the Bordin prize in mathematics to Dr. S. Lefschetz, assistant professor of mathematics in the University of Kansas, and of the Lalande prize in astronomy to Dr. V. M. Slipher, director of the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff.

FORMER assistants of Dr. Edwin R. Le Count, professor of pathology in Rush Medical College, tendered him a banquet on December 17 and presented him with two paintings as a recognition of esteem and gratitude. The presentation address was made by Dr. Frank R. Nuzum, Janesville, Wis., who presided. Addresses were also made by Drs. Herman A. Brennecke, Aurora; George E. Clements, Crawfordsville, Ind.; William H. Burmeister, George H. Coleman, Arthur H. Curtis, Morris Fishbein, Edward H. Hatton and James P. Simonds, Chicago.

SURGEON GENERAL SIR ALFRED KEOGH and Sir Almroth E. Wright have had the honorary degree of doctor of science conferred on them by the University of Leeds.

SIR DONALD MACALLISTER, superintendent of the British Medical Council, has been invested by President Poincaré, with the cross of the commander of the Legion of Honor.

DR. A. S. LOEVENHART, professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Wisconsin, was elected president of the Pharmacological Society at the annual meeting

held in Cleveland last week.

MR. ELMER H. FINCH, geologist of the U. S. Geological Survey, has recently been appointed chairman of the Mineral Division Land Classification Branch, U. S. Geological Survey, succeeding Mr. A. R. Schultz, resigned.

DR. FOREST B. H. BROWN, research fellow at Yale University, has been appointed botanist on the staff of the Bishop Museum at Honolulu. Dr. Elizabeth Wuist Brown has been appointed research associate in cryptogamic botany in the same institution.

DR. P. G. AGNEW, physicist in the Electrical Division of the Bureau of Standards, has resigned to become secretary of the American Engineering Standards Committee, with head

quarters at the Engineering Building, 29 West 39th Street, New York City.

DR. ARTHUR LACHMAN, a well-known chemist of San Francisco, formerly professor in the University of Oregon, was last seen on the street at noon on December 11, 1919. Since then his family and friends have been unable to obtain any clue or any trace of his whereabouts. It seems probable that he had an attack of amnesia with loss of identity and wandered away. Dr. Lachman is known to many readers of SCIENCE. Any one having information in regard to him is requested to communicate with his family or with Dr. Felix Langfeld, 272 Post St., San Francisco, California.

LANCASTER D. BURLING, invertebrate paleontologist of the Geological Survey of Canada, has accepted the position of geologist with S. Pearsons and Sons, Limited, of London, England. His first assignment is to work in the old fields of Trinidad, for which he will leave upon the first available sailing.

CAPTAIN W. E. BROPHY, C.E. (Columbia, '15), formerly of the Barrett Company and later of the Chemical Warfare Service, U. S. A., has joined the engineering staff of Arthur D. Little, Inc., at Cambridge, Mass. In the early part of the war, Captain Brophy had charge of the construction and operation of the plant at Astoria, Long Island, for the manufacture of high absorbent carbon for use in gas masks and later he designed, constructed and operated an additional unit for the purpose at San Francisco.

DR. HIDEYO NOGUCHI, of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, has landed at the port of Progreso from which he will proceed to Merida in order to carry on confirmatory studies of his discovery of L. icteroides and to try on a larger scale the curative properties of the specific serum prepared by him.

MR. N. H. DARTON, geologist of the U. S. Geological Survey, will spend two months in the Dominican Republic early in 1920 to investigate oil conditions for a New York company.

Ar the thirty-sixth Annual Convention of the Association of Official Agricultural Chemists held at Washington beginning on November 17 the following officers were appointed for the ensuing year: President H. C. Lythgoe, State Department of Health, Boston, Mass.; Vice-president, W. F. Hand, Agricultural College, Agricultural College, Miss.; Secretary-Treasurer, C. L. Alsberg, Bureau of Chemistry Department of Agriculture, Washington, D. C. Additional members of the Executive Committee are C. H. Jones, University of Vermont, Burlington, Vt., and W. W. Skinner, Bureau of Chemistry, Washington, D. C.

Ar the annual meeting of the Washington Academy of Sciences, held on January 13, Dr. F. L. Ransome, delivered the address of the retiring president on "The Functions and Ideals of a National Geological Survey."

The sixth lecture of the series of The Harvey Society will be by Dr. Carl Voegtlin, professor of pharmacology, United States Public Health Service, on "Recent Work on Pellagra" at the New York Academy of Medicine on January 24 at 830.

DR. GEORGE MACLOSKIE, professor emeritus of biology of Princeton University, died at Princeton, on December 4 in his eighty-fifth year.

THE death is announced of Professor A. Ricco, director of the Observatory of Catania and vice-president of the International Astronomical Union.

THE death is announced of Professor E. H. Bruns the director of the University Observatory at Leipzig.

UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL
NEWS

AN anonymous gift of $1,000,000 has been offered to Throop College of Technology, at Pasadena, California, conditional upon an equal amount being raised from other sources.

MR. GUSTAVUS F. SWIFT, of Chicago, has added $8,000 to the previous endowment of the Gustavus F. Swift Fellowship of the University of Chicago, making the income from that

fellowship amount to $925. This fellowship is awarded for the encouragement of research, and is given only to a student who has already proved his capacity for investigation.

DR. WILLIAM H. WALKER, head of the Research Library of Applied Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been appointed head of the new division of industrial cooperation and research.

DR. M. G. SEELIG, has accepted the position of professor of clinical surgery, at the School of Medicine of Washington University at St. Louis, Mo.

DR. WALTER H. EDDY, of Teachers College, Columbia University, associate in physiological chemistry, has been appointed assistant professor of physiological chemistry. Dr. Eddy has recently returned from France, where he served fifteen months with the A. E. F., as major in the Sanitary Corps.

HAROLD S. PALMER, instructor in geology in Trinity College, Hartford, Conn., leaves on February 1 for Honolulu to take charge of the department of geology in the University of Hawaii.

SIR RICHARD GLAZEBROOK, who recently returned from the directorship of the British National Physical Laboratory, has been appointed to the Zaharoff chair of aviation tenable at the Imperial College of Science and Technology, founded by Sir Basil Zaharoff, who gave to the university the sum of £25,000 for this purpose.

DR. G. M. ROBERTSON has been appointed to a professorship of psychiatry and Dr. J. H. Ashworth to a professorship of zoology in the University of Edinburgh.

DR. FRITZ PANETH, director of the chemical department of the German technical high schools at Prague, has been appointed professor of chemistry at the University of Hamburg.

DISCUSSION AND CORRESPONDENCE MUSICAL SANDS

THE article on "Singing sands of Lake Michigan" by W. D. Richardson, in SCIENCE,

November 28, gives suggestion for the present writing.

The phenomenon of sonorous sands was very thoroughly studied in the years 18821889 by Dr. H. Carrington Bolton and Dr. Alexis A. Julien, both of New York City. The very interesting results of their enthusiastic research were published in several short articles in the Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and in the Transactions of the New York Academy of Sciences. A brief review of their work may be worth the space.

The preliminary paper was read at the Minneapolis meeting of the Association, 1883, describing their study of the musical sands at Manchester, Mass., and on the island of Eigg in the Hebrides; with reference to many other localities. This paper is printed in the Proceedings, volume 32, pages 251-252.

After a year of extensive travel and study of the phenomenon, and with voluminous correspondence, a second paper was read at the Philadelphia meeting, 1884, and printed in abstract in volume 33 of the Proceedings, pages 408-415. In this article the sounds emitted by the sands are indicated by musical notation. Some search of old writings had shown that allusions to the phenomenon were found in the literature of the past one thousand years; and that famous localities, like Jebel Nagous, had been visited by many travelers. A brief chronology of the study and writings from the sixteenth century was included.

In Volume 3 of the New York Academy Transactions, pages 72-76 and 97-99, for 1884, Dr. Bolton described the phenomenon on the Baltic coast, and in the sand-hill of Arabia and Afghanistan, especially at Jabel Nakous, or "Mountain of the Bell" on the Gulf of Suez. A paragraph at the close of that article is worth quoting.

The localities in which sonorous sand is found may be divided into three classes: first, sea- and fresh-water beaches, where all the sand possesses the sound-producing quality permanently, as at Eigg, Manchester, Plattsburg, etc.; secondly, seabeaches where small tracts of the sand possess

acoustic properties transiently, as along the Atlantic coast, in New Jersey, North Carolina, and on the Baltic; thirdly, sand-hills in the interior or otherwise, whose steep slopes give rise to acoustic phenomena of great magnitude, as at Kauai, in Nevada, and at Jebel Nakous and Reg Ruwan.

Volume 8 of the Academy Transactions, 1888, pages 9-10, prints a letter giving the conclusion of the authors as to the cause of the sounds. And on pages 181-184 is given a very interesting letter of Dr. Bolton, from Egypt, describing his visit to Jabel Nagous. In Volume 9, 1889-1890, pages 21-25, Dr. Bolton gives a fuller account of his visit to Arabia Petraea, and also a summary of the conclusions reached by Dr. Julien and himself, as follows:

Dr. Julien and I believe that the true cause of sonorousness in the sands of singing beaches and of deserts is connected with thin pellicles or films of air, or of gases thence derived, deposited and condensed upon the surface of the sand-grains during gradual evaporation after wetting by seas and lakes or by rains. By virtue of these films, the sand-grains become separated by elastic cushions of condensed gases, capable of considerable vibration, and whose thickness we have approximately determined. The extent of the vibration and the volume and pitch of the sound thereby produced, after any quick disturbance of the sand, we also find to be largely dependent upon the forms, structures and surfaces of the sand-grains, and especially upon their purity or freedom from fine silt or dust.

In Volume 8, page 10, of the New York Academy Transactions, is described the opening by Dr. Bolton of two packages of sea sand collected at Rockaway Beach four and five years previous, and which gave distinct high notes when quickly rubbed or shaken.

The present writer has a large bottle of the Rockaway Beach sand, collected with Dr. Bolton on that summer day in 1884, when the beach was singing clearly. The bottle has been closed with a cork stopper, but was opened, for a minute, a few years ago for removing a sample. The bulk of the sand has been in the bottle over thirty-five years. This day, December 2, it has been poured into a stocking, and when quickly compressed has

MORE ON SINGING SANDS

TO THE EDITOR OF SCIENCE: The comment of Mr. Richardson in a recent number of SCIENCE (November 28, 1919) on the singing sands of Lake Michigan, calls to mind some observations made a number of years ago that should be considered in connection with the hypothesis he advances to explain the singing quality of the sand.

These sands were encountered by us in connection with the soil survey of Allegan, county, Michigan. The singing quality was particularly well developed within four to six rods of the lake shore. We collected a sample of several hundred pounds which was forwarded to the Bureau of Soils at Washington. After the material was in the sack on the

beach, the singing quality could be developed by merely running the fingers through the sands.

The material was shipped by freight and stored in the basement of the building then occupied by the bureau. Some months later the material was looked up and examined. It had completely lost its singing quality. Of course it had dried out. There was no leaching and presumably no change in chemical composition.

It has seemed to me that this quality is associated with two primary factors namely: (a) Very well rounded and smooth particles, (b) A particular amount and condition of moisture. Neither a very wet nor a very dry condition suffices. We have noticed a slight tendency to this singing quality in walking over the sand dunes in that section of Michigan, if the foot is jammed into the sand so as to get below the very dry surface layer and into contact with the somewhat moist sand immediately below.

I am inclined to think the percentage of

moisture when coupled with the smooth, rounded particles is the chief factor in developing singing sand. That per cent. is somewhere in the region of the lento-capillary point or the margin between hygroscopic and free capillary moisture where, due to surface attraction of the sand particle, film movement is very sluggish. It might be defined as the first stage of film solidification.

ELMER O. FIPPIN

THE INITIAL COURSE IN BIOLOGY

THE botanists are more and more loudly proclaiming their academic rights as against the zoologists. In most American universities now there is a course in general biology, and it is given, often entirely, by the department of zoology. It is a very large course, running sometimes to several hundred students a year. It involves a large staff, assistant professors, instructors and assistants, and thus provides places for graduate students without fellowships. Sometimes it carries more patronage than all the other courses in zoology, botany and related subjects combined.

Naturally the botanists feel aggrieved, when they compare the few students who reach their courses, and the inadequacy of the assistantships for their support in botany, with the opulent conditions in the department of zoology.

Professor George E. Nichols has presented recently in SCIENCE data bearing on this matter, and has discussed with fairness and ability the question of the initial course in biology. The initial course in any field is a difficult subject: whether it should be designed primarily as introductory for those who intend to go further, or as broadly educational for those who can not.

I take it as axiomatic that there is a certain minimum of information regarding matters biological which every educated man ought to have, and that this would consist particularly in some knowledge of the living human body. In fact, however, a large number of students are passing through our universities, many are even taking courses in biology, who fail

to obtain this minimum. I have known of engineering students who believed that the child is born through the umbilicus. I have sat opposite to an astronomer who refused to finish a glass of dark beer when he learned that in passing from his mouth and stomach to his kidneys the black and foaming fluid in the glass in front of him would have to go through his heart.

I am inclined to agree with Professor Nichols that general biology, as given by zoologists, is a course which is suited primarily to introduce students to animal morphology. But I doubt whether a course of this sort half as long, followed in February by an exactly similar course by botanists and introducing students equally to plant morphology, would be a better arrangement.

To my mind neither the zoologists nor the botanists should give the initial course, for if either or both have a hand in it, it will have the emphasis of a specialist. It will deal primarily with morphology plus a single function, that of reproduction.

The initial course should be a course in physiology. I may illustrate what I mean by speaking of zoologists as specialists, by quoting a distinction which I once heard a physicist give of the difference, as he saw it impartially, between zoology, or general biology, on the one hand, and physiology on the other. The former, he said, dealt with reproduction, the latter with all the other functions of life.

Now it is nice to know about ameba and frogs and the germination of seeds, but a lawyer, or an engineer, or a journalist, or even a doctor, can get along and yet know very little of such matters. If, however, he has no notion of his own insides-of what purpose his food serves, and of why he keeps breathing-well, he simply is not an educated man. Even for the student who is going far in zoology, or botany, I believe that the first great lesson should be in function, with structure included along with, but not emphasized above, chemical and physical basic facts.

The student should begin, therefore, in that field in which knowledge of function has been

most highly developed, a field which has the most powerful appeal for a human being, the field of "human," that is, mammalian, physiology as presented par excellence in that marvelous little book, Huxley's 66 Lessons in Elementary Physiology."

It seems at least some of us hope that today we are about to see a displacement of the academic college course in favor of a junior college, which would give such general subjects as the languages, American history, elementary chemistry and physics, and the one or two other things that every one should have; to be followed in the senior college by groups of increasingly specialized studies, each group aimed to a definite end. If this is to come, neither the course in general biology which Professor Nichols condemns, nor the combined elementary zoology-botany which he favors, is entitled to a place in the curriculum of the junior college.

But a brief course in human physiology is. At least, so thinks a physiologist.

YALE UNIVERSITY

YANDELL HENDERSON

SCIENTIFIC BOOKS

The Fauna of the Clyde Sea Area, being an attempt to record the zoological results obtained by the late Sir John Murray and his assistants on board S. Y. Medusa during the years 1884 to 1892. By JAMES CHUMLEY. Glasgow. Printed at the University Press. 1918. Pages vi+ 200, 1 map and 3 figures in text.

The former secretary of the Challenger Office and of the Lake Survey of Scotland, Mr. James Chumley, for many years associated with the late oceanographer and marine zoologist, Sir John Murray, has compiled the data regarding the latter's explorations of the Clyde Sea Area in a "Fauna" of that region. The work has been financed by the Carnegie trustees for the universities of Scotland. The work contains brief account of the Scottish biological stations at Granton and Millport, which respectively preceded and succeeded the explorations which are here summarized.