April 16, 1915] 



SCIENCE 



571 



in the age of onset is shown probably to have a 

 merely statistical significance. 



C. B. Dayenpoet: Inheritance of Temperament. 



An analysis of matings between persons who 

 have a prevailingly elated and those who have a 

 prevailingly depressed temperament indicates that 

 the temperament of the former is inherited as a 

 simple dominant, that of the latter as a recessive, 

 but not allelomorphio to elation. In F, and later 

 generations the zygotic combinations are complex, 

 including elated, depressed, alternating, normal 

 and intermediate grades. Thus with a knowledge 

 of ancestry sufficient to infer the gametic composi- 

 tion of the parents the distribution of tempera- 

 ments for the offspring may, within limits, be 

 predicted. 



G. H. Pakker: The Fur-seal Berd of the Pribilof 



Islands. 



The Alaskan fur-seals are pelagic animals that, 

 during the summer, come ashore on the Pribilof 

 Island for the purpose of breeding. The adult 

 males, or bulls, arrive on the islands in May and 

 June followed by the females, or cows. A bull may 

 have associated with him from one to over a hun- 

 dred eows, and this assembly constitutes a harem. 

 Each cow, shortly after her arrival, gives birth to 

 one young seal, or pup, and soon thereafter be- 

 comes again pregnant. The period of gestation is 

 a little less than a year. The seals in the main 

 leave the islands for the open sea early in the 

 autumn. In 1914 there were born on the Pribilof 

 Island over 93,000 seals and the total herd was 

 estimated to be slightly under 300,000, a fair in- 

 crease over the former year. As there are about 

 equal numbers of males and females born and as the 

 average harem is composed of one male and about 

 sixty females, there are under normal conditions 

 a considerable number of excess males, the so- 

 called idle bulls. The number of idle bulls is a 

 measure of the lack of adaptation in the propor- 

 tion of sexes and indicative of a certain inefficiency 

 on the part of nature. 



Aethur L. Day, 

 Home Secretary 



Smithsonian Institution, 

 Washington, D. C. 



EBESSABD FBAAS 



Feom Stuttgart comes the very sad news 

 of the death upon March sixth of the very dis- 

 tinguished paleontologist, Dr. Eberhard Fraas, 

 professor in the university and head of the 



Eoyal Museum of Natural History. On the 

 very day following, namely, March 7, the 

 widow of Professor Fraas learned of the death 

 of their only son, Hans Oscar Fraas, in the 

 Argonne near Vauqois, on March 1. The 

 young man was twenty-two years of age. 



Eberhard Fraas was one of the most talented 

 pupils of Karl von Zittel, at Munich, and was 

 one of the ablest and broadest of the vertebrate 

 paleontologists of Europe. Besides his ex- 

 plorations, chiefly in the marine and terrestrial 

 Trias and Upper Permian of Wiirttemberg, he 

 traveled widely through other parts of Europe, 

 and made an extensive journey accompanied 

 by the writer through the Jurassic-Cretaceous 

 exposures of the Eocky Mountain region. It 

 was, however, his journey to the dinosaur beds 

 of German East Africa some years ago which 

 very seriously impaired his health and necessi- 

 tated one or two surgical operations from 

 which he never fully recovered, so that al- 

 though a man of superb physique his death 

 came at the early age of fifty-two. 



He leaves as his monument great collections 

 of vertebrate fossils, especially in the museum 

 at Stuttgart, including the phytosaurs and 

 carnivorous dinosaurs of the Trias and many 

 of the very early and most rare of the Testudi- 

 nata besides a superb collection of ichthyo- 

 saurs from Holzmaden, which he was the first 

 to describe, and of the marine Crocodilia 

 from the Jura. 



Among the most important of his early con- 

 tributions were those to the Labyrinthodonts 

 and other giant Stegocephalia of the Permian. 

 Among his latest was the description of the 

 carnivorous dinosaurs of the Trias as well as 

 the geological narrative of the journey to East 

 Africa. All his papers are enlivened by a keen 

 appreciation of the importance of adaptation 

 and of the adaptive significance of the various 

 types of structure, one of his principal contri- 

 butions in this line being his interpretation 

 of the adaptive evolution of the ichthyosaurs 

 from terrestrial to aquatic life, which was fa- 

 cilitated by the study of his unrivaled collec- 

 tions. 



His death is a loss not only to the Father- 

 land but to the whole world of vertebrate pale- 



