350 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLIX. No. 1267 



President Eliot, but lie threw liimseli into the 

 duties of the office with characteristic energy, 

 devotion, and elevation of ideals. It was his 

 ambition to make the school as good as any 

 school of applied science anywhere, and he 

 strove for that end. 



Whether the history and fate of the school 

 would have been notably diflferent if it had 

 included undergTaduate programs of study, is, 

 fortunately, a question we need not discuss. 

 For it is now possible to undertake the experi- 

 ment of building up at Harvard a school of 

 applied science second to none in its higher 

 reaches but standing on a base of directed 

 undergraduate work done within Harvard 

 walls. In this undertaking we can have no 

 better ideals than those which Sabine's dean- 

 ship kept always before us. 



When this deanship ended, he returned 

 gladly to the work of teaching and research, 

 and but for the war he would probably have 

 had before him a long career of growing use- 

 fulness and fame, and would have lived to a 

 vigorous old age according to the habit of his 

 ancestors. But from that fiery furnace into 

 which other men were dravsni by millions he 

 could not hold himself back. He would have 

 felt recreant if he had escaped unscathed. 

 Going to France in 1916 with the intention 

 of giving a course of lectures as exchange 

 professor at the Sorbonne in the fall, he 

 engaged during the summer in the work of 

 conducting tuberculous patients from the 

 French hospitals to Switzerland, an enterprise 

 undertaken by the Rockefeller Foundation. 

 Overworking in this, he was attacked during 

 the fall by a disease which nearly ended his 

 life and comx)elled the postponement of his 

 Sorbonne lectures. WTien he was able to be 

 moved, he went back to Switzerland, this time 

 as a patient; but he gained strength studying 

 French constantly meanwhile, and in the 

 spring of 1917 gave his lectures, on achi- 

 tectural acoustics, in Paris. These ended, he 

 went through some months of extreme activity 

 in the technical science service of the allied 

 governments. Eeturning to America in the 

 late fall, he went on with similar work in 

 Washington, and elsewhere, coming to Cam- 



bridge for his lectures every week, eating and 

 sleeping when and where he could, always too 

 busy for the surgical operation which his phys- 

 ical condition demanded. He refused mili- 

 tary rank, declaring, with that severity of 

 judgment which sometimes verged upon in- 

 tolerance, that the uniform should be worn 

 only by those who were subject to the dangers 

 and labors of the front. But he risked his 

 life constantly, and at last fatally, in the 

 service of the country and the university. 



We have known in him a rare spirit, and we 

 reverence his memory. 



Edwin H. Hall, 

 C. N. Geeenough, 

 P. W. Bridgeman, 



Committee 



SCIENTIFIC EVENTS 

 THE GASPE BIRD RESERVES 



The Parliament of the Province of Quebec, 

 in its present session, has passed a law cre- 

 ating, on very broad lines, the remaining 

 lodges of water-fowl on the shores and the 

 islands of the Gulf of St. Lawrence into one 

 gTeat Bird Reserve to be under the adminis- 

 trative control of the Minister of lisheries. 

 Three definite areas are embraced within this 

 protective provision, all of which are within 

 the county of Gaspe. 



1. Perce Rock, the picturesque and brilliant 

 Devonian Island which lies a few rods off the 

 coast of Perce village. Its bird colony is con- 

 stituted of the Herring Gull and the Crested 

 Cormorant. 



2. The east and north cliffs of Bonaventure 

 Island which lies three miles out from Perce. 

 Here is probably the largest surviving colony 

 of the Gannet with its customary associates — 

 the Kittiwake, Razor-billed Auk, Puffin, Guil- 

 lemot and Murre. The law takes over the 

 entire face of the high cliffs where the two 

 colonies on this Island are located and also a 

 belt of land ten feet back from the edge of the 

 cliffs. 



3. The celebrated but now somewhat de- 

 pleted colony of the Bird Rock, northernmost 

 of the Magdalen Islands, 124 miles out to sea 

 from Perce, in the heart of the Gulf. 



