FEBRUARY 9, 1912] 
UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL NEWS 
ConpitionaL gifts of $100,000 to Washing- 
ton and Jefferson College at Washington, Pa., 
toward a $500,000 fund, and $50,000 to the 
Emory and Henry College at Emory, Va., 
toward a $250,000 fund, were voted at a meet- 
ing of the General Education Board of the 
Rockefeller Foundation on January 26. 
Frederick T. Gates was reelected chairman 
and Wallace Buttrick, secretary of the board 
for 1912. These two officers and Robert C. 
Ogden, Walter H. Page, John D. Rockefeller, 
Jr., Starr J. Murphy and Edgar L. Marston 
form the executive committee. Jerome D. 
Greene, business manager of the Rockefeller 
Institute for Medical Research, was elected a 
member of the board. 
CorNELL UNIVERSITY again has a forestry 
faculty. One year ago Mr. Walter Mulford, 
junior professor of forestry in the University 
of Michigan, was appointed professor of for- 
estry at Cornell, and has been in Ithaca since 
last summer. This fall Mr. John Bentley, 
Jr., formerly of the U. S. Forest Service, was 
appointed assistant professor in the depart- 
ment. And now Professor Filibert Roth, who 
for the past nine years has been at the head 
of the forest school at the University of Michi- 
gan, has accepted appointment at Cornell as 
professor of forestry and head of the depart- 
ment. The forestry work is a department of 
the New York State College of Agriculture 
at Cornell University. The department plans 
to give a thorough professional course. 
Dr. HucH P. Baker, professor of forestry 
at Pennsylvania State College, has been ap- 
pointed to fill the newly created post of pro- 
fessor of forestry at the University of Illinois. 
Mr. A. W. Notan, of West Virginia Uni- 
versity, has been appointed assistant professor 
of agriculture. Dr. B. E. Powell, formerly 
private secretary to President James, has been 
appointed journalist in the College of Agri- 
culture and Experiment Station. 
Dr. J. B. WoopwortH has been promoted to 
an associate professorship of geology at Har- 
vard University. 
SCIENCE 
215 
Proressor W. A. Bone, F.R.S., Leeds Uni- 
versity, has been appointed professor of fuel 
and refractory materials in a new department 
of applied chemistry now being established in 
the Imperial College at South Kensington, 
London. 
Proressor Hess, of Wiirzburg, has received 
a call as director of the eye clinic of the Uni- 
versity of Berlin. 
DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE 
FORMATION OF CLOUDS OVER FIRES 
To tHE Eprror or Science: In your issues 
of May 15, 1908, and October 23, 1908, there 
appeared letters describing the formation of 
clouds observed above the column of smoke 
from large fires. In the latter letter, by Wm. 
F. Wallis, no mention of the character of the 
clouds thus formed is given; I am under the 
impression that Mr. B. M. Varney, in his let- 
ter of May 15, described these clouds as 
cumulus clouds, but as I have not that num- 
ber of ScrENcE before me can not now be sure 
that he did so describe them. If previously 
noted occurrences of clouds over fires have 
been of cumulus clouds, it may be of interest 
to note a formation of a slightly different type. 
On the morning of November 16, 1911, the 
revolutionary forces attacked the city of Foo- 
chow, and set fire to the Manchu quarter of 
the city. The fire burned more or less fiercely 
for some twenty-four hours. About 1:05 p.m. 
on the 9th, when the air temperature was 70°, 
the relative humidity 52 per cent., and the sky 
otherwise cloudless, there appeared at the top 
of the smoke column rising from the city a 
white cloud closely resembling the fracto- 
eumulus. The cloud maintained its position 
over the column of smoke for only a very few 
minutes, and then melted away, but was fol- 
lowed some fifteen minutes later by a similar 
cloud, which soon disappeared. How fre- 
quently and at what intervals this formation 
and disappearance occurred I do not know, 
but several times later until about 4:30 p.m. 
similar clouds were observed for a few min- 
utes. These clouds were at about the average 
height of cumulus clouds, and would seem to 
have been formed, as Mr. Varney suggests, by 
