September 9, 1921] 



SCIENCE 



221 



year now expended by the hospital and medi- 

 cal school for running expenses, and provid- 

 ing a building fund of $1,000,000. 



Dr. Lee I. Knight, of the department of 

 botany, University of Minnesota, has been 

 appointed chairman of that department. 



Dr. Harry F. Lewis, A.B. and A.M., Wes- 

 leyan University, and Ph.D., Tilden, Illinois, 

 has been elected associate professor in chemis- 

 try at Cornell College. 



Dr. Joseph L. Mayer, chief chemist of the 

 research and analytical laboratories of the 

 Louis K. Liggett Co., New York, has been 

 appointed professor of analytical and phar- 

 maceutical chemistry in the Brooklyn College 

 of Pharmacy where he has been associate pro- 

 fessor of analytical chemistry for several 

 years. 



S. C. Ogb0rn, Jr., graduate of the Univer- 

 sity of North Carolina, has been appointed in- 

 structor in chemistry at Washington and Lee 

 University. 



James L. Howe, Jr., who has been for three 

 years assistant professor of chemistry in Wash- 

 ington and Lee University, has accepted the 

 professorship of chemistry in Hangchow 

 Christian College, China. 



H. P. Philpot, assistant professor at Uni- 

 versity College, London, has been appointed to 

 the professorship of civil and mechanical 

 engineering at the Finsbury Technical Col- 

 lege; and A. J. Hale, chief assistant in the 

 department of applied chemistry, has been 

 appointed to the professorship in that depart- 

 ment. 



DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE 



THE CHERT PITS AT COXSACKIE, N. Y. 



A remarkable series of chert pits and two 

 large quarries two miles south of Coxsackie, N. 

 Y., is being examined by the archeological 

 staff of the State Museum of New York under 

 the leadership of State Archeologist Arthur C. 

 Parker. 



These pits are on the property of the West 

 Shore Eailroad and cover the greater portion 

 of an elongate hill a mile in length and some 

 one thousand feet in width. The hill is cov- 



ered with the refuse of aboriginal excavations. 

 The steep slopes are covered in places to a 

 depth of six or more feet with the rock broken 

 from the pits and quarries. One immense 

 dump is more than a hundred feet long and 

 eight feet in thickness and contains besides 

 the waste rock the rejected blocks of flint and 

 many broken or partially completed imple- 

 ments. Broken rock occurs in such quantities 

 that the railroad purchased the property think- 

 ing it an enormous bed of broken stone suit- 

 able for road bed ballast. 



Mr. Parker is making a survey of the hill in 

 order to make a relief model of it for a mu- 

 seum exhibit. The artificial nature of the 

 broken stone was discovered by Mr. Jeffer- 

 son Ray, of West Coxsackie, who made a 

 collection of 1,500 chipped chert implements 

 from the workshop sites on the flats below the 

 hill. 



The site is an exceedingly old one and must 

 have been worked by three or four hundred 

 Indians at a time for a period of 500 to 1000 

 years, judging from the large quantities of 

 flint found upon it. The site is a remarkable 

 one and is a unique archeological monument 

 that will well repay visitation by archeologists 

 and geologists interested in securing data 

 bearing on the stone age. 



Everett R. Burmaster 



State Museum, 

 Albany, N. Y. 



the use of agar in facilitating the 

 removal of a swallowed foreign 



OBJECT 



Opportunity of experimentation and obser- 

 vation in the use of agar in assisting in the 

 removal of a foreign object from the stomach 

 came to the writer in the case of a child, four 

 and one half years old, who had swallowed a 

 safety pin. The pin was an ordinary nickeled 

 pin, one and one half inches long, and was 

 closed. 



According to the best medical practise the 

 use of purgatives or cathartics in such emer- 

 gency is to be avoided, as such would tend to 

 liquefy and remove the bowel content leaving 

 the object unsupported; and moreover any 



