without having to so inform consumers. This is wrong.
It will remain for the courts to adjust the conflict between such statutes and the general food law. The law itself contains an omnibus joker, intended by its friends to exempt certain practises of adulteration or misbranding from the other strict but fair provisions relating to deception by artificial color and to misrepresentative labels. This joker appears in the last paragraph of Section 8, in the definition of the word 'blend.' But it can be safely conjectured that when the act goes before the supreme court this paragraph will not be construed out of harmony with the other strong provisions.
A committee consisting of H. W. Wiley, chairman, from the Department of Agriculture, S. N. D. North, from the Department of Commerce and Labor, and James L. Gerry, from the Treasury Department, has been appointed by the secretaries of these departments to formulate regulations for the enforcement of the law. This committee began hearings in New York City on September 7. The various manufacturing interests will be heard, and the state departments have been asked to cooperate in suggesting regulations. At Hartford, Conn., in July, the association of food-control officials amended its constitution so as to include the food-control officials of the federal government, and an arrangement was adopted whereby there will be coalition of the food standard committee from the state analysts and the food standard committee appointed by the United States Secretary of Agriculture. This action will influence uniformity between the state laws and the national law, and bring about close cooperation between the United States Department of Agriculture and the state officials in the enforcement of food and drug control legislation.
SCIENTIFIC ITEMS.
We regret to record the deaths of Dr. H. Marshall Ward, F.R.S., professor of botany at Cambridge University; of Dr. Alexander Herzen, professor of physiology at Lausanne, and of William Buck Dwight, professor of geology at Vassar College.
Dr. A. A. Michelson, professor of physics at Chicago, has been elected a foreign member of the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome.—Dr. L. A. Bauer, of the Carnegie Institution, and Dr. John M. Clarke, state geologist of New York, have been elected corresponding members of the Göttingen Royal Academy of Sciences.
At a conference of the International Geodetic Association to be held at Budapest on September 20, the principal topics to be considered were the accurate surveying of mountain chains subject to earthquake, with a view to ascertaining whether these chains are stable or whether they rise and sink, and the taking of measures of gravity so as to throw light upon the distribution of masses in the interior of the earth and upon the rigidity of the earth's crust. The drawing up of preliminary reports on these two questions has been entrusted to M. Lallemand. director of the general survey in France, and Sir George Darwin
