February 10, 1922] 



SCIENCE 



155 



made up to Jidj^ 1, 1921, which amounted to 

 $26,732,000, which was distributed among 191 

 different institutions. The annual report fur- 

 ther reveals that Mr. Eockefeller has released 

 the board from any obligation to hold any of 

 his gifts in perpetuity. 



The will of the late A. Barton Hepburn, of 

 New York City, gives $250,000 to the A. Bar- 

 ton Hepburn Hospital at Ogdensburg, N. Y. ; 

 $200,000 to Middlebury College in Middlebury, 

 Vt., of which Mr. Hepburn was a graduate; 

 $150,000 to Columbia University, of which he 

 was a trustee, and $100,000 to St. Lawrence 

 University at Canton, N. Y., where he had 

 lived. The will had also given $100,000 each to 

 Wellesley College, of which his daughters were 

 graduates, and to Williams College, of which 

 his son was a graduate, but these gifts were 

 canceled by a codicil because he made gifts to 

 those institutions two years ago, anticipating 

 the intention of his will. Each gift to educa- 

 tional institutions is specifically made for the 

 purpose of founding chairs in economics or 

 history. 



Mr. William Cooper Proctoe has endowed 

 three visiting fellowships at Princeton Uni- 

 versity with an annual stipend of $2,000. The 

 fellows are to be appointed, respectively, on 

 nomination of the University of Oxford, the 

 University of Cambridge and the Paris Higher 

 Normal School. 



Dr. M. C. Merrill, head of the department 

 of horticulture at the Utah Agricultural Col- 

 lege and horticulturist at the Agricultural Ex- 

 periment Station, has accepted an appointment 

 as. dean of the College of Applied Arts and as 

 head of the department of horticulture of the 

 Brigham Young University. This appointment 

 is to take effect July 1. 



H. M. Jennison, assistant professor of 

 botany and bacteriology at the Montana State 

 College, has been granted leave of absence 

 and will spend the remainder of the college 

 year in the graduate laboratories of the Mis- 

 souri Botanical Garden and Washington Uni- 

 versity, St. Louis. 



Alfred P. Lothrop is on leave of ab- 

 sense from the chaii- of organic chemistry at 



the Medical School, Queen's University, Kings- 

 ton, Ontario, where he has taught for the past 

 twelve years, to act as associate professor of 

 chemistry at Oberlin College. 



DISCUSSION AND CORRESPOND- 

 ENCE 

 PROFESSOR SUDHOFF'S PARACELSUS 



The announcement of the forthcoming pub- 

 lication of the complete works of Paracelsus, 

 under the editorship of Professor Karl 

 Sudhoff, of Leipzig, will be a matter of con- 

 siderable interest to chemists and physicians 

 as well as to philosophers. This edition will 

 include the unprinted MS. material as well as 

 what is already known in the printed tests. 

 Paracelsus was a most prolific writer, but many 

 of his more important works, familiar to 

 bibliophiles by their characteristic title-pages 

 in red and black, are now so rare as to be 

 practically inaccessible, particularly such pam- 

 phlets as those on miners' diseases (1567) and 

 mineral baths (1576). 



Paracelsus, one of the pioneers in an- 

 alytical chemistry, the founder of chemo- 

 therapy, and one of the great medical reform- 

 ers of the sixteenth century, was even a 

 doughtier figure than Vesalius, who began 

 bravely but ended as a courtier, or Pare, whose 

 popularity saved him from persecution. As 

 compared with these men, Paracelsus occupies 

 about the same position in medicine as did 

 Luther or Knox in relation to Erasmus or 

 Maitland of Lethington. He was more impul- 

 sive and impetuous and pushed his denuncia- 

 tion of scholastic medicine to the extreme limit 

 of coarseness. His training was, however, 

 better than is commonly supposed. As Sud- 

 hoff has shown, he graduated at Ferrara in 

 1515, having studied under the celebrated 

 Leonicenus. Although Browning's poem ideal- 

 izes him, he is commonly represented as a 

 charlatan and a mountebank. This false view 

 is, in the main, due to the character of his 

 writings, which are a curious jumble of exag- 

 gerated swagger and of passages showing keen 

 insight into the real nature of things, e. g., 

 that gout and calculus are diathetic diseases, 

 or that goitre and myxoedema are hereditary 



