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the other islands of the Hawaiian group there are volcanic mountains scarcely less interesting. The crater of Haleakala, in the summit of East Maui, 10,000 feet above sea level, is one of the largest extinct craters in the world and is as well preserved as if its fires had been extinguished but a few years, instead of perhaps several hundred years ago.

The active volcanoes of Hawaii give a wonderful demonstration of the processes by which all these island mountains have been built up from the great depths of the ocean. Since the days of Captain Cook, geologists and others who are interested in the problems of volcanoes have visited the Hawaiian Islands and written about them.

Near the base of these mountains of igneous rock lie fields of sugar cane, which are just now of special interest. They are supplied with water from mountain streams and from wells and drainage tunnels that tap underground supplies. The Geological Survey, in cooperation with the Territory of Hawaii, has for several years been studying the water resources of the islands with a view to increasing the amount of water available for use in irrigation, and therefore in the output of sugar and other crops.

Several publications giving information on special phases of these interesting islands will be sent free on application to the Director of the United States Geological Survey, Department of the Interior, Washington, D. C. Among these are Water-Supply Paper 318, "Water Resources of Hawaii, 1909-1911," by W. F. Martin and C. H. Pierce, and WaterSupply Paper 336, "Water Resources of Hawaii, 1912," by C. H. Pierce and G. K. Larrison. These papers deal mainly with stream measurements and kindred subjects but contain also much information of general interest. A paper on the water supply of one of the neighboring islands is also availableWater-Supply Paper 77, " The water resources of Molokai, Hawaiian Islands," by Waldemar Lindgren. This paper contains an excellent map of the island.

Professional Paper 88 of the United States Geological Survey, Department of the Interior,

"Lavas of Hawaii and their relations," by Whitman Cross, presents a summary of our present scientific knowledge of the lavas of the islands. With the exception of the introduction the book is mainly technical. It contains 97 pages and includes an excellent map of the Hawaiian Islands and diagrams showing the composition of the lavas.

THE DIVISION OF GAS WARFARE OF THE WAR DEPARTMENT

By direction of President Wilson all the activities of the government concerned with manufacturing poison gas for war and experimenting in the work of devising new methods were transferred to the control of the War Department on July 1.

The entire gas experimental work will be under the direction of Major General William L. Sibert, who recently returned from France, where he commanded the First Division of the regular army, and was assigned as chief of a special department on gas defense.

President Wilson has signed an order transferring the chemical section of the Bureau of Mines of the Department of the Interior to the War Department in accordance with the President's decision that measures for the use of gas as a weapon of offense and defense should be coordinated under the War Department. Experiments on war gas and masks have been divided among several branches of the government, including the Ordnance and Medical Departments of the army.

The most extensive work has been conducted by the Bureau of Mines, which established a special chemical laboratory at the American University on the outskirts of Washington. About 1,700 American chemists have given the government the benefit of their advice, experience, and services in this work, and important results are predicted.

Among the chemists whose services have been utilized by the Bureau of Mines in its Chemical Section in the gas experimentation are Dr. William H. Nicolls of 25 Broad Street, New York, President of the General Chemical Company; Dr. F. C. Venable, of the University of North Carolina; Professor E. C.

Franklin, of Leland Stanford University; William Hoskins, chemical engineer of Chicago; Professor H. P. Talbot, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr. Ira Remsen, president emeritus of Johns Hopkins University; Professor F. W. Richards, of Harvard; Dr. Charles L. Parsons, of the Bureau of Mines; Dr. Reed Hunt, of Harvard; Professor W. D. Bancroft, of Cornell; Professor A. B. Lamb, of the Havemeyer Laboratory, New York University; W. K. Lewis, Chemical Engineer of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Professor C. A. Hulett, of Princeton; Yandell Henderson, of the Yale Medical School, and Dr. F. B. Underhill, of Yale.

In a letter dated June 26 to Dr. Van H. Manning, chief of the Bureau of Mines, notifying him of the coordination of war gas experimental work in the War Department, President Wilson wrote as follows :

I have had before me for some days the question presented by the Secretary of War involving the transfer of the chemical section established by you at the American University from the Bureau of Mines to the newly organized Division of Gas Warfare, in which the War Department is now concentrating all the various facilities for offensive and defensive gas operations. I am satisfied that a more efficient organization can be effected by having these various activities under one direction and control, and my hesitation about acting in the matter has grown only out of a reluctance to take away from the Bureau of Mines a piece of work which thus far it has so effectively performed. The Secretary of War has assured me of his own recognition of the splendid work you have been able to do, and I am taking the liberty of inclosing a letter which I have received from him in order that you may see how fully the War Department recognizes the value of the services.

I am to-day signing the order directing the transfer. I want, however, to express to you my own appreciation of the fine and helpful piece of work which you have done, and to say that this sort of teamwork by the bureaus outside of the direct war-making agency is one of the cheering and gratifying evidences of the way our official forces are inspired by the presence of a great national task.

WAR ACTIVITIES OF THE U. S. COAST AND GEODETIC SURVEY

By executive order dated May 16, 1918, the President transferred to the service and jurisdiction of the Navy Department for temporary use the Coast and Geodetic Survey steamers Patterson and Explorer, including their equipment and personnel other than commissioned officers. These vessels have been employed for many years in surveys on the Pacific coast and chiefly on the coast of Alaska.

Since the beginning of the war the work of this bureau has been almost entirely for military purposes. Five vessels, three on the Atlantic and two on the Pacific coast, have been transferred to the Navy, and about twentythree per cent. of the personnel has been transferred to some branch of the military service. Of the remaining force most of the field officers are engaged in land or hydrographic surveys for the Army or Navy, and a large portion of the office force is employed in reducing and publishing the results thus obtained.

A very important part of the office work is the preparation and production of charts, coast pilots and tide tables for vessels of the Navy and Merchant Marine, including those operated by the Shipping Board, the Railroad Administration, the Coast Guard and the Bureau of Lighthouses. The officers of the Survey are trained in work of triangulation, precise leveling, astronomic work, hydrographic surveying and chart construction, and are particularly available for service as navigation officers in the Navy and for duty with the Corps of Engineers, the Artillery Corps and the Aviation Service of the Army.

MAGNETIC OBSERVATIONS

THE various parties sent out by the Carnegie Department of Terrestrial Magnetism and the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, have all reported securing successful series of magnetic observations during the time of the total solar eclipse of June 8. Magnetic observations were made by the Coast and Geodetic Survey at Green River, Wyo., Mena, Ark., and Orlando, Fla. In addition data will be obtained from the various magnetic observatories of the Coast and Geodetic Survey.

The stations at which magnetic observations were made by the observers of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism were: Goldendale, Wash.; Corona, Colo.; at an altitude of 12,000 feet; Moraine Lake, Colo.; Lakin, Kans.; Brewton, Ala., and Washington, D. C. At Lakin, furthermore, and at Washington, D. C., atmospheric-electric observations were made. Reports on the results obtained will be published in the September issue of the journa! Terrestrial Magnetism and Atmospheric Electricity. At various universities also series of magnetic observations were obtained and data will likewise be furnished by the Canadian magnetic observatories.

The magnetic survey vessel Carnegie arrived safely at her home port, Washington, D. C., on June 10, where she will be put out of commission probably during the period of the war. During her cruise from Buenos Aires, Argentina, around The Horn to Valparaiso, Chile, Callao, Peru, thence through the Panama Canal to Newport News, she was in command of Dr. H. M. W. Edmonds; the other members of the scientific staff aboard were: Messrs. A. D. Power, Bradley Jones, L. L. Tanguy, J. M. McFadden, and Walter E. Scott.

SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS

DR. THEODORE W. RICHARDS, Erving professor of chemistry and director of the Wolcott Gibbs Memorial Laboratory at Harvard University, has been made a foreign member of the Accademia dei Lincei, Rome. He has been elected an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy.

SIR JAMES DEWAR has been awarded the medal of the Society of Chemical Industry in recognition of the conspicuous services which, by his research work in both pure and applied science, he has rendered to chemical industry.

THE French Geological Society has awarded the Conrad Ealte-Brun prize to Professor Lawrence Martin, of the University of Wisconsin, for his studies on the glaciers of Alaska.

DR. VICTOR C. VAUGHAN, of the University of Michigan, and Dr. George E. Crile, of Western Reserve University, have been promoted to

the rank of Colonel in the Medical Corps of the National Army.

DR. LEONARD P. AYRES has been made a colonel and is attached to General Pershing's staff in France. Dr. Ayres has had charge of the statistical work of the War Department in Washington.

CAPTAIN PAUL H. DEKRUIF, Ph.D. (Michigan), has been ordered to return to the United States for the purpose of making special investigations on gas gangrene. Captain DeKruif has been in France for some months studying at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. He expects to remain in this country for about three months, when he will return to France.

SUPERVISORY authority over several of the largest explosive manufacturing plants in the country has been granted to Professor Arthur H. Hixson, of the chemistry department at the University of Iowa. He holds the position of consulting chemical engineer in the ordnance department.

DR. ARTHUR CARLETON TROWBRIDGE, of the geology staff of the State University, for the past few months in charge of the work at Camp Dodge, has been called to New York to take a place on the national war work council of the Y. M. C. A.

DR. CHAS. W. BURROWS, associate physicist of the National Bureau of Standards in charge of the magnetic section of that institution, has resigned and will take up the work of commercial research and consultation, with laboratories equipped for research on problems involving magnetic materials and apparatus located at Grasmere, Borough of Richmond, New York City.

DR. VERN B. STEWART, of Cornell University, has accepted an appointment in the Bureau of Plant Industry, and is at present engaged in work on the pathological aspects of markets inspection of vegetables.

MR. H. J. MORGAN, of the General Chemical Company, has been transferred from the Delaware Works at Marcus Hook, Pa., to the main laboratories of the company at Laurel Hill, Long Island, where he will be chemist in charge.

MISS MILDRED P. STEWART has resigned her position as instructor in physiology and chemistry at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, N. Y., to take charge of the work of the Dutchess County (N. Y.) Public Health Association, with headquarters at Poughkeepsie, N. Y.

Ir is stated in Nature that the British minister of munitions, in agreement with the secretary of state for the colonies and the petroleum executive, has appointed a committee to inquire into certain matters relating to the production of fuel oil from home sources. The terms of reference are: "To consider the report which has been rendered by the Petroleum Research Department on the production of fuel oil from home sources, and to advise to what extent, and within what time, it should be possible under present conditions to carry out the proposals made in this report; and to consider the steps which have been taken by the Ministry of Munitions in this connection." The members of the committee are: Marquess of Crewe (chairman), Colonel A. Stirling, Major G. Collins, Engineer Vice-Admiral G. G. Goodwin (Engineerin-Chief of the Navy), Sir Richard Redmayne (representing the Controller of Coal Mines), Sir Lionel Phillips (representing the Ministry of Munitions); secretary, Mr. G. C. Smallwood (Ministry of Munitions).

THE British Army Medical Advisory Board, established in 1901 has been in abeyance since the beginning of the present conflict. We learn from the British Medical Journal that it has now been considered advisable to appoint a new advisory board somewhat differently constituted and with a smaller number of members. The Director-General, Lieutenant-General T. H. J. C. Goodwin, is president, and the other members are Major-General Sir Bertrand Dawson, Major-General Sir Berkeley Moyniham, Colonel W. H. Horrocks, Colonel Sir Robert Jones and Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Harold J. Stiles. Sir Bertrand Dawson, who is physician to the London Hospital, is a consulting physician with the British Expeditionary Force in France. Sir Berkeley Moynihan, who is surgeon to the Leeds Infirmary, is consulting surgeon to the Northern

Command. Sir Robert Jones is the Inspector of Military Orthopedics, and Sir Harold Stiles, of Edinburgh is assistant inspector of Military Orthopedics for Scotland and was a member of the commission of inquiry in France. Colonel Horrocks, who was a member of the old board, again serves on the new board as sanitary expert. The secretary is Mr. A. T. Gann, who was the secretary of the old board. It will observed that the new board does not contain, as did its predecessor, representatives of the India Office and of the directorates of military operations and of fortifications and works.

MR. D'ARCY POWER has been appointed Bradshaw lecturer of the Royal College of Surgeons of England for the ensuing year.

THE annual Halley lecture at Oxford University was delivered on May 28 by Sir Napier Shaw, director of the Meteorological Office. The subject was "The first chapter in the story of the winds

DR. WILLIAM MECKLENBURG POLK, professor of gynecology and dean of Cornell Medical School, died on June 24, in his seventy-fourth year.

ALBERT MCCALLA, Ph.D., a past-president of the American Microscopical Society and of the Illinois Microscopical Society, died on June 6, aged seventy-two years.

TITLES of articles upon physiological subjects, both plant and animal, which are not published in the regular journals devoted to such studies are solicited by the Physiological Abstracts. Authors may send titles to Dr. Withrow Morse, 2900 Ellis Avenue, Chicago.

FREE public lectures have been delivered in the lecture hall of the Museum building of the New York Botanical Garden, Bronx Park, on Saturday afternoons, at four o'clock, as follows:

April 6. "How to prepare the soil for gardening," by Mr. J. G. Curtis.

April 13. "Vacant lot gardens," by Carl Bannwart.

April 20. Tree-planting for forests," by Professor S. W.

Allen.

April 27. "Home gardens," by Henry G. Par

sons.

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(Exhibition of Flowers, May 11 and 12) May 18. "Fiber plants and their cultivation," by Lyster H. Dewey.

May 25. "Women as gardeners," by Delia W. Marble.

June 1. "Diseases of garden crops and their control," by Dr. Mel. T. Cook.

June 8. "Insect pests and their control," by Dr. F. J. Seaver.

THE following lecture course was given by the Illinois Audubon Society during March. March 9, Ernest Harold Baynes, Meriden, N. H., "Birds in the nesting season." March 16, Norman McClintock, Pittsburgh, Pa., "Moving pictures of wild birds and animals." March 23, Edward Howe Forbush, Boston, Mass., “How birds help to win the war." March 30, Louis Agassiz Fuertes, Ithaca, N. Y., "Birds and their conservation."

IT is related in Nature that the staff of the Natural History Museum, London, has been of assistance to various public departments in connection with the war. The following are examples of some of the questions which its members have been asked to answer: (1) nature of some organisms which caused blocking up of certain sea-water pipes; (2) as to some mite-infested oats at the front; (3) application of a remedy for the rice weevil in connection with the disease of beriberi; (4) as to methods of destruction of bedbugs; (5) the identification of specimens of larvae found in drinking water; (6) nature of wood used in the construction of a propeller of a Zeppelin brought down in this country; (7) inquiries as to certain wood stated to possess luminous properties; (8) questions arising out of the Canadian commission to consider the alleged depredations of sea lions on the Pacific coasts of North America, in connection with the fishing and canning industries; (9) identification of certain animal forms of tinned food, such as Pacific lobsters, sardines or sprats; (10) the identification of poisonous fishes in the West Indies; (11) the sponge fishery in the West Indies, and (12) the introduction of

reindeer and other animals into South Georgia.

THE Osiris prize of the value of $20,000 was founded for the recognition of the most impartant discovery or work in science, letters, arts, industries, or generally anything for the public benefit. The prize has been held in abeyance since the beginning of the war, but the Institute of France has decided to make an award this year.

PROFESSOR HENRY CHANDLER COWLES, of the department of botany at the University of Chicago, recently gave the annual address at Iowa State College for the national honorary societies Phi Kappa Phi and Gamma Sigma Delta.

THE Royal Society of Canada recently closed its thirty-seventh yearly meeting at Ottawa, Canada. There was an unusually large number of papers presented in all sections of the society, including those in the mathematical, physical and chemical, as well as the biological and zoological sciences. Abstracts of papers and discussions are expected in a forthcoming issue of SCIENCE.

Ir is announced in Nature that Mr. W. B. Randall of Waltham Cross, has generously provided funds for the establishment of a new research post at the Rothamsted Experimental Station, and the committee has appointed Mrs. D. J. Matthews (formerly Miss Isgrove) to occupy it. Mrs. Matthews will devote herself to the study of some of the problems connected with soil sterilization as it is now being carried out in certain types of nurseries.

ON the initiative of Professor Gradenigo stations of psycho-physiological research on the effects of aviation have lately been founded at Turin and Naples. They are chiefly intended for the examination of candidates for service as air pilots.

UNIVERSITY AND EDUCATIONAL
NEWS

CONGRESS has passed a vocational training bill which, carrying an appropriation of $2,000,000, provides for an elaborate system of educating soldiers in trades. It provides for the teaching of more than 300 vocations. While a soldier is undergoing training he is to

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