286 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XX. No. 504. 



The Department of Agriculture at Wash- 

 ington is making definite arrangements con- 

 cerning the work which will be carried on 

 with the Guatemalan ants found by Mr. 

 O. F. Cook in Guatemala to kill the cotton 

 boll weevil. Mr. Cook has been assigned to 

 the Bureau of Entomology for especial work 

 on the ant, although he is to continue the 

 personal direction of the work in tropical agri- 

 culture by the Bureau of Plant Industry. He 

 has authority under the chief of the Bureau 

 of Entomology to carry to completion the 

 study of the life history of the Guatemalan 

 ant and of such other species of ants as may 

 be involved in order to properly understand 

 the life history of this species. He will also 

 direct and superintend the further introduc- 

 tion of the kelep ant from Guatemala if the 

 same is deemed necessary, and will supervise 

 and carry out the work connected with the 

 colonization of the ant in the southern United 

 States. All publications on the work will be 

 issued by the Bureau of Entomology. Coop- 

 eration with the Bureau of Plant Industry 

 will continue in so far as such cooperation 

 may be useful in the utilization of the ant in 

 practical cotton culture and in incidental 

 studies on the varieties of cotton best adapted 

 to support the ants, and other collateral con- 

 siderations which involve problems of plant 

 life history, plant introduction, plant breed- 

 ing and plant pathology. Eesults of any such 

 collaboration, where they have a botanical or 

 plant industry bearing, are to be published 

 by the Bureau of Plant Industry. 



Until such time as a successor to the late 

 Dr. J. B. Hatcher, as curator of paleon- 

 tology in the Carnegie Museum, shall have 

 been chosen, the work of the Section of 

 Paleontology in that institution will be under 

 the immediate supervision of Dr. W. J. Hol- 

 land, the director of the museum. 



The University of Freiburg has conferred 

 an honorary doctorate on the anthropologist. 

 Otto Ammon, of Karlsruhe. 



Professor Blondlot, the physicist of 

 Nancy, has been made an officer of the French 

 Legion of Honor. 



The Briiish Medical Journal states that 

 Professor von Esmarch, of Kiel, who recently 

 celebrated his eightieth birthday, who was 

 recently the victim of an accident which dis- 

 abled him for a time, has now recovered and is 

 able to take his customary walks in the 

 environs of the town. 



Professor Ewald Hering, the well-known 

 physiologist, celebrated his seventieth birth- 

 day at Leipzig, on August 5. 



Du. Georg Thh^enius, professor of anthro- 

 pology at Breslau, has been appointed director 

 of the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology. 



The British Admiralty has appointed a 

 standing committee on machinery designs, 

 with Professor A. B. W. Kennedy, LL.D., 

 F.R.S., as president. 



The Royal College of Physicians, London, 

 has appointed lecturers for next year as fol- 

 lows : The Goulstonian lecturer. Dr. W. C. 

 Bosanquet; the Milroy, Dr. T. M. Legge; the 

 Lumleian, Dr. W. H. Allchin; the Oliver 

 Sharpey, Dr. L. E. Hill; the FitzPatrick, Dr. 

 Norman Moore. 



We learn from Nature that a statue to Jan 

 Pieter Minckelers, the reputed discoverer of 

 coal gas, was unveiled last month in Maas- 

 tricht, Holland. Minckelers was born in 1748, 

 and became in 1772 professor of physics in 

 the University of Louvain, where in 1784, in 

 endeavoring to discover a substitute for hy- 

 drogen, he succeeded in obtaining from the 

 distillation of powdered coal a gas which he 

 called ' inflammable air.' It was in 1785 that 

 he first utilized the gas for lighting purposes, 

 when a class-room in the Louvain University 

 was illuminated by his method. He died in 

 1824 at the age of seventy-six years. 



Dr. Joseph David Everett, F.R.S., formerly 

 professor of natural philosophy at Queen's 

 College, Belfast, died on August 9, at the age 

 of seventy-three years. In 1871 Dr. Everett 

 moved the appointment of a committee of the 

 British Association for the selection and 

 naming of dynamical and electrical units, and 

 in 1873 drafted a report in which the terms 

 ' dyne,' ' erg,' and ' C. G. S. unit ' were intro- 

 duced at his suggestion. His ' Illustration of 



