November 25, 1910] 



SCIENCE 



755 



Mr. Theodore Roosevelt has taken advan- 

 tage of a recent stay in Washington to inspect 

 the collections made by the Smithsonian Af- 

 rican Expedition during 1909-10. 



Mr. a. S. Hitchcock, systematic agrostolo- 

 gist, U. S. Department of Agriculture, has 

 returned from a four months' trip to Mexico. 

 He brought back a collection of grasses, con- 

 sisting of 2,703 numbers, about 20,000 speci- 

 mens, made in forty localities from nearly all 

 the states north of the Isthmus of Tehuan- 

 tepec. He was accompanied by his son, Frank 

 Hitchcock, as assistant. 



Professor Frederick Starr, of the Univer- 

 sity of Chicago, will leave the United States 

 on December 22 for Korea, where he will make 

 a study of the inhabitants. Mr. Manuel Gon- 

 zales, his companion on previous trips of this 

 kind, will accompany him. 



Mr. Priestly, who accompanied Sir Ernest 

 Shackleton, as geologist, on his Antarctic ex- 

 pedition, is going with Captain Scott in the 

 place of Mr. Thompson, who is ill. 



A large shipment of pure rare earths, worth 

 several thousand dollars, has been received by 

 Professor Victor Lenher, of the chemistry de- 

 partment of the University of Wisconsin. 

 Several graduate students will also make use 

 of the material in their investigations. 



For the past three years advanced lecture 

 and seminary courses in physics, chemistry 

 and mathematics have been maintained at the 

 Bureau of Standards by the members of the 

 staff, primarily in the interests of those of the 

 younger men who have not yet received the 

 doctorate. For the current year such courses 

 are being given by Drs. E. B. Eosa and A. S. 

 McDaniel, of the bureau, and Drs. J. A. 

 Anderson and A. H. Pfund, of Johns Hopkins 

 University. Over thirty men are enrolled in 

 the courses. 



Dr. L. H. Bollev, botanist at the ]Srorth 

 Dakota Experiment Station, addressed the 

 department of plant morphology of the New 

 York State College of Agriculture on Friday 

 evening, November 11. The subject of his 

 remarks was, " The Eelation of Fungous Dis- 

 eases to Soil Sanitation and Crop Rotation." 



The annual Huxley memorial lecture of the 

 Royal Anthropological Institute was given on 

 November 22 by Professor W. Boyd Dawkins, 

 F.R.S., whose subject was " The Arrival of 

 Man in Britain in the Pleistocene Age." 



Dr. Henry Wurtz, formerly chemical ex- 

 aminer in the U. S. Patent Office, has died at 

 his home in Brooklyn, in his eighty-third year. 



Mr. Theodore Cooke, for many years prin- 

 cipal of the Poona College of Science, has 

 died at seventy-four years of age. 



Dr. D. J. B. Gernez, member of the Paris 

 Academy of Sciences, associated with Pasteur 

 in his researches, has died at the age of 

 seventy-six years. 



As the Chicago Section of the American 

 Mathematical Society will meet at Minne- 

 apolis in aiBliation with the American Asso- 

 ciation, all mathematical papers which are to 

 be presented at this meeting should be mailed 

 to Professor H. E. Slaught, University of 

 Chicago. The papers on astronomy should be 

 mailed to the secretary of Section A. The 

 reading of the latter will begin on Wednesday 

 morning immediately after the organization 

 of the section. The " general-interest ses- 

 sion " of Section A will be held on Wednes- 

 day afternoon. At this session the retiring 

 vice-president. Professor E. W. Brown, will 

 read his address entitled " The relations be- 

 tween Jupiter and the Asteroids." Several 

 other papers of general mathematical and as- 

 tronomical interest will be read at this session. 

 On Friday afternoon there will be a joint 

 session of Sections A and D and the Chicago 

 Section of the American Mathematical So- 

 ciety to hear the report of the committee on 

 the teaching of mathematics to engineering 

 students, which was appointed at a similar 

 joint meeting at Chicago in 1907. Dr. G. A. 

 Miller, of the University of Illinois, is secre- 

 tary of the section. 



The American Phytopathological Society 

 will hold its annual meeting in Minneapolis, 

 Minnesota, in affiliation with the American 

 Association for the Advancement of Science, 

 December 28-30. The society will hold joint 

 sessions with the Botanical Society of Amer- 



