Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 60.djvu/196

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188
POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

present thousands of graduates and guests for whom a program lasting four days had been prepared. It included sermons, addresses, concerts, dedications and other exercises, leading to the commemorative exercises and the conferring of honorary degrees. The doctorate of laws was conferred on President Roosevelt and forty-six others, including among scientific men t. S. Billings, director of the New York Public Library; S. P. Langley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution; A. A. Michelson, professor of physics in the University of Chicago; William Osier, professor of medicine in the Johns Hopkins Medical School; Henry Smith Pritchett, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Ira Remsen, president of the Johns Hopkins University; Ogden Nicholas Rood, professor of physics in Columbia University, and Wilhelm Waldeyer, professor of anatomy in the University of Berlin.

About half of those who have become eminent for public services are college graduates, and Yale has certainly contributed its full share. The addresses by ex-President Oilman on Yale's Relation to Letters and Science, and by Professor Welch on Yale's Relation to Medicine, told of the important part taken by Yale's graduates in the scientific work of the country. Through the influence of the elder Silliman and the 'American Journal of Science,' established by him in 1818, and through the Sheffield Scientific School, Yale has always led in the sciences. Its faculty has included the two Sillimans, Olmsted, Loomis, Dana, Newton and Marsh, and among its alumni are many of those who have advanced science, including two of our leading inventors, Whitney and Morse. In education Yale has had great influence through the college presidents it has trained. As President Northrop pointed out in his address, one hundred and five graduates of Yale have been president of a college; and eighty-five different colleges have at some time had a Yale graduate for president. Yale furnished the first president of at least seventeen colleges—Princeton, Columbia, Dartmouth, Georgia, Williams, Hamilton, Kenyon, Illinois, Wabash, Missouri, Wisconsin, Beloit, California, Cornell, Western Reserve, Johns Hopkins and Chicago.

NOTES FROM THE BERLIN MEETING OF THE INTERNATIONAL ZOOLOGICAL CONGRESS.

The fifth meeting of the International Zoological Congress, which opened at Berlin on August 13, was attended by a very large number of zoologists and carried out an elaborate program in the course of which many highly interesting papers were read. The general sessions of the Congress were occupied by a series of addresses on general topics, among which may be mentioned those of Professor Yves Delage, of Paris on the fertilization of the egg, of Professor Grassi of Rome on the malaria organism, of Professor Poulton of Oxford on mimicry in insects, and the fine closing address on vitalism and mechanism by Professor Bütschli of Heidelberg. The number of detailed papers read in the various sections is too great to allow of their review here, but attention may be called to the interesting discussion on vitalism and mechanism that took place in the opening session of the section for experimental biology. The modern revival of interest in this time-honored problem, which occupied so large a field of discussion a half-century ago, has been largely due to the surprising results attained by experimental embryology during the last decade, especially those brought forward by Roux, Driesch and their many followers. The discussion at Berlin was opened by Driesch himself in a paper entitled 'Two New Proofs of Vitalism,' a title which indicates his own position on the general problem. Presenting in brief