JuxE 16, 1905.] 



SCIENCE. 



933 



achieved eveu more permanent results if used 

 in some other way ? 



In looking over the reports of various mu- 

 seums it becomes evident that too much stress 

 must not be laid on mere number of visitors. 

 Three great institutions show a drop in 1903 

 or 1904 of from 70,000 to 50,000, while the 

 United States National Museum exhibits a 

 large increase, following a large decrease. 

 None of the museums in which the attendance 

 has declined has fallen off in the quantity 

 or quality of their displays; on the contrary, 

 they have made very great progress, and yet 

 the public for some unexplained reason seems 

 temporarily to have lost interest. How much 

 the frequent expositions of the last ten years 

 may have had to do with this it is impossible 

 to say, but it probably has had its effect in 

 decreasing attendance. 



F. A. L. 



SCIENTIFW NOTES AlfD NEWS. 



Professor L. Hermann, Konigsberg, Pro- 

 fessor H. A. Lorentz, Leyden ; Professor Henri 

 Moissan, Paris, and Professor Hugo de Vries, 

 Amsterdam, have been elected foreign mem- 

 bers of the Royal Society. 



Dr. Friedrich Kohlrausch, who recently 

 resigned the directorship of the Keichsan- 

 stalt, and has changed his residence, has been 

 made an honorary meinber of the Berlin 

 Academy of Sciences instead of a resident 

 member as hitherto. 



Louis Henry has been elected a corre- 

 sponding member of the Paris Academy of 

 Sciences, in the section of chemistry. 



Cambridge University has conferred the 

 honorary degree of Sc.D. upon Commander 

 R. F. Scott and Sir Francis E. Younghus- 

 band, K.C.I.E., LL.D. 



The Broca prize of the Paris Anthropolog- 

 ical Society has been awarded to MM. Lau- 

 nois and Roy for their biological study of 

 gigantism. 



Professor George T. Ladd, who has re- 

 signed from the chair of philosophy at Yale 

 University, has arranged to pass the latter 

 half of next year as professor of philosophy 

 at "Western Reserve Universitj-. At the close 



of the war in the east he expects to go to 

 Japan to lecture on educational methods under 

 the auspices of the Japanese Imperial Educa- 

 tion Society. 



Dr. B. F. Clarke, professor of mechanical 

 engineering at Brown University, retires at 

 the end of this year, in accordance with the 

 pension regulations recently adopted by the 

 corporation. 



Dr. G. F. Hull, Appleton professor of 

 physics at Dartmouth College, will spend 

 next year abroad, working in the laboratory 

 of Professor J. J. Thomson, at Cambridge. 



Professor Olin F. Tower, of "Western Re- 

 serve University, has a six months' leave of 

 absence, which he is spending at the Uni- 

 versity of Berlin. 



Dr. W. J. Humphreys, Ph.D. (Johns Hop- 

 kins, '97) has been appointed chief physicist 

 of the United States Weather Bureau, in 

 charge of the new physical laboratory in the 

 mountains of West Virginia, near Gap Mills. 

 Before assuming his new duties. Dr. Hum- 

 phreys will go abroad to study foreign labora- 

 tories. 



Mr. I. B. Pole Evans, B.Sc. (Wales), has 

 been appointed assistant for plant diseases 

 under Mr. J. Burtt-Davy, government agros- 

 tologist and botanist of the Transvaal De- 

 partment of Agriculture. Since October, 

 1903, Mr. Pole Evans has been working for 

 his research degree at Cambridge under Pro- 

 fessor Marshall Ward, being engaged prin- 

 cipally in an investigation of the rusts of 

 cereals. During this time he has been acting 

 as demonstrator in elementary biology for Mr. 

 Seward, and last term had charge of the 

 practical work of Professor Marshall Ward's 

 advanced course on fungi. The cereals of 

 the Transvaal are greatly affected by parasitic 

 fungi, and its flora presents a new and prac- 

 tically untouched field for the mycologist. 



Professor Bernhard Proskauer has been 

 appointed head of the chemical department of 

 the Institute for Infectious Diseases at Berlin. 



The courses that Pi'ofessor Wilhelm Ost- 

 wald, of the University of Leipzig, will offer 

 at Harvard University during the first half 



