 Louis Valentine Pirsson, M.A., New Haven. 

 George Harrison Shull, B.S., Ph.D., Princeton. 

 Joseph Swain, B.L., M.S., LL.D., Swarthmore, Pa. 

 William Eosooe Thayer, A.M., LL.D., Litt.D., 



L.H.D., Cambridge 

 Samuel Wendell Williston, A.M., M.D., Ph.D., 



Sc.D., Chicago. 



Joseph Jacques Cesaire JofEre, Paris 

 Paul Painlevg, Paris. 

 Raymond Poincarg, Paris. 



SCIENTIFIC PEOGKAM 



Thursday Afternoon, April 18; William B. Scott, 

 D.Sc, LL.D., president, in the chair 

 Control of prices of food under Queen Elisabeth: 

 E. P. Chetney, A.M., LL.D., University of Penn- 

 sylvania. The five years from 1594 to 1598 were a 

 period of great scarcity and high prices of all food 

 products in England. The average price of wheat, 

 transformed into modern values, was for months at 

 a time above $7 a bushel, and in some places and at 

 certain times, especially in the year 1596, it rose to 

 $15 and even $18 a bushel. Eye, oats and barley 

 were hardly cheaper and meats and other food rose 

 in proportion. There was much privation and dis- 

 order. The government took the following steps to 

 overcome the difficulty: (1) One set of provisions 

 was directed toward better distribution of what 

 food was in England. (2) Another set of pro- 

 visions was directed toward increasing the avail- 

 able supply. (3) It is noticeable that the govern- 

 ment did not establish a legal price; no relation 

 was established between the price of grain and the 

 price of flour; no substitutes were provided for. 

 (4) The government, town authorities and the 

 rural gentry were constantly in fear of popular 

 uprisings, and there were several threatening move- 

 ments which were vigorously punished by the gov- 

 ernment. (5) No satisfactory method of control- 

 ling the supply and price of food was worked out 

 at this time, and the suffering was only alleviated 

 by better crops, heavy taxation for the poor, and 

 the cessation of the war. 



Control of commerce in wa/r time: William E. 

 LiNGELBACH, prof essor of modern European history, 

 University of Pennsylvania. 



The influence of Russian political parties on do- 

 mestic and international questions: Alexander 

 Petrunkevitch, Ph.D., professor of zoology, Yale 

 University. 



The relations of French and American thought in 

 the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Albert 

 SCHINZ, A.M., Ph.D., professor of French litera- 

 ture. Smith College, Northampton, Mass. 



Problems of war finance: Thomas S. Adams, 

 Ph.D., professor of political economy, Yale Uni- 

 versity. 



Control of railroads of the United States : Emory 

 E. Johnson, Sc.D., professor of transportation and 

 commerce. University of Pennsylvania. 



The sanitation of camps: Colonel Frederick 

 P. EussELL, Medical Corps, U. S. A. 



Surgical shocTc: William T. Porter, M.D., 

 LL.D., professor of comparative physiology, Har- 

 vard University. 



Friday Morning, April 19; J. G. Eosengarten, 

 LL.D., Vice-president, in the Chair 



History of the study of GreeTc vase painting: 

 Stephen B. Luce, curator of Greek antiquities. 

 Museum of the University of Pennsylvania. 



The art of George Catlin : Edwin Swipt Balch, 

 A.B., of Philadelphia. 



Typewriter Tceyboards; an inquiry for some ror 

 tional ones: Charles E. Lanman, Ph.D., LL.D., 

 professor of Sanskrit, Harvard University. 



Changing of sex ratio in the rat: Helen D. 

 King, associate professor of embryology, Wistar 

 Institute, Philadelphia. This paper gave the re- 

 sults of a series of inbreeding experiments on the 

 albino rat that were made to determine: (1) 

 whether inbreeding increases the number of male 

 offspring, as maintained by Carl Dtising; (2) 

 whether the sex ratio can be altered by selection. 

 The data summarized cover twenty-five generations 

 of inbred rats, comprising 25,452 individuals. Ac- 

 cepting the current view that the spermatozoa are 

 of two kinds, one "male-producing" and the 

 other "female-producing," it is possible to ex- 

 plain the altered sex ratios in the two series by 

 assuming that, in the A series, selection preserved 

 those females for breeding in which the ova had 

 an inherited tendency to attract spermatozoa that 

 were "male-producing"; among the offspring, 

 therefore, there was an excess of males (122.3 



