278 
It is to be hoped that the reorganization of 
the Department, approved by the Secretary of 
Agriculture and the House Committee on Agri- 
culture, will be introduced as a special bill. 
Scientific men at Washington can not well advo- 
cate a measure that increases their salaries, . 
and there is consequently every reason for those 
interested in science and not connected with the 
Government service to use all efforts to secure 
the introduction and passage of a measure 
that is essential for efficiency and economy. 
SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS. 
AT a meeting of the Prussian Academy of 
Sciences, held on January 24th, the announce- 
ment was made that the Helmholtz Medal 
had been conferred upon Sir George Gabriel 
Stokes, of Cambridge University. The medal 
has hitherto been conferred only on Professor 
Virchow and Lord Kelvin. 
AT a meeting of the Council of the Astro- 
nomical and Astrophysical Society of America, 
held in New York, on January 29th, at which 
all members of the Council save one were pres- 
ent, the previous action by which Denver was 
designated as the next place of meeting for the 
Society was reconsidered, and by unanimous 
vote the Council determined to hold no meeting 
during the summer of 1901. In lieu of the 
customary summer meeting of the Society, a 
winter meeting will be held in the City of 
Washington during the next Christmas holidays, 
and Professors Newcomb and Brown were ap- 
pointed a local committee to arrange the details 
of such meeting. The Committee upon Legis- 
lation affecting astronomical interests made 
through its chairman a report of progress, and 
was continued. Professor W. W. Campbell, 
director of the Lick Observatory, was elected a 
member of the Council in place of the late 
Professor James E. Keeler. 
PROFESSOR R. W. Woop, of the University of 
Wisconsin, has decided not to accept the invi- 
tation of the director of the U. S. Naval Ob 
servatory to go to Sumatra as a member of the , 
eclipse expedition, but he has fitted up a polar- 
izing spectroscope to test the method, recently 
SCIENCE. 
[N. S. Von. XIII. No. 320: 
described by him in ScrENcE, of photographing 
the Fraunhofer lines in the spectrum of the 
corona, by placing a Nicol prism in front of the 
slit of the instrument in such a position as to 
transmit the polarized light reflected by the 
coronal particles. Dr. Norman E. Gilbert, of 
the Johns Hopkins University, will operate the 
instrument, the observations being both visual 
and photographic. The visual work will be 
confined to the few moments at second and 
third contact, when the flash spectrum is seen. 
THE Reale Accademia dei Lincei of Rome has 
elected to membership the Duke of the Abruzzi. 
Dr. M. CANTOR, honorary professor of mathe- 
matics in the University of Heidelberg, has been 
elected a corresponding member of the St. 
Petersburg Academy of Sciences. 
Mr. EVELYN B. BALDWIN returned to New 
York on February 3rd, after having arranged, 
while abroad, for two vessels for his North Polar 
Expedition. 
PROFESSOR FRANCIS E. Luoyp, of Teachers 
College, Columbia University, has gone abroad 
on a leave of absence, and will spend the next 
eight months at Bonn. 
Dr. WiLLIAM R. Brooks, director of the 
Smith Observatory and professor of astronomy 
in Hobart College, Geneva, N. Y., recently de- 
livered two illustrated lectures in the opera 
house of that city on ‘The Wonders of the 
Sun and the late Eclipse.’ The stereopticon 
views included a large number of photographs 
of the eclipse in its partial phases, made at the 
Smith Observatory, and others taken at differ- 
ent points along the total belt. 
A BRONZE bas-relief of the late Professor M. 
S. Newberry, the eminent geologist, has been 
presented to Columbia University by his chil- 
dren. 
A Bust of Dr. Horace Green, who died in 
1866, was presented to the New York Academy 
of Medicine on February 8th by Mrs. Green 
and George Walton Green. Dr. D. B. St. John 
Roosa made a commemorative address. 
Mites Rock, whose death in Guatemala 
was noted in SciENCE of February 8th, was 
from 1883 to 1898 chief engineer and president 
of the Guatemala Commission to locate the 
