636 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XVllI. No. 463. 



nation was not reproducing itself at the same 

 rate as of old; the less able and the less ener- 

 getic were more fertile than the better stocks. 

 No scheme of wider or more thorough educa- 

 tion would bring up in the scale of intelligence 

 hereditary weakness to the level of hereditar.y 

 strength. The only remedy, if one were pos- 

 sible at all, was to alter the relative fertility 

 of the good and bad stocks in the community. 

 Grave changes had taken place in relative fer- 

 tility during the last forty years. He ven- 

 tured to think that we now stood at the be- 

 ginning of an epoch that would be marked by 

 a great dearth of ability. We had failed to 

 realize that the psychical characters — the 

 backbone of a state in the modern struggle 

 of nations — were not manufactured by home 

 and school and college; they were bred in the 

 bone, and for the last forty years the intel- 

 lectual classes of the nation, enervated by 

 wealth or by love of pleasure, or by following 

 an erroneous standard of life, had ceased to 

 give us in due proportion the men wanted to 

 carry on the ever-growing work of our empire, 

 to battle in the fore rank of the ever-intensi- 

 fied struggle of nations. The remedy lay first 

 in getting the intellectual section of our na- 

 tion to realize that intelligence could be aided 

 and be trained, but that no training or educa- 

 tion could create it. It must be bred; that 

 was the broad result flowing fr«m the equality 

 in inheritance of the psychical and the phys- 

 ical characters in man, and that result consti- 

 tuted a problem for statecraft to deal with. 



SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS. 



President Schueman, of Cornell University, 

 has proposed the erection of a new building 

 for Sibley College, in memory of the late Pro- 

 fessor Thurston, to be known as Thurston 

 Hall. The students of Sibley College have 

 voted to erect a bronze memorial tablet in 

 honor of Professor Thurston. 



Dr. C. S. Sherrington, professor of phys- 

 iology at Liverpool University, will give the 

 second series of Silliman lectures at Yale 

 University. 



Professor H. S. Jacoby, of Cornell Uni- 

 versity, is spending the present term in the 



practical study of the bridges of the chief 

 railroads of the United States and Canada. 



Professor J. Culver Hartzell, of the Illi- 

 nois Wesleyan University, is in Munich, hav- 

 ing been given leave of absence for eighteen 

 months. He is studying the upper devonian 

 of Europe. The past seven months he has 

 spent in Germany, and the next five months 

 will be spent in Italy and Switzerland. 



We learn from Bulletin No. 4 of the 

 Bureau of Agriculture of the Philippine 

 Islands that Dr. Janet Perkins has been au- 

 thorized by the Carnegie Institution to work 

 on the Philippine flora at the Botanical Garden 

 in Berlin. 



Dr. Llewellys F. Barker, professor of 

 anatomy in the University of Chicago, sailed 

 for Europe on November 7. 



Professor E. W. Scripture, of Yale Uni- 

 versity, is in Munich carrying on researches 

 on the analysis of speech by means of gramo- 

 phone records, under the auspices of the Car- 

 negie Institution. 



Professor H. S. Hele-Shaw, who holds the 

 chair of engineering at Liverpool University, 

 has been appointed, through the Colonial 

 Ofiice, to organize technical education in the 

 Transvaal and the Orange River Colony. The 

 appointment is not a permanent one, and Pro- 

 fessor Hele-Shaw has been granted leave of 

 absence by the university council until Sep- 

 tember next. 



The committee of the National Physical 

 Laboratory has appointed Mr. W. A. Caspari 

 to the post of junior assistant in the chemical 

 department. 



We learn from Nature that Mr. G. Marconi, 

 in company with Captain H. B. Jackson, has 

 gone to Gibraltar to carry out further experi- 

 ments in wireless telegraphy for the Ad- 

 miralty. It is hoped to be able to open com- 

 munication with Gibraltar before losing touch 

 with Portsmouth. 



Baron E. Nordenskiold has arranged to 

 make a zoological and anthropological expedi- 

 tion to the frontiers of Peru and Bolivia. The 

 expedition will start from Stockholm at the 

 end of December or the beginning of January. 



While students of the Agricultural College 



