216 THE AMERICAN NATURALIST. [VoL. XXXII. 
Prof. E. Ray Lankester has been elected Fullerian Professor of 
Physiology in the Royal Institution of Great Britain. He is to give 
a course of seven lectures on the simplest living things. This ap- 
pointment does not interfere with his position in the University of 
Oxford. 
The Geological Society of London has awarded the Wollaston 
medal to Prof. F. Zirkel, the Murchison medal to T. F. Jamieson, 
and the Lyell medal to Dr. W. Waagen. 
In the editorial department of this journal for February a plea 
was made for the exercise of common sense in questions of scientific 
nomenclature. In Science for January 21 Dr. Theodore N» Gill has 
a casein point. In 1852 Dana recognized a genus Arctus and took 
for his type the Scy//arus arctus of Fabricius. Now, since Arctus 
was the only species known to Fabricius, Dr. Gill proposes to over- 
turn this work which has stood for nearly half a century, to refer 
Arctus back to the genus Scyllarus, and to refer those species which 
later students assigned to Scyllarus to a new genus Scyllarides. We 
doubt if almost “every zoologist” will admit the necessity for the 
change. Why not leave well enough alone? The proposed change 
merely introduces confusion where all was simplicity before. 
Prof. Thomas Jeffrey Parker, of the University of Otago, New 
‘Zealand, died at Dunedin, Nov. 7, 1897. He was the son of the 
late William Kitchen Parker, and received his scientific training at 
the hands of his father and of Huxley. From 1872 to 1880 he was 
demonstrator of biology at the Royal College of Science, South 
Kensington. In that year (1880) he went to New Zealand, where 
he remained until his death. He was most widely known by his 
books, /ustruction in Zootomy (1884) and Lessons in Elementary Biol- 
ogy (1891), but he had published numerous articles dealing chiefly 
with Vertebrata and Crustacea. Shortly before his death, in con- 
nection with Prof. W. A. Haswell, he had completed the manuscript 
of a text-book of zoology just published by the house of Macmillan. 
The University of Chicago makes appropriations of $729,000 for 
the University year beginning July 1, 1898. Among the items we 
note the following: for the faculty of arts, literature, and science, 
$347,000; libraries, laboratories, and museums, $44,000; printing 
and publishing, $41,000. The total number of graduate students in 
the university is 324, of whom 122 are women. 
At the meeting of the Yale Corporation held on the 13th inst. 
O. C. Marsh, professor of paleontology, formally presented to the 
University the valuable scientific collections belonging to him, now 
