Chemical Technology: Witt, Otto N., Charlottenberg Polytechnic Institute, Berlin. Agriculture: Lindet, Prof. Charles, Institute National Agronomique, Paris.

DEPARTMENT 20. PRACTICAL ECONOMICS. Transportation: Philippovich, Eugen von, The University, Vienna.

Commerce and Exchange: Stieda, Wilhelm, Leipzig.

Money and Banking, Credit and Credit System: Lévy, Prof. Raphael Georges, Paris.

Industrial Organization: Conrad, JohannesErnst, The University, Halle.

DEPARTMENT 21. PRACTICAL POLITICS.

Diplomacy: Casimir-Perier, Ex-President. National Administration: Bryce, Rt. Hon. James, 54 Portland Place, London.

Municipal Administration: Nerinck, A., University of Louvain.

Constitutional Law: Jellineck, Prof. Georg, The University, Heidelberg.

Criminal Law: Listz, Prof. Franz von, The University, Berlin. Wach, Prof. Adolf, The University, Leipzig.

Private Law: von Bar, Ludwig, Göttingen. Hilty, Prof. Karl, Berne.

DEPARTMENT 23. PRACTICAL SOCIAL SCIENCES.

The Rural Community: Weber, Prof. Max, The University, Heidelberg.

The Urban Community: Wuarin, Prof. Louis, The University, Geneva.

The Industrial Group: Sombart, Prof. Werner, The University, Breslau.

The Dependent Group: Münsterberg, E., Berlin. The Criminal Group: Lombroso, Prof. Cesare, The University of Turin, Italy.

DEPARTMENT 24. PRACTICAL EDUCATION. The School: Sadler, Prof. M. E., London. The University: Ziegler, Prof. Theobald, The University, Strassburg.

The Library: Axon, Ernest, Assistant Librarian, Ref. Library, Manchester.

DEPARTMENT 25. PRACTICAL RELIGION.

Influence of Religion on Civilization: Black, Hugh, Edinburgh.

THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF NATURALISTS. THE twenty-second annual meeting of the American Society of Naturalists will be held at St. Louis on December 29 and 30, in affiliation with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, under the presidency of Professor William Trelease, of the Missouri Botanical Garden. Headquarters will be at the Planters Hotel and the meetings will be held at the Central High School. The annual discussion will take place on the afternoon of December 30, on 'What academic degrees should be given for scientific work?' in which a number of prominent educators and naturalists will take part. The public lecture by President David Starr Jordan, of Stanford University, on 'The Resources of our Seas,' will be on Tuesday evening in the auditorium of the Central High School. The annual dinner and the president's address will be given on Wednesday evening, December 30, at seven o'clock at the Mercantile Club (7th and Locust Sts.). A business meeting for the election of officers will he held at 6:45. The societies affiliated with the American Society of Naturalists which will meet at St. Louis are The Zoologists of the Central States, The Botanists of the Central States, The American Psychological Association, The American Society of Anthropologists. The general Secretary is Professor G. Ross Harrison, The Johns Hopkins University, to whom communications should be addressed.

SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS. THE following is the list of council and officers of the Royal Society nominated by

the council for election by the society at the next anniversary: President, Sir William Huggins, K.C.B., O.M., D.C.L., LL.D.; treasurer, Alfred Bray Kempe, M.A.; secretaries, Professor Joseph Larmor, D.Sc., D.C.L., LL.D., Sir Archibald Geikie, Kt., D.C.L., Sc.D., LL.D.; foreign secretary, Francis Darwin, M.A., M.B. Other members of the council-George Albert Boulenger, F.Z.S., Professor John Rose Bradford, M.D., D.Sc., Professor Hugh Longbourne Callendar, LL.D., Frank Watson Dyson, M.A., Professor Harold Baily Dixon, M.A., Sir Michael Foster, K.C.B., D.C.L., Professor Percy Faraday Frankland, Ph.D., Sir Robert Giffen, K.C.B., LL.D., Professor William Dobinson Halliburton, M.D., F.R.C.P., Ernest William Hobson, Sc.D., Professor John Wesley Judd, C.B., LL.D., Professor George Downing Liveing, M.A., Professor Augustus Edward Hough Love, M.A., Adam Sedgwick, M.A., William Napier, Shaw, Sc.D., Captain Thomas Henry Tizard, R. N., C.B.

PROFESSOR JOHN U. NEF, head of the Department of Chemistry of the University of Chicago, has been elected a member of the Royal Society of Science at Upsala, Sweden.

PROFESSOR E. J. MAREY, of Paris, and Professor Camillo Golgi, of Padua, have been elected foreign corresponding members of the Vienna Academy of Sciences.

THE Denny gold medal of the British Institute of Marine Engineers has been presented to Mr. C. W. Barnes for his paper on ship electric lighting.

DR. FRANCIS RAMALEY, of the Department of Biology at the University of Colorado, at Boulder, has obtained leave of absence and will sail from San Francisco on December 22 for Japan. He will visit various botanical centers in the far east for purposes of study and for securing collections. During his absence the department will be in charge of Mr. Chancey Juday, M.A. (Wisconsin).

DR. MAXIMILIAN HERZOG, professor of pathology and bacteriology in the Chicago Polyclinic, has been appointed pathologist in the Bureau of the Government Laboratory, Ma

nila, and will sail from San Francisco about December 30.

MR. DE WINTON has resigned the acting superintendency of the Gardens of the London Zoological Society.

SIR JOHN GUNN delivered the presidential address before the British Institute of Marine Engineers on November 23.

THE New York Alumni Club of the University of Wisconsin will entertain President Charles R. Van Hise at dinner at the Murray Hill Hotel.

PROFESSOR DICEY, of Oxford, delivered the Sidgwick Memorial Lecture at Newnham College, Cambridge, on Saturday, November 21. His subject was 'The Relation of Law and Opinion as illustrated by the History of the Combination Laws during the Nineteenth Century.'

MR. CLOUDSLEY RUTTER, of the U. S. Bureau of Fisheries, died on November 28, at Oakland City, Indiana, at the age of 36, after a short illness from erysipelas. Mr. Rutter was a graduate of the Indiana State Normal School and of Stanford University. He was a young man of unusual ability and energy, and had made very important studies of the salmon of our Pacific Coast, on which subject he was a recognized authority.

DR. CYRUS EDSON, at one time health commissioner of New York City, died on December 2, at the age of forty-six.

PROFESSOR HEINRICH MOEHL, director of the Meteorological Institute at Cassel, died on October 14.

DR. GARY DE HOUGH'S collection of flies, especially Muscidæ (10,000 specimens), has been purchased for the Zoological Museum of the University of Chicago.

A SPECIAL fund of $10,000 is being collected by the New York Botanical Garden for the purchase of plants, specimens and books and for defraying the expenses of botanical exploration in the West Indies, Central America and the Philippine Archipelago. The sum of $8,781 had been contributed on December 1.

THERE will be a meeting in the rooms of the Board of Trade and Transportation, New

York City, to consider the question of the dissemination of mosquitoes. Governor Murphy, of New Jersey, has been invited to preside, and addresses are expected from Dr. L. O. Howard and others.

IT is said that a project for the establishment of a Behring Institute, after the model of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, is under consideration by the German Government. The primary objects of the new institute are to be the furtherance of research in the domain of serum therapy and the accurate preparation of serums of all kinds.

Nature, for November 26, gives the first place to the following note.

A rumor has reached us that at the annual meeting of the Royal Society on Monday next an attempt is to be made by a certain section of the fellows to upset the selection of officers made last week by the council. It appears that the phys iologists are under the belief that they have acquired a prescriptive right to hold one of the two secretaryships. It is true that for upwards of forty years they have so held it, but the group of natural sciences includes more than physiology or even biology, and the council, in the exercise of its discretion, has thought that it was high time that one of the other sciences should be represented in this secretaryship. We are further informed that a copy of a letter is being circulated which appears to convey an invitation from the president and council to a certain physiologist to accept the vacant office. That letter was, it is stated, written in error, without the sanction or knowledge of the president and council, but in view of it a special meeting was called to consider the matter, when the council decided to adhere to the decision at which they had already arrived in the ordinary and regular way-a decision which is obviously in the best interests of the Royal Society as a whole, and doubtless the great majority of the fellows will support it by their votes on Monday.

UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL NEWS.

GENERAL F. M. DRAKE, of Des Moines, has bequeathed $50,000 to Drake University.

THE fund left by Mr. Lewis Elkin for annuities for women teachers of the public schools of Philadelphia, is said to amount to $1,800,000.

A DONOR Who wishes to remain anonymous has given, through Professor Sterling, £50,000

to University College, London, to be used for the promotion of higher scientific education and research.

2.

OTTAWA UNIVERSITY, a Roman Catholic institution, was destroyed by fire on December The loss is said to be at least $200,000, most of which is covered by insurance. Three of the priests were seriously injured. The main building of Jewell Lutheran College in Iowa has also been destroyed by fire. The loss is estimated at $25,000, one half being covered by insurance. One of the students was killed. THE Rev. George Morgan Ward has been elected president of Wells College, Aurora, N. Y.

DR. C. H. JUDD has been made acting director of the Yale Psychological Laboratory for the present year. At the same time an advisory committee on the laboratory has been appointed consisting of Professors Ladd, Duncan and Sneath.

DR. JAMES E. LOUGH, professor of psychology of the School of Pedagogy of New York University, has been appointed director of the summer school.

DR. HORACE CLARK RICHARDS, instructor in physics in the University of Pennsylvania, has been made assistant professor of physics.

AT a meeting of the electors to the Wilde readership in mental philosophy, held on November 19, at Oxford, Mr. William McDougall, M.A., M.B., fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge, and reader in experimental psychology at University College, London, was elected reader in place of Mr. Stout, recently elected professor of logic and metaphysics in the University of St. Andrews. Mr. McDougall took the degree of B.Sc. with first-class honors in geology at Victoria University; he afterwards gained first-class honors in physiology and anatomy in both parts of the Natural Science Tripos at Cambridge.

MR. REINHOLD F. A. HOERNLÉ, B.A., Balliol College, has been elected to the John Locke scholarship in mental philosophy.

MR. W. M. FLETCHER, of Trinity College, Cambridge, has been appointed demonstrator of physiology.

them meaning the same.

Perhaps they are in reality the same phenomena; but in this paper by fluorescence we mean a luminosity, more usually evidenced by a play of color, lasting only during the direct influence of the exciting agent. By phosphorescence, we mean the emission or propagation of ethereal stresses, which affect the optical centers, producing light, white or colored, which persists after the removal of the cause. Substances may, therefore, be both fluorescent and phosphorescent.

The radium preparations of the highest activity used in these investigations became the property of the American Museum of Natural History through the liberality of Mr. Edward D. Adams, a member of the Board of Administrators of the Museum and of the New York Academy of Sciences. His gift of the necessary funds was applied to the purchase of one portion of radium bromide of 300,000 activity and another of 1,800,000; uranium being taken as the standard at 1. The preparations were obtained from the Société Centrale des Produits Chimiques at Paris. Unfortunately, although the order was authorized and material assured, it has been impossible to obtain the bromide of the highest strength in time for presentation at this meeting. The results here announced have to do with the radium of 300,000 and of 7,000 activity (chloride) and 240 (chloride) and of 100 radium barium carbonate. The compounds of lower activity were purchased by the authors.

The intense penetrative powers of radium preparations have been previously noted by numerous investigators-as the Curies, Strutt, Rutherford and othersmentioned later. The bibliography is so extensive that no effort is made to give all the references in this abbreviated paper. A remarkable illustration, almost startling, of its penetration was demonstrated with the following experiments: Radium bro

mide of 300,000 activity was placed in a sealed glass tube contained in a rubber thermometer-holder, the top of which was tightly screwed down, and the whole placed in a water-tight tinned-iron box; over the box were placed, first, a heavy silver tureen 1.5 mm. thick, then four copper plates, such as are used for engraving, and finally a heavy graduated measuring-glass 10 cm. in diameter filled with water to a depth of 15 cm. A diamond was then suspended in the water and became fluorescent immediately. Whenever the tube with radium was withdrawn a distance of more than one meter, the fluorescence ceased, but was resumed on replacing the radium under the tureen. This experiment showed that the influence of the radium was exerted successively through glass, rubber, silver 1.5 mm. thick, four copper plates, glass 0.5 cm. thick, and finally 8 cm. of water.

With all these wonderful properties of radio-activity, there is yet a certain amount of discussion at the present time between the German and the French investigators. Some of the former say that radium of 300,000 activity seems to them improbable; and that no scientific man should take this

expression seriously.

expression seriously. They believe that if metallic radium is ever obtained its activity will not exceed 100,000. This view is reiterated by others, who also state that these activities are only surmised, that they are not accurately determined, and can not be sustained by definite measurements. Madame Curie unhesitatingly speaks of the difficulties attending accurate measurements of such high radio-activity.

Incidentally it may be well at this point to call attention to the complex nature of these radiations. While a number of researches from such physicists as Becquerel, Professor and Madame Curie, Meyer and von Schweidler, Giesel, Elster and Geitel, Villard and Rutherford have proved the