Febeuaky 4, 1916] 



SCIENCE 



169 



000; a nurses' home for 100 nurses, to cost 

 $100,000; and alterations of the existing build- 

 ings on the Parnassus Avenue site in San 

 Francisco to accommodate the departments of 

 physiology and physiological chemistry, ad- 

 ministrative offices and the medical library. 



Edward Plaut, of the class of 1912, has pre- 

 sented $5,000 to Princeton University to 

 establish the Albert Plaut Memorial Library 

 of Chemistry, in memory of his father. 



Mr. Christopher Welch has left his real 

 estate in the county of Somerset to the Uni- 

 versity of Oxford for the endowment of 

 scholarships for the study of biology, to be 

 known as the " Welch " scholarships. They 

 are to be tenable for four years and their value 

 is to be £400 a year, any surplus income to be 

 paid into a reserve fund formed by the residue 

 of his estate, to be used for the upkeep of the 

 estate and for furthering the study of biology. 

 If the university does not accept the condi- 

 tions attached to the bequests then the amount 

 goes to six London hospitals, one of which 

 shall be St. George's Hospital ; but no hospital 

 where vivisection is disallowed or discoun- 

 tenanced is to benefit, " antivisectionists being 

 enemies of the human race." 



Sir Alexander M'Eobert has given to Aber- 

 deen University an endowment of about £750 

 per annum for a Georgina M'Robert lecture- 

 ship on pathology, with special reference to 

 malignant diseases. The donor recently gave 

 an endowment of £373 per annum to the Aber- 

 deen Eoyal Infirmary. He is director of the 

 Cawnpore Woollen Mills Company, but be- 

 fore going to India thirty years ago he was 

 !N^eil Arnott lecturer in experimental physics 

 at the Aberdeen Mechanics' Institution and 

 lecturer in chemistry at Robert Gordon's Col- 

 lege, Aberdeen. 



The one hundred and fiftieth anniversary 

 of the founding of the medical school by John 

 Morgan at the University of Pennsylvania will 

 be celebrated by a dinner to be given by the 

 Society of the Alumni of the Medical School 

 at the Bellevue Stratford on the evening of 

 February 4. The committee expects to make 

 this event the largest gathering of its kind ever 



held by the medical aliunni, since it also marks 

 the celebration of the beginning of medical 

 teaching in the United States. 



Mr. R. M. Raymond, managing director of 

 the El Oro Company, has been appointed pro- 

 fessor of mining in the School of Mines of 

 Columbia University, succeeding Professor 

 Henry S. Munroe, who retired last June after 

 twenty-seven years of service. 



Dr. Clarence W. Farrar, of the State Hos- 

 pital for the Insane, Trenton, has been ap- 

 pointed lecturer on abnormal psychology in 

 Princeton University. 



DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE 



FIREFLIES FLASHING IN UNISON 



Fifty years ago in Gorham, Maine, while 

 walking along the road I passed an open field 

 and noticed to my astonishment hundreds of 

 fireflies flashing in perfect unison. I watched 

 this curious sight for some time and the 

 synchronism of the flashing was unbroken. 

 Many times after I have watched these lumin- 

 ous insects, hoping to see a repetition of this 

 phenomenon, but the flashes in every instance 

 were intermittent. Since that time I have 

 read about these insects in various books with- 

 out meeting any allusion to this peculiar be- 

 havior. At last I have found a confirmation 

 of my early observations. In Nature of De- 

 cember 9, page 414, is the report of an inter- 

 esting paper read before the South London 

 Entomological and Natural History Society 

 by K. G. Blair entitled " Luminous Insects " 

 in which reference is made to the remarkable 

 synchronism of the flashes in certain European 

 species of fireflies. The explanation offered as 

 to the cause of this behavior seemed to me in- 

 adequate. One often notices in the stridula- 

 tion of the Grillidse the perfect time the in- 

 sects keep in their concerts and it seems likely 

 that the same impulse must animate these 

 flashing beetles, and the light emitted coidd 

 be more easily followed than the sound. 



The following is an extract from Mr. Blair's 

 paper : 



Apart from its principal function in securing 

 the proper mating of the sexes, the light seema 



