476 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XXII. No. 563. 



Dr. Wyssling, professor of electrical engi- 

 neering in the Polytechnic Institute at Zurich, 

 and Charles Wirth, also of Zurich, are in this 

 country, to prepare a report on electrical rail- 

 way development for the Swiss government. 



The opening address to the students of the 

 medical faculty of McGill University was de- 

 livered, on September 19, by Dr. Abraham 

 Jacobi, emeritus professor at Columbia Uni- 

 versity. In the evening he was the guest of 

 honor at a banquet. 



During the coming January Mr. Bailey 

 Willis, of the United States Geological Survey 

 and the Carnegie Institution, will present a 

 course of twelve lectures in the geological 

 department of the University of Wisconsin 

 on the subject of ' Continental Variations, 

 with Special Reference to North America.' 



Mr. E. E. Ellis has recently completed for 

 the Division of Hydrology, U. S. Geological 

 Survey, an investigation of the occurrence of 

 groundwater in crystalline rocks of Connecti- 

 cut. The results show that the supplies to be 

 obtained from such rocks are much greater 

 than is usually supposed, that the water is 

 frequently under artesian pressure, and that 

 its occurrence has a very definite relation to 

 the presence of overlying drift. 



Mr. Carl Schaeffer has just returned from 

 southwestern Arizona, where he has been col- 

 lecting insects for the last three months in the 

 interest of the Museum of the Brooklyn Insti- 

 tute. His trip has been very successful and 

 he has obtained many rare and some new spe- 

 cies, the beetles being represented by the 

 largest number of species and specimens. He 

 secured a few specimens of the very rare tiger 

 beetle, Amblychila heroni, only three or four 

 specimens of which were previously known in 

 collections. A few specimens of Gymnetes 

 cretacea, were secured and two other species 

 of the same genus new to the fauna of the 

 United States. The collection of moths in- 

 cludes a number of rare species, some being 

 heretofore represented by a single specimen 

 and some that have recently been thrown out 

 of lists, having been considered as wrongly 

 attributed to our fauna. As soon as time 



permits, the material will be worked up and 

 the results published. 



The house at Ithaca occupied by the late 

 Professor R. H. Thurston has been purchased 

 by Mr. Hiram W. Sibley and given to the 

 university as a residence for the director of 

 Sibley College. 



Professor DeWitt Bristol Brace, Ph.D. 

 (Berlin), head of the department of physics 

 in the University of Nebraska, and one of the 

 leading physicists of the United States, died 

 at his home in Lincoln, Nebr., on October 2, 

 at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. He was in his 

 forty-seventh year, and had just entered upon 

 his nineteenth year of teaching in the Uni- 

 versity of Nebraska. 



Baron Ferdinand von Richthopen, pro- 

 fessor of geography in the University of Ber- 

 lin, died on October Y, at the age of seventy- 

 two years. 



The death is also announced of Mr. George 

 Bowdler Buckton, E.R.S., a leading British 

 entomologist. 



The International Tuberculosis Congress 

 will hold its next meeting in Washington in 

 1908. At the closing session of the Paris 

 Congress, on October 7, Professor Behring 

 made a statement relative to his new curative 

 principle for tuberculosis. According to a 

 cablegram published in the daily papers he 

 said : " In the course of the last two years 

 I recognized with certainty the existence of a 

 curative principle completely different from 

 the antitoxic principle. This new curative 

 principle plays an essential role in the opera- 

 tion of the immunity derived from my bovo- 

 vaccine, which has proved effective against 

 animal tuberculosis during the past four years. 

 This curative principle reposes upon the im- 

 pregnation of the living cells of the organism 

 with a substance originating from tuber- 

 culose virus, which substance I designate ' T. 

 C " Professor Behring then gave a technical 

 description of how ' T. C was introduced into 

 the cellular organism, and said it had already 

 given marked results in the treatment of ani- 

 mals. He expressed the confident belief that 

 his researches would permit similar curative 

 results in man. He added that he was unable 



