jAurABT 30, 1914] 



SCIENCE 



173 



Announcement was made at a meeting of 

 the Tale Corporation on January 19 that gifts 

 and pledges of $350,000 had been obtained for 

 the development of the Yale Divinity School 

 into a university school of religion. These 

 gifts will increase the endowment of the school 

 to over $1,200,000. Among the gifts were 

 $100,000 from Mrs. D. Willis James and 

 Arthur Curtiss James, of Nevr Haven; $80,- 

 000 from Mrs. Stephen Merrell Clement, of 

 Buffalo, N. Y., and an anonymous gift of 

 $100,000, the latter to found a chair of social 

 service. 



The trustees of Vassar College have an- 

 nounced that as President Taylor's resigna- 

 tion, which he presented a year ago, is to take 

 effect February 1, in accordance with his 

 wishes, and as no new president has been ap- 

 pointed, the administration of the college will 

 be carried on by committees of trustees and 

 faculty. Professor Herbert E. Mills, head of 

 the department of economics, will act as chair- 

 man of the faculty. 



On January 9 and 10 occurred the first an- 

 nual convention of the Stevens Institute of 

 Technology. The convention opened with a 

 symposium on " An Engineer's Part in the 

 Eegulation of Public Utilities." President 

 Humphreys acted as chairman of the meeting, 

 and papers were read' by him and by several 

 other Stevens alumni. Other features of the 

 convention were the midwinter alumni meet- 

 ing, a conference of Stevens Clubs, a trip to 

 the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the alumni din- 

 ner at the Hotel Astor. 



Dr. E. a. Fath, director of Beloit College 

 Observatory, has resigned his position to ac- 

 cept the presidency of Eedfield College of Red- 

 field, S. D. He will take up his new work 

 about March 1. 



Dr. Henry Winston Harper, professor of 

 chemistry in the University of Texas, Austin, 

 has been made dean of the graduate depart- 

 ment. 



Dr. Creighton Wellman, dean of the school 

 of hygiene and tropical medicine of the Tu- 

 lane University of Louisiana, has resigned this 

 position. 



Professor F. L. Stevens has resigned the 

 position of dean of the College of Agriculture, 

 Mayaguez, Porto Rico, to become professor of 

 plant pathology in the University of Illinois. 



Dr. William Duane has been appointed as- 

 sistant professor of physics in Harvard Uni- 

 versity. He has spent six years in the Curie 

 Radium Laboratory at Paris, and last fall re- 

 turned to this country as research fellow of 

 the cancer commission of Harvard University. 

 Professor Duane will devote the greater part 

 of his time to the physiological action of radio- 

 active substances and to the problems in phys- 

 ics directly eoneeted with this subject at the 

 Harvard Medical School and at the Hunting- 

 ton Cancer Hospital, but he will also under- 

 take the direction of advanced students in 

 problems on the purely physical side of radio- 

 activity in the Jefferson Physical Laboratory. 



Dr. H. F. Baker, F.R.S., fellow and lecturer 

 of St. John's College, and Cayley university 

 lecturer in mathematics, has been elected 

 Lowndean professor of astronomy and geom- 

 etry at the University of Cambridge in suc- 

 cession to the late Sir Robert Ball. 



DISCUSSION AND COBBESPONDENCE 

 tuberculosis following typhoid fever 

 In Science for 1908, Professor W. T. 

 Sedgwick, of the Massachusetts Institute of 

 Technology, called attention to the remarkable 

 discovery by Reincke, of Hamburg, and Mills, 

 of the United States, that when an infected 

 water supply of a community was improved 

 by filtration or otherwise, not only did ty- 

 phoid fever diminish, but other diseases also, 

 such as tuberculosis. Hazen calculated that 

 for every typhoid death prevented, two or 

 three were saved from death by other diseases. 

 Sedgwick and MacNutt subsequently pub- 

 lished their full paper in the Journal of In- 

 fectious Diseases, and the former in still 

 another paper in a symposium on " Tubercu- 

 losis in Massachusetts," 1908, stated that as 

 a rule infected waters increased the death 

 rate from tuberculosis and purification of 

 water decreased the rate. 



