DECEMBER 22, 1899. ] 
present meeting to be held at the Hull Biolog- 
ical Laboratories, University of Chicago, 
Thursday aud Friday, December 28 and 29, 
1899. 
The provisional programme is as follows: 
Thursday: 10 A. M.—General meeting in 
Botany Building, for organization and reading 
of papers. 8 P. M., Discussion: Methods and 
Results of Limnological Work. 6:30 P. M., 
Dinner at the Quadrangle Club. Friday: 9:00 
A. M.—General meeting for reading of papers. 
Naturalists are requested to send titles of 
papers to C. B. Davenport, 5725 Monroe 
Avenue, Chicago. 
The committee in charge of the arrangements 
consists of Professors C. R. Barnes, H. H. 
Donaldson, 8S. A. Forbes, Wm. A. Locy and 
Jacob Reighard. 
Proressor S. W. Srrarron, of the Uni_ 
versity of Chicago, has recently been ap- 
pointed Inspector of Standards, Bureau of 
Weights and Measures, in the corps of which 
the Superintendent of the United States Coast 
and Geodetic Survey is the official head. In 
accepting this position Professor Stratton takes 
immediate charge of the United States Office of 
Weights and Measures at a most opportune 
time. This Office has long had in its custody 
the national standards of length and mass and 
has done much valuable work for science and 
the arts, which has been the logical outcome of 
this custody. Within the last two years the 
Office has taken up vigorously the matter of 
standards for electrical measurements, has ac- 
quired apparatus and made special studies, and 
is now ready to do valuable work along that 
line. It is especially well supplied for measure- 
ments of resistance of the highest degree of 
accuracy. Aside from this departure from the 
traditional policy of the Office there is a strong, 
well-founded and steadily-growing demand for 
a radical extension of the scope of the Office, 
which will doubtless be answered in the affirma- 
tive in the near future under the leadership of 
Professor Stratton. 
THE deputation which was appointed to visit 
the United States and Canada with the view of 
inquiring into the working of some of the lead- 
SCIENCE. 
941 
ing universities returned to Birmingham on 
December 7th. When Mr. Andrew Carnegie 
made his donation of £50,000, he suggested that 
some of the features of the American universi- 
ties should be incorporated in the proposed 
Birmingham University, and Mr. G. H. Ken- 
rick, Professor Poynting, Professor of Physics, 
and Professor Burstall, Professor of Engineer- 
ing at Mason University, were deputed to make 
the necessary inquiries. They left Birmingham 
on November 1st, and visited Cornell Univer- 
sity, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 
McGill University, and the leading colleges and 
schools in Chicago, Baltimore and Philadelphia, 
concluding their tour at New York. The 
deputation will present a report to the Univer- 
sity Committee embodying their views. 
Dr. YERSIN, well known for his researches on 
the plague, has been charged by the Govern- 
ment of Cochin China with a special mission to 
Java. 
PROFESSOR JOSIAH ROYCE goes to Europe 
again this Christmas to complete his course of 
Gifford lectures at the University of Aberdeen. 
Dr. HERBERT M. RICHARDS, instructor in bot- 
auy at Barnard College, has unfortunately been 
compelled by ill health to relinquish his courses 
and has sailed for Europe. 
PROFESSOR HELMERT, director of the Geo- 
detic Institute of Berlin, has been elected a 
member of the Royal Astronomical Society of 
London. 
PROFESSOR JOHN M. CouLTER, who is spend- 
ing his vacation at Washington, will shortly 
publish Plant Structures, a book for secondary 
schools and colleges, this following his other 
recent publication, entitled Plant Relations. 
Professor Coulter has just completed Synopsis 
of Mexican and Central American Umbelliferae, 
now in the hands of the government printer. 
He expects a revision of North American Umbel- 
liferae, a large volume, to be published by the 
Smithsonian Institution. Before he returns to 
the university in April, Professor Coulter ex- 
pects to publish Special Morphology of the Seed 
Plants, a university text-book upon which he 
has been working for a number of years. 
