Febeu.^et 18, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



263 



fund will receive $170,000,000, the university 

 fund $30,000,000, and the remainder will go 

 to the swamp-land fund, the income from one 

 half of which goes to the school fund and the 

 remainder to assist in maintaining our state 

 institutions." 



A DEPARTMENT of experimental breeding has 

 been established in the College of Agriculture 

 of the University of Wisconsin by the regents, 

 who have appointed Dr. Leon J. Cole, of the 

 SheflSeld Scientific School at Yale, an associate 

 professor of experimental breeding. Dr. Cole 

 will take up his new work with the opening 

 of the second semester, conducting investiga- 

 tions in the subject of experimental breeding 

 with special reference to the laws of heredity 

 and improvement of animal life. He will also 

 give instruction to advanced students. Dr. 

 Cole graduated from the Michigan Agricul- 

 tural College and the University of Michigan 

 in 1901. He continued at Michigan as a 

 graduate assistant for two years before enter- 

 ing Harvard University, where he obtained the 

 degree of doctor of philosophy in 1906, and 

 was appointed representative of the United 

 States Bureau of Animal Industry in breeding 

 work at the Rhode Island Agricultural Col- 

 lege, whence he removed to Tale University 

 in 1908. 



The Kansas State Agricultural College has 

 established a new department, that of milling 

 industry, and selected to head this department 

 Mr. Leslie A. Fitz, now in the ofiice of grain 

 standardization. United States Department of 

 Agriculture, and in charge of cooperative mill- 

 ing experiments and other work at the Fargo, 

 ]Sr. D., Station. Mr. Fitz will enter upon his 

 new field March 1. The object of the new 

 department is to take cognizance more fully 

 of the great importance of bringing to the 

 market a more perfect grain and to investigate 

 means of utilizing this to the greatest advan- 

 tage. It will concern itself with all questions 

 touching upon the wheat crop, flour making 

 and bread baking. Mr. Fitz has been con- 

 nected with the Department of Agriculture 

 for several years and has been intimately asso- 

 ■ciated with several lines of wheat investiga- 

 tion. He was also engaged in the same work 



previously at the Kansas State Agricultural 

 College, of which institution he is a graduate. 



E. K. SoPER, of Cornell University, has been 

 appointed instructor in economic geology in 

 the University of Minnesota. 



Mr. W. Aston, M.A., demonstrator in phys- 

 ics, Birmingham University, has been ap- 

 pointed assistant to Sir J. J. Thomson in the 

 Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge. He is 

 succeeded at Birmingham by Mr. E. E. Four- 

 nier d'Albe. 



/ DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE 

 EARLIER REFERENCES TO THE RELATION OF FLIES 

 TO DISEASE 



In the last number of Science (January 

 7) there is an interesting note by Dr. E. W. 

 Gudger on Edward Bancroft's reference, in 

 1769, to the belief .that flies transmit the trop- 

 ical disease known as " yaws." It is not gen- 

 erally known that as early as the sixteenth 

 century there was definitely promulgated the 

 theory that flies play a role in the transmis- 

 sion of the plague. 



Dr. Josiah Nott, 1849, lists Athanasius 

 Kircher as among the earlier writers who be- 

 lieved that insects served as transmitters of 

 disease. Dr. Kelly, in his fascinating volume 

 " Walter Eeed and Yellow Fever," goes 

 further and quotes from Kircher's " Scru- 

 tinium Physico-medieum," published at Rome 

 in 1658, the remarkable statement: 



There can be no doubt that flies feed on the 

 internal secretions of the diseased and dying, then 

 flying away, they deposit their excretions on the 

 food in neighboring dwellings, and persons who 

 eat it are thus infected.* 



Unfortunately, Dr. Kelly's translation stops 



'Apropos of tlie present-day belief that blood- 

 sucking and stinging insects may occasionally be 

 direct inoculators of disease germs, the following 

 statement from the same work is of interest: 

 " In a recent plague at Naples, while a certain 

 nobleman was looking out a window a hornet flew 

 in and lighted on his nose and stinging him with 

 the sharp point of its proboscis, caused a swelling. 

 And when the poison had gradually spread and 

 crept into the vital organs, within a space of two 

 days (without doubt from the contagious humours 

 which the insect had sucked up from a corpse), 

 he contracted the disease and died." 



