Dr. Alexander Agassiz has been appointed director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and Dr. A. E. Kennelly, of Philadelphia, has been appointed professor of electrical engineering at Harvard University.—The Hon. Carroll D. Wright, commissioner of labor, has been appointed president of the collegiate department of Clark University. It is understood that Mr. Wright will not, for the present at least, resign his position under the government or his work at Columbian or Catholic University.—The Secretary of War has sent to the House a recommendation that Surgeon-General Sternberg be granted the rank of major-general before his retirement on reaching the age limit June next.—The University of Edinburgh has conferred its LL.D. on Professor William James, the eminent psychologist of Harvard University, and on Dr. J. G. Schurman, president and formerly professor of philosophy at Cornell University.
Dr. Daniel Coit Gilman, president of the Carnegie Institution, sailed for Europe on April 17, with a view to studying foreign scientific institutions.—Professor Solon I. Bailey, of the Harvard Astronomical Observatory, is about to leave for the observatory's branch at Arequipa, Peru, where he will especially study the planet Eros. Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, of Cambridge University, will shortly start on an expedition for the psychological study of the Todas of southern India on the lines of his work in Torres Straits.—Professors Victor C. Vaughan and Frederick G. Novy of the medical department of the University of Michigan will leave for Asia about the middle of June to investigate tropical dysentery.—Dr. J. L. Wortman, of the Peabody Museum of Yale University, will be in the West until September, exploring the fields in Dakota, Wyoming and the Bad Lands, where the late Professor Marsh made his important paleontological discoveries.—Ernst A. Bessey, in charge of the Section of Seed and Plant Introduction in the United States Department of Agriculture, has been detailed to proceed to Russia, the Caucasus, and Turkestan for the purpose of securing certain seeds of forage and cereal plants. He is to sail on July 2.—An expedition to northern Brazil will be sent out by the Austrian Government in the autumn under the direction of Dr. M. Steindachner, curator in the Vienna Museum of Natural History.
In accordance with our plan of reprinting in each number of The Popular Sclence Monthly an article which appears to be of special interest and which is inaccessible to most of our readers, we published last month part of a paper on the physiological effect of electrically charged molecules by Professor Jacques Loeb, of the University of Chicago, originally contributed to The American Journal of Physiology. The consent of the editor of the journal and of Professor Loeb was asked, but Professor Loeb wrote that he would prefer not to have the article republished, as owing to the misrepresentation that his work had suffered in the daily papers and in the magazines, he preferred to have his researches published only in technical journals. Unfortunately Professor Loeb's letter was not received until after the form had been printed, and we can only express our regret that the extracts were reprinted without his approval.
