MEETING OF THE INTERNATIONAL EUGENICS

CONGRESS IN NEW YORK CITY

THE National Research Council has appointed a committee on eugenics, under the division of biology and agriculture, consisting of the following members: L. F. Barker, A. G. Bell, E. A. Hooton, Daniel W. LaRue, Stewart Paton, Raymond Pearl, R. M. Yerkes, H. S. Jennings and C. B. Davenport, chairman. The committee met on March 20 and voted to hold the Second International Eugenics Congress in New York City, September 22 to September 28, 1921, inclusive. The invitation of the American Museum of Natural History to hold the meetings of the Congress was gratefully accepted. Dr. Alexander Graham Bell was elected honorary president and Dr. Henry F. Osborn, president. Madison Grant is treasurer and Mrs. Sybil Gotto, secretary of the Eugenics Education Society, in view of her activity in organizing the First Eugenics Congress, was named as honorary secretary of the Second Eugenics Congress. The nucleus of a general committee for the Second International Congress was elected. This general committee is to meet in New York on Saturday, April 10. To this general committee are entrusted the details of organizing the congress, of arranging the program of the meeting, of providing for the entertainment of guests and the raising the necessary funds. The national consultative eugenics bodies in the various allied and associated countries will be informed of the action of the eugenics committee of the National Research Council and invited to send representatives. A general invitation will be sent to universities in

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General Electric Company, for his work on the electric propulsion of ships.

DR. E. W. BROWN, professor of mathematics in Yale University, received the Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, at a meeting in San Francisco on March 26.

THE University of Dublin has conferred the degree of doctor of science on Professor R. A. Millikan, of the University of Chicago.

DR. J. M. T. FINNEY, Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. Charles H. Mayo, Rochester, Minn., have been elected honorary fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons. It is hoped that they may be able to attend the meeting of the council in July for the presentation of diplomas.

SIR JAMES DEWAR has been elected a corresponding member of the French Academy of Sciences in the section of general physics in succession to the late Professor P. Blaserna.

PROFESSOR HORACE LAMB, Sir Thomas L. Heath, Professor W. H. Bragg and Dr. Henry Head have been elected honorary fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge.

DR. BRADFORD KNAPP, chief of extension work in the South, States Relations Service, U. S. Department of Agriculture, since 1911, has been appointed dean of the college of agriculture, of the University of Arkansas and director of the experimental station, and chief of the department of rural economics. Martin Nelson has been appointed vice-dean and vice-director and chief of the department of agronomy.

DR. J. STANLEY GARDINER, F.R.S., professor of zoology in the University of Cambridge, has, at the request of the deputy minister of fisheries, undertaken temporarily the direction of

the late Sir William Osler, in which he emphasizes the genial cosmopolitan spirit of this great physician. It appears that Osler was the first physician to inquire into the rumors concerning the economic condition of the Viennese population after the war and the first to take measures for the relief of the starving Viennese.

DR. JAMES GAYLEY, past president of the Institute of Mining Engineers, has died at the age of sixty-five years.

PROFESSOR ERNEST M. JORDAN, a member of the faculty of the Boston University Medical School since 1913, and a specialist in nervous diseases, died on March 15.

PROFESSOR CHARLES LAPWORTH, for many years professor of geology and physiography in the University of Birmingham, died on March 13 at the age of seventy-seven years.

DR. PIER ANDREA SACCARDO, emeritus professor of botany in the Royal University of Padua, and long director of the Botanical Garden of that city, has died at the age of seventy-five years.

WORD has been received of the death on December 13 last, of Professor Woldemar Voigt, the eminent mathematical physicist of the University of Göttingen, at the age of sixty-nine years. Being a man of broad mind with friends in all the warring countries, he suffered keenly throughout the war and this is said to have aggravated the heart trouble which was the immediate cause of his death. His writings include papers and books in many fields of physics, but chiefly in magnetooptics and crystal physics.

THE Carnegie Corporation has given to the American College of Surgeons $75,000 to be used for hospital standardization. The present gift is the second which the corporation has made to the college. In 1916 it gave $30,000, making a total now of $105,000 for hospital standardization. This amount is supplemented by funds of the college.

THE Institute of Research in Animal Nutrition at Aberdeen has received a gift of £10,000 from Mr. J. Q. Rowett. The amount

required from public sources for the establishment of the institution is £25,000.

THE Biological Laboratory of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences will hold its thirty-first session during July and August. Investigators can find accommodation at any time during the summer. The usual courses are offered in field zoology by Drs. Walter, Kornhauser and Parshley, in comparative anatomy by Dr. Pratt, systematic and field botany by Drs. Harshberger and Stiteler and beginning advanced work under the direction of the various instructors. The Eugenics Record Office, Carnegie Institution of Washington, takes advantage of the arrangements for boarding students at Cold Spring Harbor to give its training course for field workers in eugenics at the same time with the session of the Biological Laboratory (Drs. Davenport and Laughlin.) The announcement for 1920 can be secured by addressing the Biological Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, L. I.

DURING the period of the Christmas meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, an anthropological society was organized in St. Louis, largely under the stimulation of Dr. Aleš Hrdlička who visited the city at that time. The object of the society as stated in the constitution is the promotion of research in all branches of anthropology. The officers are: president, Professor R. J. Terry; vice-president, Dr. H. M. Whelpley; secretary-treasurer, Dr. C. H. Danforth, councilors, Drs. W. W. Graves, Albert Kuntz, R. Walter Mills, Sherwood Moore, Daniel M. Schoemaker and Mr. J. Max Wulfing. Two regular meeting have been held. At the first Dr. R. Walter Mills presented a paper on "Variation in Physicial Type and Visceral Function," and at the second Dr. H. M. Whelpley spoke on "Notched Indian Hoes, The Most Specialized of Indian Agricultural Implements."

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$71,000 from the state for maintenance, as compared with $49,500 last year. An additional appropriation of $60,000 was made for a physiology building and equipment.

THE proposal to admit women to be fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh

after examination, on the same conditions and with the same privileges as men, has been accepted.

DR. H. MONMOUTH SMITH, who is at present assistant director of the Carnegie Nutrition Laboratory in Boston, and who was formerly connected with Syracuse University, has been appointed a professor of inorganic chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. PROFESSOR FRANK C. WHITMORE, of the University of Minnesota, has succeeded Professor Harry A. Curtis as professor of organic chemistry in Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.

MR. J. D. BLACK has been appointed professor and chief of the division of agricultural economics at the University of Minnesota, in the place of W. W. Cumberland, whose leave of absence for service in Turkey as financial and economic adviser to the commission to negoti

criticism of Professor McAdie is intended, nor any desire on his part to misstate a fact is in any sense suspected.

Unauthorized statements are made in the press, the results of which are far reaching.

One of these is the innocent acceptance of them by Professor McAdie as being correct and the corresponding reappearance of the incorrect values in the above mentioned article.

On September 18, 1919, Roland Rohlfs, the test pilot of the Curtiss Engineering Corporation, made an altitude flight, obeying in every particular the official rules laid down for such contests. It should be stated here that the compliance with these rules is a serious handicap and in justice the same conditions should be observed by all competitors.

The flight was made in a Curtiss triplane fitted with a K-12 motor without supercharger and without the use of special fuel. The result obtained from the barograph chart by the Bureau of Standards after all corrections for

instrumental errors had been made was 34,910 feet, this value being, however, uncor rected for the average temperature of the air column. The instrumental corrections to the barograph readings were determined by sub

been continued for another year.

MR. A. AMOS, of Downing College, has been appointed lecturer in agriculture in Cambridge University.

DR. HUGO FUCHS, professor of anatomy at the University of Königsberg, has been transferred to the University of Göttingen, succeeding Professor Merkel.

of pressure and temperature in the laboratory as those encountered during the actual flight.

The value of 34,910 feet, although uncorrected for air temperatures was homologated, this being strictly according to the 1919 rules and was of interest for comparison with the French altitude flight of Jean Casale made June 14, 1919, which was calculated by the same method.

It is well known that this way of expressing results, that is, without air temperature corrections, is not only unsatisfactory and unfair but also scientifically incorrect and the Curtiss Company has always admitted that the true (tape line) altitude reached by Rohlfs became 32,450 feet when the air temperature correction, also made by the Bureau of Standards, was applied. There is thus a large but proper reduction in the indicated altitude. This correction is the larger the colder the air encountered in the flight.

It may be noted here that the undersigned was at least partially instrumental in awakening interest in the unsatisfactory official rules, the result being that both the Bureau of Standards and the homologating body sent representatives to Europe with a view of putting the rules on a fairer and more scientific basis.

The outcome is that the rules are greatly improved but are still open to proper criticism and objection. It is necessary, however, for all either to accept the rulings of the official body or, if they are to be ignored, for all to work on the same unbiased scientific basis and abide by the decisions of an authoritative and independent scientific laboratory such, for example, as the Bureau of Standards at Washington.

In order to bring out clearly an important point in this matter, that is, the importance of the air temperature correction, assume that two identical perfect barographs with no instrumental errors are taken up, one in the summer time and the other in winter, to such an altitude that both read say 8 inches of mercury as the minimum pressure. Assume also that the average temperature of the air is in the first case -10° C. and in the second -30° C. which values correspond closely to actual observed figures.

The true altitudes corresponding to this pressure are in the first case 33,475 feet and in the second 30,929 feet, although the altitude uncorrected for air temperature is the same for both, i. e., 36,020 feet. These figures are obtained from Circular No. 3 of the Aeronautic Instruments Division of the Bureau of Standards and are within per cent of the true values. The correction for the first case is -2,545 feet and is twice as much for the second, or 5,091 feet. The value 36,020 feet assumes that the air is at a uniform temperature of -10° C throughout. As stated above Rohlfs' record reduced in this manner by the Bureau of Standards gave a true altitude of 32,450 feet.

We now quote from the Air Service News Letter No. 11, issued by the Information Group, Air Service, of March 9, 1920.

The purpose of this letter is to keep the personnel of the Air Service both in Washington and in the field informed as to the activities of the Air Service in general and for release to the public press. At an indicated altitude of 36,000 feet

the temperature at his greatest altitude was 67 degrees below zero F. . . . The preliminary calibration of the barograph indicates that the airplane reached a pressure of eight inches of mercury which corresponds approximately to 36,000 feet on the Bureau of Standards altitude chart.

In commenting on this letter we note that it does not claim that a record was obtained. We ask then by whose authority a record is granted and published as such. We note also that approximately 36,000 feet corresponds almost exactly to the stated minimum pressure of eight inches of mercury, which shows that this value has not been corrected for air column temperature. The ground temperature is not stated but the Weather Bureau kindly furnished us with the values, max. +18° F., min. 13° F. for Dayton, Ohio, February 26, 1920. Using the most favorable value, i. e., +18° F., for the McCook Field flight, the average is 31.4° C., which gives a correction, using the Bureau of Standards tables of -5,269 feet and hence the true altitude is not 36,020 feet (as published) but is 30,751 feet.

This altitude does not reach that of Rohlfs by 1,700 feet, figured on the same basis, and as according to the rules for beating a record it should surpass it by 328 feet (100 meters) it lacks 2,027 feet to beat Rohlfs' record.

It is not surprising then that the Curtiss Company wished to protest the validity of this new record. The premature announce ment in the press that Major Schroeder has beaten all altitude records with a flight to 36,020 feet, beating the previous one held by Rohlfs, is neither justified by the figures, nor authorized by the Army bulletin nor fair to the Curtiss Company's machine and motor nor just to its pilot, Mr. Rohlfs. Slightly modified results were given personally to the writer at a meeting which he had with Major Schroeder, showing an uncorrected altitude of 36,118 feet and a true altitude of 30,835 feet.