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SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXI. No. 792 



ics and an inventor of distinction, died on 

 February 23, at the age of seventy-three years. 



Professor J. Edmund Wright, associate pro- 

 fessor of mathematics in Bryn Mavsr College, 

 died on February 20 of heart disease. He was 

 an Englishman and won distinguished honors 

 at the University of Cambridge, being senior 

 wrangler in 1900, first in the second part of the 

 mathematical tripos in 1901, and Smith's 

 prizeman in 1902, and has been for the past 

 seven years a fellow of Trinity College, Cam- 

 bridge. He was called to Bryn Mawr College 

 in 1903 to succeed Professor Harkness, now 

 professor of mathematics in McGill Univer- 

 sity. He 'was the author of numerous papers 

 dealing with a wide range of subjects in the 

 field of higher mathematics, such as the theory 

 of groups, Abelian theta functions, and diifer- 

 ential geometry of space. In 1908 his treatise 

 on " Invariants of Quadratic Differential 

 Forms " was published by the Cambridge Uni- 

 versity Press. 



Mr. Wilfred Stalker, member of the Brit- 

 ish Ornithologists' Union to Dutch New 

 Guinea, has been drowned. Mr. Stalker, who 

 was only thirty-one years of age, had displayed 

 much ability as a collecting naturalist. 



The death is announced of Dr. W. Krause, 

 doeent in anatomy at Berlin. 



The French Association for the Advance- 

 ment of the Sciences will hold its thirty-ninth 

 annual meeting at Toulouse in August under 

 the presidency of M. Gariel, professor of 

 biological physics in the faculty of medicine 

 - of the University of Paris. 



The Blue Hill Meteorological Observatory, 

 in Milton, Mass., founded and maintained by 

 Professor A. Lawrence Eotch, has just com- 

 pleted twenty-five years' work. The initial 

 investigations of the upper air, undertaken 

 there in the interest of pure science, are now 

 of practical value to aeronauts and aviators. 



The division of physical sciences of the 

 Royal Academy of Bologna calls attention to 

 an international competition for a biennial 

 prize of three thousand lire established from 

 the income of a donation made by one of its 



corresponding members. Professor Elia De 

 Cyon, with the object of promoting re- 

 searches in the subjects in which he has 

 worked. This award will be conferred on 

 competitors whose works treat : (1) The func- 

 tions of the heart, and, above all, of the car- 

 diac and vaso-motor nervous systems; (2) the 

 functions of the labyrinth of the ear; (3) the 

 functions of the thyroid glands of the hypo- 

 physes and of the pineal gland. The first 

 prize will be awarded on March 1, 1911. 



The first ordinary meeting of the society 

 formed by the amalgamation of the Society of 

 Engineers and the Civil and Mechanical 

 Engineers' Society, was held in London on 

 February 7, when Mr. Diogo A. Symons, the 

 first president of the new society of engineers, 

 delivered an inaugural address. 



The Eoyal Meteorological Society held a 

 meeting at the physical laboratory, Man- 

 chester University, on February 23. This 

 meeting was the first the society has held out 

 of London. Papers were read describing the 

 investigations made at the Howard Estate 

 Observatory, Glossop, into the electrical state 

 of the upper atmosphere, and also on the 

 hourly registering balloon ascents which were 

 made from Manchester on June 2-3, 1909. 

 Mr. Lempfert and Mr. Corless will also con- 

 tribute a paper on " Line-squalls and Asso- 

 ciated Phenomena." 



According to a communication made on 

 February 14 to the Paris Academy of Sciences 

 by M. Lippmann and reported in the London 

 Times, Mme. Pierre Curie, the widow of M. 

 Pierre Curie, the discover of polonium and 

 radium, has at last succeeded in isolating one 

 tenth of a milligram of polonium. In order 

 to obtain this result Mme. Curie, working 

 in cooperation with M. Debierne, has had to 

 treat several tons of pitchblende with hot 

 hydrochloric acid. The radio-active properties 

 of polonium turn out to be far greater than 

 those of radium. It decomposes chemically 

 organic bodies with extraordinary rapidity. 

 When it is placed in a vase made of quartz, 

 which is one of the most refractory of sub- 

 stances, it cracks the vessel in a very short 



