Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 68.djvu/575

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THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE.
571

each additional year of service above twenty-five, the retiring allowance shall be increased by one per cent, of the active pay. (d) No retiring allowance shall exceed three thousand dollars.

6. Any person who has been for ten years the wife of a professor in actual service may receive during her widowhood one half of the allowance to which her husband would have been entitled.

7. In the preceding rules, years of leave of absence are to be counted as years of service but not exceeding one year in seven.

8. Teachers in the professional departments of universities whose principal work is outside the profession of teaching are not included.

9. The benefits of the foundation shall not be available to those whose active service ceased before April 16, 1905, the date of Mr. Carnegie's original letter to the trustees.

Institutions supported by the state were excluded by the terms of the original gift, but this provision has not been included in the act of incorporation and the question is under consideration. Institutions controlled by a religious organization, requiring sectarian tests, or teaching distinctly denominational tenets are excluded. The fact that a university such as Chicago is excluded, while a college whose spirit is essentially sectarian may be accepted, will at first work inequality, but the institutions will doubtless adjust themselves to the conditions. It would probably have been better if the denominational question had been ignored. A sectarian university is a contradiction in terms, as an institution can not be at the same time sectarian and a university, but under existing conditions a certain amount of denominational control seems to be innocent enough, especially in the case of small colleges. The definition of a college, based in part on the New York state ordinance, is as follows:

An institution to be ranked as a college, must have at least six professors giving their entire time to college and university work, a course of four full years in liberal arts and sciences, and should require for admission, not less than the usual four years of high school preparation, or its equivalent. A technical school, to be eligible, must have entrance and graduation requirements equivalent to those of the college, and must offer courses in pure and applied science of equivalent grade. To be ranked as a college an institution must have a productive endowment of not less than two hundred thousand dollars.

SCIENTIFIC ITEMS

We regret to record the deaths of Professor Israel Cook Russell, head of the Department of Geology at the University of Michigan, of Walter F. R. Weldon, F.R.S., Linacre professor of comparative anatomy at Oxford University, and of M. Pierre Curie, professor of physics at the Sorbonne, Paris, eminent with Mine. Curie for the discovery of radium.

Stanford University suffered severely by the recent earthquake, the loss being estimated at nearly $3,000,000. The buildings totally wrecked are the church, the memorial arch and the new library and gymnasium buildings. The buildings occupied by the laboratories and lecture rooms are not seriously damaged, and the university will be able to resume its work at the opening of the next term on August 23. The University of California suffered but little injury, either at Berkeley or San Francisco. Buildings owned by it in San Francisco, however, were destroyed and will seriously curtail its income, which will also suffer by the decrease of taxation in the state, unless this is made good by the legislature. The University of the Pacific suffered to the extent of about $60,000 with its buildings and collections. The building of the California Academy of Sciences was completely burned, but the type specimens and records were saved.

The New York legislature has passed a bill providing for a new building for the State Museum, State Library and the Education Department, to cost not more than four million dollars. The bill carries an appropriation for the acquisition of a site and the preparing of plans. The legislature also passed a bill to acquire Watkins Glen, one of the ravines running into the Finger Lakes of western New York, for a state reservation. This region was described