906 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. VIII. No. 208. 



cuse University, part of which has been used 

 for the purchase of twenty-uine microscopes. 



The will of the late Miss Elizabeth Rogers 

 leaves all her property, valued at $100,000, to 

 the Rogers Hall School for Girls at Lowell, 

 Mass. 



The sum of $50,000 has been collected in 

 Pittsburg for the Methodist American Univer- 

 sity at Washington. 



The growth of the various English university 

 colleges as compared with the older universities 

 is illustrated by the papers read before the 

 Royal Society during the past three years. 

 Professor Ramsay points out that of 252 such 

 papers about half — 122 — were contributed from 

 these colleges, leaving only half from Oxford, 

 Cambridge, Scottish and Irish universities and 

 private individuals. University College, Lon- 

 don, contributed 57 papers, which apparently 

 surpasses the number of papers from Oxford 

 or Cambridge. 



The Isaac Newton Studentship of Astron- 

 omy and the John Lucas Walker Studentship 

 in Pathology at Cambridge University will be 

 filled in January. Each studentship is of the 

 annual value of £200 and is tenable for three 

 years. 



We announced last week that Professor W. 

 C. Rontgeu had been called from Wiirzburg to 

 Leipzig. The vacancy, we now learn, is caused 

 by the retirement of Dr. Gustav Weidermann, 

 ■which takes place at the end of the present 

 semester. 



Dr. Klockmann, of Clausthal, has been ap- 

 pointed professor of mineralogy and geology 

 in the Institute of Technology at Aix. 



M. C. Sauvageau has been appointed profes- 

 sor of botany in the faculty of sciences at 

 Dijon. 



DISCUSSION AND COEEESPONDENCE. 

 ANLAGB on PROTON? 



To THE Editor of Science : I have read 

 with interest the letter from Professor Burt G. 

 Wilder which you recently published in regard 

 to the word ' proton.' I thoroughly agree with 

 him that it is very desirable to have some word 

 better than rudiment for the primitive beginning 

 in the embryo out of which some future struc- 



ture is to be developed. We need a good word 

 to use in our language, as the Germans use 

 ' anlage ' in theirs. 



The suggestion of proton by Professor Wilder 

 and that of 'primordium ' by Professor Willey 

 are certainly interesting, and I think, if we are 

 to rely upon the Greek to supply us with a new 

 term, that the suggestion made by Professor 

 Wilder is the best we have bad. But against 

 all these suggestions I have to make an objec- 

 tion. It seems to me that the time has now 

 definitely passed when it can be taken as a ne- 

 cessity for science to derive all technical terms 

 from the Greek. When we look the matter 

 fairly in the face we must recognize that the 

 claim of superlative availability of Greek words 

 and Greek derivatives is a survival of the Medi- 

 ffival epoch, which was itself a survival of the 

 earlier Roman days, when the Greek language 

 was the language of the cultured, and the lan- 

 guage with which all educated persons were not 

 merely acquainted, but familiar. Whether or 

 not this is a loss or gain, the Greek language is 

 not now familiar to our generation ; it is a lan- 

 guage quite apart from the present day. The 

 fact which we have to meet is that a knowl- 

 edge of Greek is far from universal, and that a 

 thorough knowledge of Greek is rarely attained 

 except by the special student of the language. 

 After all, a word is merely a convenient com- 

 bination of sounds to furnish a symbol for a 

 certain idea, and there is no inherent psycolog- 

 ical reason why sounds of the type used by the 

 Greeks should alone serve to represent ideas of 

 a scientific character. Indeed, is it not strik- 

 ing that the greatest scientific nation of the 

 world habitually uses technical terms of its own 

 language — that German scientists use German 

 words ? 



Now, Germany has attained such preemi- 

 nence, in science that it is probable that in any 

 department at least as much is published in 

 German as in any other two languages. It is 

 literally impossible to keep abreast with any 

 special department of science without a knowl- 

 edge of German, and this implies an acquaint- 

 ance with German words used by Germans 

 with a technical meaning. An acquaintance 

 with such words is absolutely indispensable. 



To return to the question of an English equiv- 



