256 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XLII. No. 1077 



a preliminary treatment to prevent the agar 

 from firmly binding the strain, stained, de- 

 colorized and cleared. When this dried and 

 stained plate culture is viewed under the mi- 

 croscope, the little colonies are definitely 

 stained and appear highly colored on a color- 

 less or slightly colored background. The col- 

 onies appear of considerable size under the 

 low powers of the compound microscope. In 

 fact after four hours of development these col- 

 onies are sometimes distinctly visible to the 

 naked eye. Under the oil immersion objec- 

 tive the individual cells are easily seen and 

 the different kinds of bacteria can be sepa- 

 rated one from another by the morphology of 

 the cells and their arrangement in the micro- 

 scopic colonies. 



It may be further said that the counts ob- 

 tained by this method are quite similar to 

 those secured by the ordinary plate method, 

 per c.c. have been examined by both methods. 

 The results obtained indicate that the differ- 

 ence between the counts secured by the rapid 

 method and the ordinary or standard method 

 usually amounts to little more than the vari- 

 ation which occurs between duplicate plates, 

 or between different dilutions in the same 

 analysis by the ordinary plate method. 



In the case of recently pasteurized milks or 

 milks with a very low bacterial content, it is 

 necessary to incubate the little plates some- 

 what longer, i. e., for eight hours. 



It seems fair to conclude then that we have 

 here a method which will enable the bacteriol- 

 ogist to obtain a count of the bacteria in milk 

 that corresponds very closely with counts ob- 

 tained by the standard method in from one 

 eighth to one sixth of the time required by the 

 standard method, and also that the higher the 

 bacterial content, the shorter the time re- 

 quired for the analysis. W. D. Frost 



Depaetment of Bacteriology, 

 Agricultueal Experiment Station, 

 University of Wisconsin 



SOCIETIES AND ACADEMIES 



THE NEW ORLEANS ACADEMY OF SCIENCES 



The academy met in the Stanley Thomas Hall, 

 Tulane University, on Tuesday, May 18, the final 



meeting of the year. Miss Edwina Abbott pre- 

 sented a paper on the transfer of mental habits 

 in children. This is the first time in its history of 

 fifty-one years that the academy has been ad- 

 dressed by a woman. Miss Abbott attempted to 

 prove what has been projected as a theory previ- 

 ous to this that one sort of training fits for 

 another, for instance that Greek and Latin train 

 the memory for other things and mathematics 

 trains the reason for other things, or that neatness 

 in one thing tends towards neatness in others. 

 Her tests were made with children who were 

 trained to select pairs of words, not adjacent, on 

 cards and were then taken to a table on which 

 many objects were placed, left there two minutes, 

 then asked to state what objects they had seen. 

 Memory exercises were also given throughout the 

 term. Two sets of children were selected ; one was 

 trained, the other imtrained. The training was 

 done from November to May. Three tests were 

 made, one in November, one in May and one in 

 between. The trained children improved from 46 

 to 76 per cent., the untrained from 51 to 71 per 

 cent., a difference of 33i per cent, in favor of the 

 trained children. 



Dr. Bean presented two negro brains before the 

 academy to demonstrate differences in the size and 

 shape of the pons and cerebellum. One brain is 

 from a negro man, aged 41, a hyper-onto-morph, 

 small, thin, wiry, with slight muscular develop- 

 ment, who weighed about 100 pounds. The other 

 is from a negro man, aged 41, a meso-onto-morph, 

 tall, well developed, well nourished, with great 

 muscular development, who weighed about 200 

 pounds. The pons and cerebellum of the hyper- 

 onto-morph are small in both antero-posterior and 

 transverse diameters, 25 and 32 millimeters, re- 

 spectively, but not so flat as in the meso-onto- 

 morph, where the antero-posterior and transverse 

 diameters are large, 29 and 40 millimeters, re- 

 spectively. This condition is true not only in the 

 two brains presented, but in eighteen other brains 

 so far examined the same relative difference is 

 noted where the types are distinct. Dr. Mann 

 called attention to the difference in size and shape 

 of the convolutions in the cerebellum of the two 

 brains. The meso-onto-morph has more numerous, 

 more complete and smaller convolutions of the 

 cerebellum than the hyper-onto-morph. The brains 

 of the two men weigh the same, hyper-onto-morph 

 1,417 grams, meso-onto-morph 1,421 grams. 



R. S. Cocks 



