of science. The salaries paid to chiefs of divisions are about $3,000 a year, with almost no opportunity for advancement. The government finds it difficult to retain its ablest men of science, they being willing in most cases to accept university appointments. This added to civil service methods, desirable as they are in some regards, is in danger of giving rise to the survival of the unfit in the government service. There is some room for the complaint that men of science in the government service do not do work of as great distinction and originality as should be the case. Presumably this is due to too much supervision and red tape, rather than to too great freedom. The general spirit in the Department of Agriculture is very good, due largely to the wise administration of Secretary Wilson, and it is to be hoped that it may not be injured by an attempt to apply stricter discipline.
SCIENTIFIC ITEMS.
Professor Alexander Melville Bell, known for his contributions to phonetics, died on August 7, at the age of eighty-six years.
Dr. E. Ray Lankester, director of the British Museum of Natural History, has been elected president of the British Association for the meeting to be held next year at York.—Dr. William H. Nichols, of New York, gave the presidential address before the Society of Chemical Industry at its general meeting in London on July 10. Dr. Edward Divers, F.R.S., was elected president of the society for the ensuing year.—Dr. Samuel G. Dixon, president of the Academy of Natural Science of Philadelphia, has been appointed commissioner of health for the state of Pennsylvania.—Professor W. W. Mills has been appointed state geologist of Michigan.
A statute of Benjamin Franklin is to be erected at Paris at the end of the street that bears his name. Plans have been made for the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of Franklin's birth, in Boston and New York as well as in Philadelphia.—A tablet was unveiled on July 14, by Signor G. Marconi, on the house in which Sir Humphry Davy once lived at Clifton, Bristol.—The American Medical Association has taken steps tor the erection of a suitable memorial to Dr. N. S. Davis, who is regarded as the founder of the association.
The official party of the British Association, including Professor G. H. Darwin, the president and the other officers, left Southampton by the mail steamer Saxon on July 29 for Cape Town, where they arrived on the sixteenth inst. The party included Professor Ernest W. Brown, of Haverford College; Professor Henry S. Carhart, of the University of Michigan; Professor W. M. Davis, of Harvard University, and Professor William B. Scott, of Princeton University.
