SCIENTIFIC NEWS. 
Dr. C. W. Hircucock, of Dartmouth, is spending the year in 
making geological explorations in the Hawaiian Islands. 
Asa Van Wormer, a wealthy merchant of Cincinnati, has given 
$56,000 to the University of Cincinnati, to be used for the erection of 
a fireproof library. 
Mr. S. W. Loper, curator of the museum of Wesleyan University, 
has returned from a very successful collecting trip of seven weeks in 
the Rocky Mountains. From the Tertiary Eocene beds at Fossil, 
Wyoming, he obtained 400 specimens of fossil fishes, insects, and 
plants. In Utah and Colorado he also collected large numbers of 
valuable fossils. All told he secured about 1300 specimens. 
On the twenty-second of October, Toland Medical College was form- 
ally transferred with appropriate ceremony to the keeping of the board 
of regents of the University of California. Toland Medical College 
was founded in 1863 by Dr. Hugh Huger Toland, who gave $75,000 
for that purpose. Eventually Dr. Toland presented the college to 
the University of California, but until October it was still known as 
Toland College. 
The late Franklin Story Conant, who died of yellow fever con- 
tracted in Jamaica, in the summer of 1897, was a graduate of Wil- 
liams College, in the class of 1893. His classmates have established 
a prize of $25 annual value, open to students of Williams College, 
and available towards defraying the expenses of the winner at the 
Woods Holl Laboratory. 
The city of Hamburg has established a station for plant investiga- 
tions, under the directorship of Dr. Carl Brick. Dr. Ludwig Reh, for . 
some time assistant of Dr. Field, in his bibliographical institute, goes 
to the new station as zoologist. 
Dr. David D. Cunningham, professor of physiology in the Calcutta 
Medical School, has resigned and has returned to England. 
Prof. W. Adolf Bastian, director of the ethnological museum in Ber- 
lin, has returned from a trip of two and a half years in Farther India. 
James Ingraham Peck, assistant professor of biology in Williams 
College, died of pneumonia, Nov. 4, 1898, aged thirty-five. He was 
born at Seneca Castle, New York, graduated at Williams in 1887, re- 
