288 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XL VI. No. 1186 



members of the faculty. Professor Schaper 

 denies that he has been disloyal. 



Dr. William Allen Neilson, professor of 

 English at Harvard University, has been 

 elected president of Smith College. He suc- 

 ceeds Dr. Marion L. Burton, who has become 

 president of the University of Minnesota. 



James C. Nagle has been appointed dean of 

 engineering and professor of civil engineering 

 in the Agricultural and Mechanical College of 

 Texas, succeeding D. W. Spence whose death 

 occurred in June. 



Professor W. S. Franklin, formerly of Le- 

 high University, has accepted a position as 

 special lecturer and teacher at the Massa- 

 chusetts Institute of Technology, partly in the 

 department of physics and partly in the de- 

 partment of electrical engineering. Pro- 

 fessor Franklin requests his correspondents to 

 note his new address. 



Dr. C. H. Shattuck, for the past eight 

 years head of the department of forestry, Uni- 

 versity of Idaho, has accepted the position as 

 professor of forestry with the University of 

 California. 



Dr. Wright A. Gardner, formerly associate 

 professor of plant physiology in the Univer- 

 sity of Idaho, has been appointed professor of 

 plant physiology and head of the department 

 of botany in the Alabama Polytechnic In- 

 stitute. 



Dr. Alfred H. W. Povah, formerly in- 

 structor in botany in the University of Michi- 

 gan, has been appointed special lecturer in 

 forest mycology in The New York State Col- 

 lege of Forestry at Syracuse University. 



Mr. Ealph Hubbard, formerly of Cornell 

 University, has been appointed assistant in the 

 museum and zoological department of the Uni- 

 versity of Colorado. 



Mr. Samuel Wood Geiser, formerly pro- 

 fessor of biology and geology in Guilford Col- 

 lege, has been appointed professor of biology in 

 Upper Iowa University. 



At the University of Oregon, Charles H. 

 Edmondson, Ph.D. (Iowa, '06), assistant pro- 

 fessor of zoology, and Albert E. Caswell, Ph.D., 



(Stanford, '11), assistant professor of physics, 

 have been promoted to full professorships, and 

 Eaymond H. Wheeler, Ph.D. (Clark, '15), in- 

 structor in psychology, has been made an as- 

 sistant professor. During the present summer 

 Dr. Edmondson has been studying the clams 

 of the I^Torth Pacific Coast with a view to their 

 conservation for food purposes. 



Dr. Lloyd Balderston, of Eidgway, Pa., has 

 been appointed professor of leather chemistry 

 and technology in the college of agriculture of 

 the Tohoku Imperial University, at Sapporo, 

 Japan. 



DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE 



ON THE "RAWNESS" OF SUBSOILS 



In the interest of accuracy the writer feels 

 impelled to call the attention of investigators 

 of soils to some facts with reference to the in- 

 fertility of subsoils which do not seem to be 

 generally appreciated. This statement is 

 called forth at this time by the recent paper 

 of Alway, McDole and Eost'; the observations 

 upon which it is based are of long standing 

 but have not been described because of mat- 

 ters of greater importance which have inter- 

 vened to prevent such description. The 

 authors just cited call attention to the char- 

 acteristic sterility of subsoils of humid re- 

 gions with which every student of soils is of 

 course familiar. No one can deny that fact. 

 They go on, however, to cite Hilgard, and 

 Wohltmann who had visited California, to the 

 effect that subsoils of arid regions are not 

 sterile, but serve just as well or better than 

 surface soils in that r^ion for the support of 

 plant life whether the latter be of legume or 

 non-legume order. 



Neither Hilgard's nor Wohltmann's obser- 

 vations are in full accord with mine except 

 in certain cases which I shall refer to below. 

 In studying the soil conditions of the Great 

 Valley of California and particularly those of 

 the citrus and alfalfa growing districts, I 

 have repeatedly observed the vegetation, nat- 

 ural or planted, which is to be found on the 

 freshly graded fields. Grading is done, of 



1 Soil Science, Vol. 3, p. 9, January, 1917. 



