CIVIL ENGINEERS AND THE ARMY

THE War Department states that two thousand engineers are needed immediately by the United States Army for commission as first lieutenants and captains. The chief of engineers has outlined a plan of campaign by which it is hoped to obtain the men needed without delay. A board of examiners will be sent out from Washington to visit about 33 principal cities.

Engineers, civil, mechanical, mining and electrical, will have an opportunity to go before the board and be examined. Those passing the examinations will be commissioned at once and sent to an engineer officers' training camp, either at Camp Lee, Petersburg, Va., or Camp Humphreys, Va., near Washington. They will be on officers' pay while training and at the completion of their courses will be assigned at once to duty with the engineer troops.

Engineering societies and institutes will be provided with application blanks to be distributed among their members and friends in the profession. Engineers who do not obtain blanks in this way should address the Chief of

Engineers, United States Army, Washington. These forms, when properly filled out, should be returned to Washington. After they have been scrutinized with a view to ascertaining the fitness of the applicants, word will be sent out telling the men when and where to appear for mental and physical examinations.

Following are the requirements that must be met:

Age Limits.-First lieutenants, 32 to 36 years; captains, 36 to 42 years. These limits may be extended in special cases, but no man of draft age will be considered.

Citizenship. All applicants must be citizens of the United States.

Qualifications.-Applicants must be actively engaged in the practise of the engineering profession, and be in good physical condition. No set rules have been adopted as to professional qualifications and experience. The examining board will determine each applicant's case. Applicants must possess the requisite qualities of leadership and temperament to fit them for the command of troops.

It is the hope of the chief of engineers to have all men who pass the examinations commissioned within ten days or two weeks. Traveling expenses of 7 cents a mile to the training camp will be allowed to those who receive commissions.

WAR WORK OF MINING ENGINEERS HEADS of practically every 66 war-work" division of the government will discuss vital war problems with 200 of the country's leading mining engineers, representing the American Institute of Mining Engineers, at a dinner in the Food Administration Cafeteria on the evening of June 21. To learn new ways in which the mining engineer can contribute his services, already great, toward the winning of the war is the aim of the gathering, which has been planned in honor of the board of directors of the institute. There are some 700 of the institute's membership of 6,700 devoting their entire time to war service.

Those who will discuss future work for the institute in the war are practically all members of the institute. They include Herbert

C. Hoover, food administrator; Charles M. Schwab, director-general of the Emergency Fleet Corporation; John D. Ryan, directorgeneral of the Aircraft Production Board; Vance McCormick, chairman of the War Trade Board; W. L. Saunders, chairman of the Naval Consulting Board; Mark L. Requa, head of the Oil Division of the Fuel Administration; Sidney J. Jennings, president of the American Institute of Mining Engineers; Benedict Crowell, Assistant Secretary of War, and Pope Yeatman, of the War Industries Board. Francis Peabody, chief, explosives section, Bureau of Mines, will be the toastmaster.

Members of the American Institute of Mining Engineers are active in a wide field of war work including the Engineer Officers' Reserve Corps, Ordnance and Signal Corps Branches of the Army and Navy, Aircraft Production, Food and Fuel Administrations, War Industries Board, War Trade Board, and the Department of the Interior. Several members of the institute have also joined the Royal Engineers of the British Army. The arrangements for the conference are in charge of Van H. Manning, director of the Bureau of Mines. In the afternoon the board of directors of the institute will hold a meeting at the Bureau of Mines.

At a meeting on June 20 a Washington section of the American Institute of Mining Engineers was formed. Although remote from the country's mining centers, Washington now contains more mining engineers than any other city.

SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS

DR. ALEXANDER LAMBERT, of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, Columbia University, was elected president of the American Medical Association at the Chicago meeting on June 13. Admiral W. C. Braisted, SurgeonGeneral of the Navy had a nearly equal number of votes. Dr. Lambert is medical director of the American Red Cross work in France, and president of the New York State Medical Association.

AT the recent commencement of New York University, the degree of LL.D. was conferred

on Surgeon-General William C. Gorgas, and the degree of doctor of public health on Dr. Charles Edward Amory Winslow, professor of public health at Yale University.

AT its commencement exercises held on June 12, St. Lawrence University conferred the degree of doctor of laws on Dr. Frederic S. Lee, professor of physiology in Columbia University.

SIR NAPIER SHAW, president of the International Meteorological Committee, has been appointed scientific adviser to the British government for the period of the war. Sir Napier has been director of the British meteorological office since 1905.

OLIVER HEAVISIDE, the distinguished English mathematical physicist, has been elected an honorary fellow of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. The only other honorary fellows are: Marconi, Ferranti, Blondel and C. E. L. Brown.

PROFESSOR L. V. KING, of the Macdonald Physical Laboratories, McGill University, was elected president of Section III., Chemical and Physical Sciences, at the thirty-seventh meeting of the Royal Society of Canada, recently held in Ottawa, Canada. Professor King has been carrying on a series of practical researches for anti-submarine warfare and other work on behalf of the British Admiralty.

THE Franklin Institute has awarded the Howard N. Potts medal to Dr. Alexander Gray, of Ithaca, N. Y., for his paper, entitled "Modern dynamo electric machinery," which is " an exhaustive discussion of the design of dynamo electric machinery." The institute has awarded its Edward Longstreth medal of merit to Professor H. Jermain Creighton, of Swarthmore College, for his paper, entitled

the underlying principles of the phenomenon of the electric corona at high potentials."

LORD ROTHSCHILD has been elected an honorary member of the recently founded Entomological Society of Spain.

SAMUEL R. WILLIAM, professor of physics at Oberlin College, has been appointed Ernest Kempton Adams fellow by Columbia University.

SIR WILLIAM ARBUTHNOT LANE, consulting surgeon to Guy's Hospital, Sir James Mackenzie, physician to the London Hospital, and Colonel Herbert A. Bruce, consulting surgeon of the British Armies in France, are now in this country to attend American medical conferences.

MAJOR GEORGE W. NORRIS, of the University of Pennsylvania, who went to France nearly a year ago with Base Hospital No. 10, now No. 16, with the British Expeditionary forces, has been assigned, in addition to his other work, consultant in general medicine for Advance Section S. O. S., Zone of the Advance. He is attached to the American Expeditionary forces.

W. A. COCHEL, for six years head of the department of animal husbandry, Kansas State Agricultural College, has resigned his position to become secretary of the American Shorthorn Breeders' Association. He will probably continue to make his home in Manhattan.

PRESIDENT W. A. JESSUP, of the University of Iowa, has received a letter from Professor C. C. Nutting, head of the expedition to the British West Indies, stating that the party had reached the island of Barbados safely after a thirteen-day voyage from New York City. Each of the nineteen members in the company is in good health, and prospects are favorable for a successful outcome. The explorers are now in government quarters and have equipped excellent laboratories and aquariums for the study of sea life.

PROFESSOR VAUGHAN MACCAUGHEY, professor of botany at the College of Hawaii, Honolulu, will have charge of the courses in biology and field natural history at the Chatauqua Institution Summer Schools, Chatauqua, New York. En route he will lecture at educational centers

on "The Islands of the Pacific and the World War."

SIR ALEXANDER PEDLER, F.R.S., known for his research work in chemistry, for many years professor of that science in the Presidency College at Calcutta, later vice-chancellor of the Calcutta University and minister of public instruction in Bengal, died on May 13, aged sixty-eight years.

THE death is announced in Nature of Dr. R. G. Hebb, consulting physician and physician pathologist to Westminster Hospital, lecturer on pathology at Westminster Hospital Medical School, reader in morbid anatomy at the University of London, and editor of the Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society.

THE Civil Service Commission announces a registration examination for geodetic, hydrographic and magnetic computors in the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey. This is a continuing examination and the entrance salary is $1,200 per annum. Detailed information regarding the requirements and the work done by the computers will be furnished upon application to the U. S. Civil Service Commission or to the U. S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, Washington, D. C.

UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL
NEWS

A $50,000 BEQUEST to the University of Pennsylvania is included in the will of the late Dr. William C. Goodell, to be used to endow a chair of gynecology.

A LETTER from the department of registration and education of the state of Illinois, states that after October 15, 1918, no medical college will be recognized as in good standing in Illinois unless it requires for admission two years of work in an approved college of liberal arts or a fully equivalent education.

THE University of Wisconsin reports the receipt of gifts amounting to $100,000 which, with an appropriation of $50,000 from the legislature of 1917, will be used in the construction of a new infirmary for the medical school.

DR. H. L. RIETZ, of the University of Illinois, has been made head of the mathematics at the State University of Iowa. He will suc

ceed Professor A. G. Smith, whose death occurred in the fall of 1916.

APPOINTMENTS at Cornell University have been made as follows: F. K. Richtmyer, professor of physics; John B. Bentley, jr., professor of forestry; Charles L. Gibson, professor of surgery, to succeed the late Professor Stimson; John A. Hartwell, associate professor of surgery and William C. Thro, professor of clinical pathology, Medical College, New York.

WILLIAM S. TAYLOR, acting professor of rural education at Cornell University, has been appointed professor of agricultural education at Pennsylvania State College.

DR. A. R. CUSHNY, F.R.S., professor of materia medica and pharmacology in the University of London (University College) since 1905 has been appointed to the chair of materia medica in the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Cushny was professor of pharmacology in the University of Michigan from 1893 to 1905.

2. I received to-day your communication on a 26.68-day solar synodic period.

3. Some time ago I received some other data from you relating to observations and computations of radiation.

4. While I appreciate your kindness in remembering me personally, I am obliged to tell you that I can not at all accept your views and I do not think you either fully understand or fairly weigh our work. My reasons are partly given below.

5. Among the words you use most is "Pyrheliometer.'' We carefully made and standardized Silver Disk Pyrheliometer S. I. III., at your request, and sent with it an accurate description of the method by which it must be read and reduced in order to give results to correspond with its con

stant of calibration. In your book "Atmospheric Circulation and Radiation," pages 263 to 267, I am surprised to see that you describe and prescribe another method of using it whereby it can not give results agreeing with its constant of calibration. 6. You use this word "Pyrheliometer" and its modifications often very objectionably when you mention our work. You make it appear as if we attach weight to empirical processes of extrapolation of total radiation of all wave-lengths combined. If an observer could operate on the moon, a pyrheliometer would be a very much more valuable instrument than it is here, and I believe you and others could not then avoid the true conclusions as to the value of the solar constant. Unfortunately, owing to the unequal transparency of the earth's atmosphere for rays of different wavelengths, it is absolutely necessary to use spectrumenergy analysis to measure the solar constant of radiation, as Langley showed. We use a linear bolometer to measure the intensity and changes of intensity of all parts of the spectrum. We have employed it at Washington, Bassour, Hump Mountain, Mount Wilson, and Mount Whitney. In our experiments the solar beam traversed paths of air ranging from that where the sun was nearly vertically overhead at Mount Whitney, to that with the sun on the horizon at Mount Wilson. Anybody interested can learn exactly how we worked by studying our published papers, particularly Volumes II. and III. of our Annals and our paper "New Evidences on the Intensity of Solar Radiation Outside the Atmosphere," Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. 65, No. 4.

In all this work we treat the pyrheliometer as a subsidiary instrument. Its sole use and purpose in our investigations is to enable us to express the readings of the bolometer in calories.

As a result of spectro-bolometric investigations over fifteen years of time, we have shown that the solar constant is 1.93 calories, and the sun an irregular variable star. Others, Clayton and Bauer particularly, have shown how the solar variations we have discovered affect terrestrial things. If our results were wrong these correlations would not be found.

7. Not everybody has a spectro-bolometer. You haven't any, for one. From a wealth of experience that nobody else in the world ever had in the measurement of solar radiation, we have put out some tabular data and empirical formulæ connecting pyrheliometry and psychrometry with the solar constant. We did this, not because we had any occasion for them ourselves, but so that observers

who had pyrheliometers, but couldn't afford the expense of money, time, and experience necessary to really observe solar radiation satisfactorily by spectrum-energy work, might get approximate results of at least moderate value. It is to be distinctly understood that these empirical methods of solar constant work by pyrheliometry, though based on our work, are likely to yield results several per cent. from the truth, owing to differences in the atmospheric transparency due to various causes, and especially to the variable influence of water vapor. Pyrheliometric methods are mere economical make-shifts when unaccompanied by spectrobolometry.

8. You are, I am certain, misled in your attack on our use of Bouguer's formula of extrapolation when applied as we applied it to homogeneous rays. See for instance our paper "New Evidences on the Intensity of Solar Radiation Outside the Atmosphere." Logically conceived the mathematical treatment consists in diminishing the path of the sunrays in every layer of the atmosphere proportionally until none remains. The fact that this can not conveniently be carried through experimentally beyond the point corresponding to the atmospheric thickness found in a vertical solar beam does not prove that a continuation such as can be logically conceived up to the point where each thickness becomes zero is mathematically unsound. Imagine, for instance, a tube to be erected from the observer to the outside of the atmosphere, and by side tubes appropriately dimensioned let the atmosphere within the tube be exhausted until none remains. This fits the logical process applied with Bouguer's formula. No mathematician but you can see in it anything objectionable, so far as I know.

9. In order to verify, as far as could be done, the sound theoretical and experimental conclusion that if the standard pyrheliometer could be read on the moon at mean solar distance it would read there on the average 1.93 calories per square centimeter per minute, we sent up a registering pyrheliometer by balloon to 22,000 meters in 1914 and found there 1.84 calories, which is a very reasonable check.

10. You have exterpolated your thermodynamical discussion of meteorological measurements into the realms of the thin air above 22,000 meters, and into the realms of the sun, which is out of the range of laboratory conditions altogether. Your results widely disagree from those I have just quoted. It seems to me not to matter who makes the curves, whether yourself or another; by the time they get outside the well-observed range of at

mospheric data, say 20,000 meters, even though they are sound at the bottom (and this I am not quite sure of), they rank rather as interesting speculations than as having quantitative value. By authority of the Secretary:

Yours truly,

C. G. ABBOT,

Director, Astrophysical Observatory Professor Frank H. Bigelow, Solar and Magnetic Observatory, Pilar, Argentina.

ence.

REPLY TO PROFESSOR WILDER BEING much interested in a short article by Professor Wilder, appearing in SCIENCE of April 19, on the subject of "Desmognathus fuscus (sic)," it occurred to me that a few remarks might not be inappropriate. The object of the nomenclatorial code in zoology, as I assume Professor Wilder recognizes as fully as any other zoologist, is primarily to afford a means of naming the various species of animals. In view of this I think it will be admitted that philological conditions should play a secondary rôle to consistency and permanMost zoologists are in favor of ridding nomenclature of the idiosyncrasies continually occurring in language, in order to bring about absolute uniformity so far as may be possible. This tendency can be traced easily. In former times it was the custom, for instance, to begin all specific words founded upon proper names with the capital letter; then, the desirability of uniformity becoming increasingly evident, only specific designations founded upon the names of persons were so written; at the present time, in all parts of the world excepting continental Europe, the custom prevails of beginning all specific names, including the personal, with a small letter. It is now Omus edwardsi, for example, and not Omus Edwardsii, as originally published, the adoption of the single i in all cases to form the genitive ending, being another recently adopted rule formulated in the sole interest of uniformity. All this should horrify the philologist quite as much as the disregarding of irregular Greek genders.

Now in regard to genders, it is considered desirable by many systematists-and their