SCIENTIFIC NEWS. 283 
the committees .are building an unwieldy machine with its central 
and regional bureaux. 
The Boston Society of Natural History is trying to increase its 
membership. Reduction in the rate of interest of its invested funds 
threatens seriously to impair its usefulness unless the loss be made 
good in other ways. 
Ever since his appointment as scientific director of the U. S. Fish 
Commission, Dr. H. C. Bumpus has been publishing notes on the 
breeding habits of animals at Woods Holl. It is to be hoped that 
the author will collect these notes, arrange them in systematic order, 
and reissue them as a whole, thus making them more useful to 
students, 
The City Library Association of Springfield, Mass., will hold this 
month an exhibition of material relating to geography and geology, 
to show chiefly the results of geographical and geological research 
during the last few years. Methods of teaching geography and geol- 
ogy will form one of the chief features of the exhibition, which will 
also demonstrate, as far as possible, the progress of these sciences by 
the display of published results. 
Professor A. S. Packard, of Brown University, sailed the first of the 
year for the Mediterranean. He will spend the winter in Egypt, 
Palestine, and other countries bordering on the Mediterranean, and 
later go to France to obtain materials for a proposed life of Lamarck. 
The refusal of the leaders of the Geological Society of America to 
affiliate in any way with the other scientific societies which meet dur- 
ing the holidays may have some good reason behind it, but we have 
never heard of it. During the meetings of 1898 this isolation caused 
some complaint on the part of some of the geologists, for they were 
unable to obtain the reduced rates on the railroads which were 
enjoyed by the members of the other societies. 
It seems probable that the Society of Naturalists, with its associated 
organizations of morphologists, botanists, anatomists, psychologists, 
etc., will meet in 1899 in New Haven. 
The Paris Academy of Sciences has awarded half of the Lallemand 
prize to Mr. E. P. Allis for his memoir upon the head of Amia. 
We chronicled some time ago the appointment of Dr. Slingerland 
as state entomologist of New York. It appears that there is a con- 
flict in the laws as to the appointing power; this being given in one 
place to the governor, in another to the regents of the university. 
