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teaching of the origin and cause of disease and its prevention and for the study and teaching of dietetics.

HOWARD UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE, Washington, has been promised $250,000 by the General Education Board, provided the medical school succeeds in raising the rest of a total sum of $500,000.

THE trustees of the University of Southern California, on April 13, decided to suspend temporarily the medical department because of inadequate endowment with which to maintain it.

DR. CORNELIUS BETTEN, Secretary of the State College of Agriculture at Cornell University, has been appointed vice-dean of the college.

CURT ROSENOw (Ph.D., Chicago, 1917), of the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute, Chicago, has accepted an assistant professorship in psychology at the University of Kansas.

DR. A. RICHARDS, professor of zoology at Wabash College, has been appointed to a professorship of zoology in the University of Oklahoma, where he will be head of the department.

DR. FRED HOFFMANN RHODES has been appointed professor of industrial chemistry and will begin his work in the autumn at Cornell University.

GENERAL SIR ARTHUR CURRIE has accepted the position of principal of McGill University in succession to Sir Auckland Geddes, who resigned to become British Ambassador at Washington.

DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE FORMULÆ GIVING THE DAY OF THE WEEK OF ANY DATE

To officials who are required to fix the dates of events beyond the end of the current year and to historians who may desire to know the day of the week of events in past years, for which calendars are not ordinarily available, the formulæ given below may be of considerable interest.

When the days of the week are numbered thus:

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the day of the week of any date in the Gregorian (New Style) calendar is the remainder, R, in the division

(Y+3C+F+L+M+D) /7=Q+R/7,

in which the symbols used have the following meanings:

Q is the integral part and R the remainder obtained in the division indicated in the first member of the equation.

Y is the year in which the date occurs.

C is the number formed by striking out the last two digits of the year. Thus, for dates in the year 1920, C=19.

F is the number of preceding leap days occuring in centennial years. These occur in the years 400, 800, 1200, 1600, etc. Thus, for dates between

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ORIGIN OF THE SUPPOSED HUMAN FOOTPRINTS OF CARSON CITY, NEVADA DURING the summer of 1919 the writer found occasion to visit Carson City, Nevada, and, through courtesy of members of the prison staff at the Nevada State Penitentiary, was enabled to examine a number of specimens of fossil mammals collected in the prison yard during past quarrying operations for building stone. In the material preserved in the collections were fragments of a skull and a cervical vertebra belonging to a ground sloth. Warden R. B. Henrichs, of the Nevada prison, was kind enough to loan the remains recovered during the excavations to the department of paleontology, University of California, and further study indicates that the ground sloth specimens pertain to an individual of the genus Mylodon.

Many years ago the discovery of footprints, bearing a superficial resemblance to imprints made by a human foot, in a shale stratum exposed in the yard of the penitentiary at Carson City, gave rise to the view that the existence of primeval man in Nevada was definitely established a view that has taken a particularly tenacious hold. The possibility that the footprints were in reality those of a ground sloth, presumably of a form related to the South American Mylodon, was, however, ad

vocated by Joseph Le Conte, O. C. Marsh and others. In 1917, the writers contrasted the outline of the so-called human footprints with that of a complete hind foot of Mylodon harlani reconstructed from remains of this species secured in the asphalt deposits at Rancho La Brea. The great resemblance which the articulated foot bore to the impressions, both in outline and in size, seemed certain proof that the latter were left by Mylodon.

The actual occurrence of osseous remains of Mylodon in the Pleistocene deposits at Carson City, Nevada, removes still farther the possibility that the Carson footprints are to be attributed to a member of the Hominidæ and materially substantiates the suggestions of Le Conte and Marsh. Further, the presence of material referable to a mylodont sloth gives a high degree of probability to the contention that the footprints were made by Mylodon rather than by some other quadruped.

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

CHESTER STOCK

SCIENTIFIC PHOTOGRAPHY TO THE EDITOR OF SCIENCE: The Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain is holding its sixty-fifth annual exhibition in September and October of this year. This is the most representative exhibition of photographic work in the world, and the section sent by American scientific men heretofore has sufficiently demonstrated the place held by this country in applied photography. It is very desirable that American scientific photography should be equally well represented in 1920, and, in order to enable this to be done with as little difficulty as possible, I have arranged to collect and forward American work in

tended for the scientific section.

This work should consist of prints showing the use of photography for scientific purposes and its application to spectroscopy, astronomy,

1 Le Conte, J., Proc. Calif. Acad. Sci., 10 pp., August 27, 1882.

2 Marsh, O. C., Amer. Jour. Sci., Ser. 3, Vol. 26, pp. 139-140, 1883.

Stock, C., Univ. Calif. Publ. Bull. Dept. Geol., Vol. 10, pp. 284–285, 1917.

radiography, biology, etc. Photographs should reach me not later than Thursday, July 1. They should be mounted but not framed.

I should be glad if any worker who is able to send photographs will communicate with me as soon as possible so that I might arrange for the receiving and entry of the exhibit. A. J. NEWTON

EASTMAN KODAK COMPANY,
ROCHESTER, N. Y.,

QUOTATIONS

COMPETITION IN RESEARCH

THE resignation of Professor Ernest Fox Nichols from the department of physics at Yale University in order to continue his re search work upon a larger scale in the Nela Research Laboratories of the National Lamp Works at Cleveland, offers a new impression of the possible utilization of professional talent. Professor Nichols resigned the presidency of Dartmouth College to come to Yale where there was a greater promise of his continuing his scientific work, and now leaves Yale to enter the employ of a private corporation whose opportunities for scientific work on a much enlarged scale are even greater.

The loss to Yale of the fine influence of Dr. Nichols' personality is obvious. That is something to be deeply regretted but, taking him as a type of trained scientists, whether the withdrawal of such men from the universities of the country and their employment by large corporations whose interest in scientific research is more direct is to the common disadvantage may seriously be questioned. The limitations which are necessarily set upon work of this character even in the best equipped of university laboratories disappear in corporations where no limitations are set when the importance of the end sought is realized. In the case of Dr. Nichols the work which he wishes to accomplish has such great importance in its actual accomplishment that his transfer must be considered as of greater general advantage because it may be accomplished the earlier under private rather than under university encouragement. The theoretical disadvantage which results to the

university is in all likelihood offset by the practical advantage to be commonly gained.

Speculation is here invited as to what the effect will be upon the teaching force of a university if the labor of research work of a scientific character is to be taken over by private corporations. We might imagine affirmative and the negative coming to blows over this thesis at least until the lessons of experience have been written into the record. -The New Haven Journal-Courier.

A NEW STATISTICAL JOURNAL THERE has recently been founded a new international statistical journal called Metron. It is published at Padua, Italy, at a subscription price of 40 lire per year. The printer, where subscriptions should be sent, is the Tipografia Industrie grafiche Italiane, Via Viscovado, Padova, Italy. The journal will appear quarterly, each number comprising 150 to 200 pages.

The founder and chief editor of Metron is Professor Corrado Gini, of the University of Padua. The fact that so brilliant and sound a worker as Professor Gini is to be in charge at once guarantees the scientific standing of the journal in the statistical field. An international editorial board has been formed, which now includes the following persons: Professor A. Andreadès, de science des finances a l'Université de Athenes (Greece),

Professor A. E. Bunge, directeur de la Statistique de la Republique Argentine, Buenos Ayres (Argentine),

Dr. F. P. Cantelli, actuaire au Ministere du Tresor, Rome (Italy),

Dr. L. V. Furlan, libre docent de statistique a l'Université de Bâle (Switzerland),

Dr. M. Greenwood, reader of medical statistics in the University of London; statistician of the Lister Institute, London (England),

Dr. A. Julin, directeur de la Statistique economique de la Belgique Ministère de l'Industrie et du Travail, Bruxelles (Belgium),

Dr. G. H. Knibbs, directeur de la Statistique de la confederation australienne, Melbourne (Aus

tralia),

Ing. L. March, directeur de la Statistique générale de la France, Paris (France),

Dr. Raymond Pearl, professor of biometry and vital statistics, School of Hygiene and Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland (United States).

The general editorial program may be set forth as follows:

One of the great difficulties in connection with modern statistics is that of becoming acquainted with the relevant literature; this is in fact derived from the work of very different schools and published in a variety of journals and transactions. It is necessary to consult mathematical, astronomical, technical, physical, chemical, actuarial, economic and financial, psychological, historical, legal, physiological and pathological, hygienic and medical, biological, genetic and eugenic and even purely zoological, botanical and agricultural publications.

It is true that generally such papers are merely applications of interest to specialists in the particular branch of knowledge. But this is not always the case and sometimes methods of general interest to all statisticians are to be found, or, again, we find in particular connections methodological problems enunciated and solved, the scope of hypotheses contained in certain analyses brought to light, the approximation of theoretical conclusions verified and advances made by different routes; progress of interest in all branches of statistics. Still more frequently the results of particular statistical investigations, even when they do not interest all statisticians, are of importance to those engaged in similar inquiries: thus results obtained in the field of anthropology, zoology, genetics or eugenics, hygiene, medicine, pathology, life insurance, political economy or history may be of great interest to the student of demography.

Whoever, desiring to enlarge the boundaries of statistical science as far as possible, is forced to consult the heterogeneous literature containing statistical papers must be aware of the inconvenience resulting from lack of coordination.

Valuable statistical data, carefully collected, scrupulously criticized, remain of no scientific value owing to their presentation and analysis

by those unskilled in modern methods. Typographical difficulties offer obstacles to the publication of the original data in their integrity so that competent statisticians are unable to harvest the grain which the original author had not the skill to reap. Sometimes we meet with tedious, inconclusive, or even fallacious arguments where quite an elementary knowledge of statistical methods would have led to a simple and exact conclusion. Sometimes indeed we merely encounter-and this is the smallest evil-the rediscovery of an established truth or the reinvention of a familiar method, but how often do we not feel in reading the work of a writer, sagacious and profound in his own subject, that he would have greatly profited by a knowledge of other statistics published in journals quite disconnected from his specialty!

Within the limits appropriate to a review, Metron will endeavor to take the first step towards remedying these defects. It is addressed to those who, cultivating different soils with various implements, nevertheless are busied with statistics; that the results of their labors may become of general utility to science. It is hoped that Metron may be a bond of union between statistical workers in different branches, perhaps at length an organ of scientific coordination.

With this object, Metron will be catholic; its pages will be open to those who employ no methods beyond the scope of ordinary culti vated men as well as to those who delight in the most refined and subtle developments of mathematical science. There is indeed scope for both schools. Some problems can be solved by the older methods now part of the intellectual stock of all educated persons, others must be investigated with the help of more recondite procedures. Between these extremes are insensible gradations and both orders of inquiry interest science in general and statistical science in particular. It is hoped that both will find in Metron an appropriate treatment.

It can not of course be denied that, the simpler the methods employed, the easier is

the process of mutual enlightenment which Metron is intended to facilitate, since the number of readers capable of profiting by the exposition will be larger. The editors hope therefore that questions will be dealt with as their nature permits. But this is merely the expression of a desire not a condition of publication. The editors do not desire to put any compulsion upon contributors or to gainsay those who will forego a numerous audience for the satisfaction of expressing their ideas in the most concise and accurate style.

The sole necessary condition of approval for publication is that papers shall make a contribution to the theory or practise of statistics of original value and likely to interest a greater or smaller number of students of statistics. Contributions will be inserted as articles or notes in accordance with the importance of the subject matter. Frequently statistical researches lead to fragmentary results, insufficient to form the subject of a paper or even a note, but still offering something of scientific interest or perhaps filling a lacuna in other investigations. Such results will be published under a special heading.

In addition to a bibliography of publications received, each number of the review will contain one or more analyses of statistical works or of results perhaps taken from works not exclusively statistical in character. Each such analysis will deal with a particular branch of statistics, e. g., demographic, sanitary, anthropometric or economic statistics. There will also be an analysis of sources and of mathematical work bearing upon statistics (calculus of probabilities, interpolation, etc.).

Metron is an international review. As it is published in Italy and consequently a majority of the editorial staff are Italians, no doubt the Italian language will at first preponderate in its pages. But the other great international languages, French, English and German, are admitted to its pages on terms of complete equality. It rests with contributors from other countries to increase their share in its pages and to cause to dis

appear any such difference. It is the wish of the editors that the participation of nonItalian writers shall become larger and larger. It is believed that many American workers, in the fields of biology, agriculture, and genetics particularly, as well as statisticians in the narrower sense, will be interested in this new journal and wish to have it in their libraries, as well as to use it as a medium of publication.

RAYMOND PEARL

SPECIAL ARTICLES

FOOT-ROT OF WHEAT

EARLY last spring attention was called to the occurrence of a foot-rot of wheat in Madison Co., Illinois. Since that time I have made a study of the disease assisted at first by Mrs. E. Young True, employed by the Illinois Natural History Survey, and later by Mr. George H. Dungan, of the Illinois Agricultural Experiment Station.

From the first it appeared probable that a certain fungus was the cause of the disease and as early as last June our notes show that this fungus was universally present and that inoculations with pure cultures gave positive results. The evidence is now so clear and conclusive that I venture to present the following facts as fully established.

1. This fungus was isolated by transfer to agar plates from diseased lesions in practically every case where the attempt was made, even when superficial leafy coverings were stripped away and the remaining surfaces disinfected with mercuric chlorid. In all several hundred such isolations were made. Reports from pathologists in other states indicate similar findings there.

2. No other species of fungus or parasite of any kind, was constantly present, or present in any large percentage of cases.

3. The diseased lesions were always penetrated and largely occupied by a fungous mycelium that agrees in general character with the fungus in question.

4. The diseased wheat stems when placed in conditions of suitable humidity become covered with spores of the fungus.

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