construction and organization of this school shall be, according to the decree, undertaken at once by the governor general so that the necessary funds will be forthcoming as provided for by this law.

Ar the seventeenth annual meeting of the North Carolina Academy of Science, held at Greensboro on April 26 and 27, Dr. E. W. Gudger, after ten years' service as secretarytreasurer, was made president for the next year. The other officers elect are: vice-president, Professor H. B. Arbuckle, Davidson College; secretary-treasurer, Mr. Bert Cunningham, Trinity College; additional members executive committee; Rev. George W. Lay, St. Mary's School; Professor Gertrude W. Mendenhall, State Normal College and Professor J. J. Wolfe, Trinity College.

UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL
NEWS

THE Rockefeller Foundation has made the following appropriations: Howard College, Birmingham, Ala., $100,000; Wake Forest College, Wake Forest, N. C., $100,000, and Meredith College, Raleigh, N. C., $75,000. The board granted $195,000 for state agents for negro rural schools and for the annual maintenance of negro schools in the south. It also appropriated $14,000 for farm demonstration work in Maine and New Hampshire.

AT the University of Kentucky Dr. C. A. Shull, of the University of Kansas, has been appointed head of the department of botany; Dr. C. B. Cornell, of the University of Nebraska, assistant professor of education, and W. D. Funkhauser (Ph.D., Cornell) head of the department of zoology.

AT the University of Chicago, the following promotions have been made: To a professorship, Preston Keyes, anatomy; to associate professorships: Herman I. Schlesinger and Jean Piccard, chemistry; to assistant professorships: Gerald L. Wendt, chemistry; Charles C. Colby, geography, and Morris M. Wells, zoology; to instructorships: Merle C. Coulter, botany; Carl Richard Moore, zoology.

AT the University of Michigan Associate Professor Arthur J. Decker has been promoted to be professor of sanitary engineering. Walter C. Drury has been made instructor in sanitary engineering.

DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE ON THE ANTIQUITY OF MAN IN AMERICA It is not from choice that the writer again ventures to take part in the controversy regarding the antiquity of man in America, but the reported discovery of remains of man associated with those of fossil animals of Pleistocene age at Vero, Florida, has reopened the question of antiquity and presents such possibilities of erroneous interpretation that I feel impelled to offer a word of caution.

The American aborigines as known to us have occupied every available part of the continent from the Arctic to the Antarctic throughout the long but illy defined period known as the Recent, and their osseous remains and the relics of their handicraft have become associated with unconsolidated superficial deposits by burial, and by the changes, often very profound, which take place everywhere through the action of wind, water and gravity and especially along stream courses; and in the passage of the centuries and millenniums it is patent that the relations of human remains and relics of all classes have been subject not only to minor but often radical changes in their relation to one another and to the original formations and surface of the occupied areas.

The full significance of these conditions is seldom realized or but imperfectly recognized by those who seek the early traces of man's presence and who venture to reckon the period of his arrival. The stream, for example, that meandered a valley or plain thousands of years ago may ere this have rearranged the materials of large areas along its course. Its channel may have worn its way back and forth over miles of territory, yet the formations thus effected may be so reset, though largely at reduced levels, as to obliterate traces of disturbance. Changes in the chronologic rela

tion of inclusions in sloping and rolling country may have been similarly effected without leaving distinguishable traces. It is the failure to recognize these important considerations that has led in many cases to the confident and regrettable announcements on the part of students respecting the original association of human remains with the remains of fossil animals of the earlier periods.

It is not the Vero evidence, however, which requires particular attention at this time, since the interpretations favoring great antiquity are fully offset by the interpretations of anthropologists of long experience in the consideration of problems of the history of man in the world and the evidence relating thereto, but because questions of wide range have been opened through the revamping by Dr. Hay of a large body of so-called evidence of geological antiquity which has long been discredited and relegated to the historic scrap heap where it should still remain.1

There is a peculiar and very strong fascination in the idea of hoary antiquity and on the part of many students a disposition to discover parallels between the early events of human history in the old and new worlds, and the gathering of data bearing on these ideas be

comes

an obsession. Had certain of our archeologists in past decades not met with strenuous opposition glacial man in America would long ago have been fully "established." We should now have in our museums large collections of American paleolithic implements duplicating in nearly every respect the paleoliths of Europe and no end of bones of Pleistocene man and if now such views as those of Dr. Hay are allowed to prevail we shall have to accept the conclusion that American man had advanced to the pottery-making stage in the middle or early Pleistocene, and that after the lapse of a vast period the art was revived by the same or another people using the same materials, employing similar methods and attaining identical results in the same region a marvel without parallel in the history of man.

It is manifestly a serious duty of the archeologist and the historian of man to continue to challenge every reported discovery suggesting the great geological antiquity of the race in America and to expose the dangerous ventures of little experienced or biased students in a field which they have not made fully their own.

Dr. Hay has published a map giving locations of finds of traces of man attributed to the Pleistocene, these in cases being associated more or less intimately with remains of Elephas imperator. But this association is open to different interpretations and I feel justified in raising the danger signal in each and every case since, if left alone, lamentable errors may become fixtures on the pages of history. I therefore hasten to relabel the map "Danger Signals for the Student of Human History."

I do not wish for a moment to stand in the way of legitimate conclusions in this or any other field of research, but illegitimate determinations have been insinuating themselves into the sacred confines of science and history with such frequency and persistence that no apology is required for these words of caution. W. H. HOLMES

DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY,
U. S. NATIONAL MUSEUM

NOTE ON SUDAN III

THE toxicity of this dye, used so extensively in the study of problems connected with fat metabolism and vital staining, is a question of considerable importance; on this account a preliminary notice is presented of the finding that the preparations now on the market are of very doubtful purity.

Mendel and Daniels once stated that large doses of this dye fed to cats were harmless, provided the dye was pure. A preparation put up by an American manufacturer was given by them in large doses to two cats, which subsequently died within a comparatively short time, apparently from the effect of some impurity in the dye.

Some years later Salant & Bengis in their

No. 1.

stated that rabbits fed 1.7 gm. per kilo died in

one to three weeks, but it was extremely doubtful whether death was due to the dye. Experiments carried out in this laboratory with three German preparations and one of American make show great variation in general physical and chemical properties. Melting points vary by as much as 70 degrees, the color of solutions in oil range from a deep orange to a venous red, and their degree of solubility in neutral, alkaline or acid solutions is not the same.

The impure preparations were found in every case to be highly toxic, causing rabbits to die within 24 hours.

Full details of the completed experiments will be published later.

YALE UNIVERSITY

B. E. READ

SCIENTIFIC BOOKS

Lord Lister. By SIR RICKMAN J. GODLEE, Bart., pp. xix, 6761. Macmillan & Co., Ltd. London. 1917.

This is the biography of a man who never wrote a book yet whose work so profoundly transformed surgery that "Before Lister" and "After Lister" in surgical chronology are the counterparts of B.C. and A.D. in Christian chronology!

As a biography the story is too detailed to be easy perusal for the non-medical reader as compared, for example, with Vallery-Radot's "Pasteur ; but as the authorized biography by Lister's nephew and assistant, who had access to all his letters, remarkable commonplace books and other data, and as a narrative intended to trace the development of Lister's antiseptic system for the enlightenment of the profession in future ages, it is none too long nor too minute. It is more than a biography. It is an important historical document.

Joseph Lister was born a Quaker and continued in the Society of Friends until his marriage with the daughter of his professor of surgery, Mr. Syme, in 1856, when he withdrew from the society and later joined the Episcopal Church in Scotland. In his correspondence with his family, however, he always used the plain language, but in a form which

differs from that of our Philadelphia Friends and often grates upon both eye and ear. He simply replaces "you" by "thee," the plural verb being retained, e. g., Thee say, are, have,

etc.

He witnessed the first operation ever performed in Great Britain under ether anesthesia by Liston in December, 1846. Yet as Godlee points out it was hard to displace the old slap-dash surgery which was no longer necessary when pain had been abolished. Yet even in my own student days (1860-62), I have seen stop-watches pulled out to time how many seconds were required by Gross and Pancoast to whip a stone out of the bladder.

Lister's first work was in anatomy and pathology, especially in inflammation. Few remember that it was he who in 1853 first demonstrated the circular and the radiating muscular fibers in the iris.

A visit to Edinburgh for observation changed his whole life, for he settled there first as a student, then as an extra-mural lecturer, and there found his model wife whose death in 1893 was such a terrible blow to him.

In 1860 he was appointed regius professor of surgery in Glasgow. The very next year he attributed suppuration not to the oxygen of the air as all the chemists and everybody else were teaching, but to fermentation. His first two papers introducing the antiseptic system were not published until 1867.

Sir Rickman gives an excellent account of the warfare on "hospitalism" and puerperal fever by Simpson, Erichsen and Semmelweiss, but does not even mention our own Holmes, whose finger pointed the way as early as 1843. The echoes of his battle royal with Meigs and Hodge, of Philadelphia, were still reverberating when I was pursuing my medical studies. The methods of treatment of wounds which I was taught, and which I practised during the Civil War and down to 1876, are well described. Then follows a discussion of fermentation and putrefaction, and next the history of the rise and progress of Lister's antiseptic system, its modifications and its eventual triumph.

66

The "Story of the Four Flasks," which became, as Godlee well says, classical," is finally completely told. These were partly filled with fresh urine, boiled, their necks drawn out to 1/12th of an inch in diameter and all left open to the air. The neck of one was left vertical, those of the other three were bent downward. The contents of the vertical necked flask soon putrified. The other three travelled with him from Glasgow to Edinburgh and thence to London, where they were accidentally destroyed by fire ten years after being prepared as described. During all these ten years the urine remained clear and undecomposed! If for ten years, why not undecomposed for a century!

The two chapters describing the reception of Lister's antiseptic system by the profession "at home" and "abroad" are most interesting. After nine years in Glasgow, Lister succeeded Syme in the chair of clinical surgery in Edinburgh, where his success as a teacher was as immediate as it had been in Glasgow, where he had "taken the students by storm." Here he created a school of enthusiastic pupils who in time won hospital positions as didactic and clinical teachers and practised antisepsis.

In 1877, at the age of fifty, he went to London to King's College as the successor of Sir William Fergusson, who had been easily and for long the foremost surgeon of the metropolis. But what a contrast! What a chilling frost! Instead of over 180 as at Edinburgh, the number of new students annually was less than 25! At his lectures the present distinguished surgeon, Sir Watson Cheyne, -one of four assistants who had gone with Lister from Edinburgh to London, as he had stipulated-was careful to attend, so that at least there might be a dozen auditors! "We four unhappy men . . . wandered about . . . the wards in other hospitals where the air was heavy with the odor of suppuration . . . and the flushed cheek spoke eloquently of surgical fever." In Edinburgh Lister had had "half a dozen wards with 60 or 70 patients" whereas at King's he had "only two wards . . . but only empty beds"! The extraordinary domi

...

neering conduct of the nurses at King's will seem very strange to American surgeons and

nurses.

In the London medical societies discussions on antisepsis were either listless or else hostile. Most of the surgeons did not really grasp the fundamentals of the system. Even Paget dressed a compound fracture of the leg by putting on collodion at once and then 12 hours later applied carbolic acid! Yet he declared that the treatment. "did no good" though he had taken "special care" to follow Lister's method! Mr. Savory, one of the leaders and surgeon to Bart's itself, in 1879 considered that an annual average of about 6 cases of pyemia, 20 of erysipelas and 26 of blood poisoning represented as good a result as it was reasonably possible to expect!

ness

In 1876 in connection with the Centennial in Philadelphia, we held an International Surgical Congress. There I saw, heard and met Lister for the first time. The general tone of the discussion in the surgical section of which Lister was chairman, with the exception of a few, was that the system was little if anything more than "surgical cleanliI was an attentive listener, was wholly converted to Lister's views and began to practise his method when I went on duty at St. Mary's Hospital, October 1, 1876, and have never for a moment ceased to be an enthusiastic disciple. My results were marvellously different from what they had been in the same hospital for ten years. "Experientia docet." I know whereof I speak by bitter prior experience.

On the Continent, Saxtorph, Thiersch, Volkmann, Nussbaum, Championnière and others very early accepted the method and improved it. Then it came back re-vamped as it were to London, and finally, has won its way in a triumphant progress all over the civilized world.

Honors had begun to come thick and fast. The presidency of the Royal Society, degrees and honorary memberships from everywhere, a baronetcy and finally the peerage and the Order of Merit, limited to 24, and Lister was one of the first 12.

Then alas came the declining day with loss of physical and at last of mental vigor and finally the last closing of the eyes and a tablet in the Abbey.

Lister lived too long. It is better that every man should go before declining powers betray him. Strange to say both he and, if one may judge from various hints, his biographer also are disposed to be laudatores temporis acti, and mourn what seems to me a natural and inevitable development from antisepsis to asepsis, but which they regard as "a heresy."

So far from Lister's "practise having been discarded and his theory exploded" they have never been so firmly entrenched as now. Asepsis well suits civil practise in "clean" cases, but not in deeply infected cases. The Great War has recalled us to antisepsis, by reason of the intensity of its infections. The Carrel-Dakin method employs better antiseptics than carbolic and better methods of disinfection than Lister ever knew. The bacteriologist and the surgeon working together determine when a wound may be closed with assurance of success. Moreover if we can treat contaminated wounds early, before the bacteria have penetrated deeply and remove all the devitalized tissue and on and in it the great majority of the bacteria, the phagocytes can care for the remaining mild infection. Immediate closure may then be made.

It has remained for a non-medical snarling Irish critic, whose colossal egotism will readily suggest his name, and an anonymous medical reviewer both in the Nation (London) and another writer in the English Review whose article I have not seen, to belittle Lister and declare that he was not a great man.

With me the opinion of such judges as Volkmann, Virchow, Pasteur, Weir Mitchell and Lord Kelvin and the homage of thousands at the Great Congresses in London, Amsterdam, Philadelphia, Berlin, Montreal and elsewhere are enough. His detractors will have their day and cease to be, but "Humanity with uncovered head will salute" the Great Benefactor.

Is not my opening sentence correct?

NOTES ON METEOROLOGY AND
CLIMATOLOGY

THE "OLD-FASHIONED" WINTER OF 1917-19181 EVEN though summer is upon us, it is not difficult to recall that last winter in the United States east of the Rockies was remarkably cold and snowy. The first killing frosts of autumn came early, and nipped crops which had started late and grown slowly in the cold spring and early summer. The South had a real winter, much to the detriment of fruit and truck crops which were caught by frost. By far the most intense winter conditions occurred in the regions from the Ozarks to New England, where low temperatures brought snow with passing cyclones, and the snowcover in turn cooled the air excessively whenever the sky was clear. The unprecedented snow and ice blockades brought the wellknown, long chain of uncomfortable and costly results.

In the eastern United States it was not surprising that autumn months which in many regions were the coldest on record, should be followed by a December and a January that defied the memories of the oldest inhabitants. For example, in Ohio, a 64-year record fails to show a colder December, and in New England, January seems to have been the coldest month at least since 1836, if an Amherst record may be considered as representative. In these cold months, new minimum temperatures were established broadcast. Early in December, for instance, temperatures as low as 20° to 31° below zero (F.) were observed

1 A more extensive account is to be found in the Geographical Review, May, 1918, Vol. 5. This is based essentially on serial publications of the Weather Bureau, and on some press reports.