NOVBMBEB 6, 1896.] 



SCIENCE. 



691 



UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL NEWS. 



The regents of the University of the State of 

 New York will hereafter strictly enforce the 

 law prohibiting the unauthorized use of the 

 names college and university. An institution 

 to be ranked as a college must have at least six 

 professors giving their entire time to college 

 and university work and a course of four full 

 years of college grade in liberal arts and sci- 

 ences, and must require for admission four 

 years of academic or high school preparation in 

 addition to the preacademic or grammar school 

 studies. The regents believe it sound educa- 

 tional policy to encourage the establishment and 

 maintenance of colleges wherever these mini- 

 mum conditions can be met. The small col- 

 lege follows naturally the high school, and the 

 more widely it is scattered about the country 

 the better for higher education, but to give col- 

 lege instruction is a very different matter from 

 exercising university powers in conferring de- 

 grees. The council earnestly recommended, as 

 vitally important for protecting and promoting 

 higher educational interests, that the regents 

 should not, except for extraordinary reasons, 

 increase the number of institutions in this State 

 holding degree-conferring powers. Students 

 completing the courses in colleges newly es- 

 tablished may obtain from the university of the 

 State the bachelor's degree, which will be more 

 valuable and more widely recognized than a 

 degree conferred by a local institution. 



The will of the late Miss Abby Gr. Beckwith 

 leaves $5,000 to Brown University for the 

 founding of two Scholarships. 



The first graduate of the University of Wales 

 by examination is a woman, Miss Maria Daw- 

 son, B. S. 



Prof. Hoelder, of Tubingen, has been 

 appointed professor of mathematics in the Uni- 

 versity at Konigsberg ; Prof C. von Seelen- 

 horst, of Jena, assistant professor in the Uni- 

 versity of Gottingen, and Dr. H. Stuhr, assistant 

 in the Anatomical Institute at Breslau, in suc- 

 cession to Dr. Endres ; Dr. Andreas Obrzut, 

 of Prague, to the chair of anatomy at Lemberg. 

 Dr. Joseph Blaas, of the University at Inns- 

 briick, has been promoted to an assistant pro- 

 fessorship of geology and paleontology. 



DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE. 



A REPREHENSIBLE METHOD OP DETERMINING 



PRIORITY OF PUBLICATION. 



Questions of nomenclature and of priority of 

 discovery in relation to matters of fact must, of 

 course, be decided by the date of publication of 

 the works in which the names of the species or 

 the facts in question were first announced; 

 hence it is important to determine the date of 

 publication with the greatest possible definite- 

 ness. It is, therefore, necessary to define at 

 the outset what is meant by the term publica- 

 tion. On this point the ' Century Dictionary ' 

 will be admitted as good authority. In this 

 work the word publication, in the sense in 

 which it is used in the present article, is defined 

 as follows : " The act of offering a book, map, 

 piece of music, or the like, to the public by 

 sale or by gratuitous distribution." Publica- 

 tion thus implies distribution, and has no nec- 

 essary relation to the date of printing, except 

 that, of course, printing must precede publica- 

 tion. 



Unfortunately, however, it is often difficult 

 to determine the exact date when a book, 

 pamphlet, or any regular part of a serial publi- 

 cation, or the signature of any work issued in 

 signatures, became accessible to the public, or 

 even to those especially interested in the sub- 

 ject to which the treatise relates ; in a word, 

 when it was published, or, to use the ' Century 

 Dictionary ' expression, when it was offered to 

 the public. 



We have only to look through the various 

 codes of nomenclature for biology to find that 

 the matter of determining the ' date of publica- 

 tion ' has received attention from those who 

 have made this question the subject of special 

 consideration. The rule generally adopted by 

 scientific bodies which have legislated on the 

 subject is to the effect that the ostensible date, 

 as that given on the title page of a book or 

 pamphlet, or at the bottom of the signatures, 

 when works are issued in signatures, shall be 

 taken as the correct date, unless known to be 

 erroneous, and that whenever such dates are 

 found to be erroneous the true date of publica- 

 tion shall be taken in all cases where it can 

 be established. The date of printing is thus 

 wholly ignored as having any bearing on the 



