cent. of manganese, 6 per cent. of iron, 6 per cent. of silica and 0.14 to 0.20 per cent. of phosphorus. The manganiferous iron ore of the district, as shown by the average of the analyses of about 300 tons shipped recently, contains about 15 per cent. of manganese, 20 per cent. of iron, 30 per cent. of insoluble material and 0.17 per cent. of phosphorus. Practically all the ore produced in the district is shipped to furnaces at Birmingham, Ala., for the manufacture of ferromanganese, spiegeleisen and manganiferous pig iron. The irregularity of the occurrence of the ores, the complex geologic structure, and the scarcity of outcrops in much of the district make it extremely difficult to use the geologic conditions as a guide in exploration and development and hazardous to predict the probable occurrence of ore in any locality or to do much more than to guess at the reserves of ore. Fortunately, however, the district has been worked for many years, either for manganese ore or for other minerals, and has been rather thoroughly explored, so that there is some basis for an estimate of the reserves. The statement seems to be warranted that the district probably still contains at least 100,000 tons of minable high-grade manganese ore and .perhaps 250,000 to 300,000 tons of manganiferous iron ore-sufficient to last for many years unless the rate of production is greatly increased. BRITISH ELECTRICAL INDUSTRIES AFTER IN the general survey with which the report of the British Departmental Committee on the electrical trades is introduced, it is urged, as we learn from the Journal of the Society of Arts, that the national importance of those trades has never been realized either by the government or the general public. Through the achievements of Faraday, Wheatstone, Kelvin, Swan, Hopkinson, and many others, Great Britain was first in electrical enterprise, and should have retained her preeminence; but manufacturers were hampered while Parliament and local authorities debated how the distribution and use of electricity might be prevented from infringing "conventional conceptions of public privileges and vested interests." Consequently foreign manufacturers were enabled, both in their own and other markets to gain a hold which they have never lost. The approximate annual value before the war of the total products of electrical plant, mains, and appliances in this country and Germany is set out in the following table: Total electrical products. 22,500,000 60,000,000 7,500,000 15,000,000 ... 2,933,000 631,000 45,000,000 Consumption of home- Moreover, of the £22,500,000 manufactured here, a large proportion was produced by concerns under foreign control, and in the case of "British" exports a proportion consisted of foreign manufactures reshipped as British goods! Apart from legislative obstacles, Great Britain, it must be remembered, had attained much prosperity and technical efficiency in her use of steam, and therefore her manufacturers had less inducement than their rivals in foreign countries to adopt electrical driving. Another factor retarding our electrical progress has been the "strength of the gas interests." Again, foreign governments, appreciating the importance of conserving their home markets as a basis for the development of overseas trade, imposed protective duties and exerted influence on State Departments to purchase native goods. An industry cultivated under these and other encouraging conditions has had an immense advantage in international competition. There is, the committee says, conclusive evidence of the existence of German control over companies ostensibly British, and of that German control being exercised to the detriment of British interests indirectly through companies incorporated in America, Switzerland, and other neutral countries. "At the outbreak of war negotiations were in progress for the acquisition by Germany of financial control in existing companies of the United Kingdom, as well as in the British Dominions and India, which if successfully concluded would have still further restricted the use of British goods in many parts of the empire." The scientific replanning of our distribution of energy on which the committee so strongly insists would, it is calculated, effect a saving of no less than 50 million tons of coal per annum. Witnesses of high authority estimate the loss incurred by the nation through failure to take full advantage of electrical progress at quite £100,000,000 a year. The larger part of the report is devoted to a careful and detailed examination, from sectional points of view, of the position of the industry. Section I. deals with electricity generation and transmission; Section II. with electrical traction; Section III. with manufacturing; Section IV. with the interdependence of manufacture and finance; and Section V. with imperial control of sources of electrical energy. Respecting the latter, it is suggested that, in particular, India and the selfgoverning Dominions should take stock of their facilities for generating electricity, whether from water-power, coal, oil, or other sources of energy, and should appreciate their permanent and ever-increasing importance to the empire. THE DEPARTMENT OF CHEMISTRY OF THE COLLEGE OF THE CITY OF NEW YORK THE following members of the staff of the department of chemistry have gone into war work: 1. In the service: Captain Reston Stevenson, Sanitary Corps, Overseas. Major F. E. Breithut, Chief Personnel Officer, Chemical Warfare Service. Second Lieutenant Paul Gross, Research Division, Chemical Warfare Service. Captain D. L. Williams, chief of supplies, Research Division, Chemical Warfare Service. Second Lieutenant Martin Meyer, United States Army. Corporal Howard Adler, Chemical Warfare Service. Corporal Arthur W. Davidson, Chemical Warfare Service. Ensign Benjamin Rayved, Paymaster Division. Private Leon J. Smolen. Private Nathan Rauch, Chemical Warfare Private Moses Chertcoff, Chemical Warfare Private F. L. Weber, Students' Army Train- Private Martin Kilpatrick, Chemical Warfare Private Hyman Storch, Chemical Warfare Joseph L. Guinane, Chemical Warfare Service. Yeoman Alexander Lehrman, Chemical Di- 2. In civilian capacity: Professor H. R. Moody, War Industries Board. Tutor B. G. Feinberg, Ordnance. Fellow Paul Scherer, Ordnance. The present staff is as follows: Baskerville, Charles, professor and director of the Chemistry Building, emeritus. Friedburg, L. H., associate professor of chemistry. Curtman, Louis J., assistant professor, chief of the Division of Qualitative Chemistry. Prager, William L., assistant professor, chief of the Division of Organic Chemistry. Curtis, Robert W., assistant professor, chief of the Division of Quantitative Chemistry. Estabrooke, William L., assistant professor, chief of the Division of the Evening and Summer Sessions. Coles, Henry T., assistant professor of industrial chemistry. Cooper, Herman C., assistant professor of physical chemistry. McCrosky, Carl R., instructor. THE CHEMICAL WARfare serVICE THE Chemical Warfare Service has been duly authorized by order of the Secretary of War, to make the necessary arrangements through the Adjutant General's Office to secure the furlough, without pay or allowances, of such chemists as are necessary in such government bureaus as the Bureau of Standards, Bureau of Chemistry, Bureau of Mines, United States Patent Office, where such chem ists are engaged in chemical work for the government, or state bureaus concerned, essential to the prosecution of the war. At the same time they are advised that the new selective service regulations, to be published shortly, will emphasize to the draft boards the fact that skilled employees of war industries should be placed in deferred classification. The induction into the military service of skilled men necessary to essential industries or occupations, to be subsequently furloughed back to their industries or occupations, involves an expense to the government, and the men concerned lose time from their necessary work. The bureaus concerned are authorized by the selective service regulations to submit to the draft boards affidavits and written proof to maintain their contention that their employees should be placed in deferred classification and it is believed that they should be encouraged in securing deferred classification rather than securing the furlough of the men after they have been inducted into the military service. All communications in regard to information from those desiring any details should be addressed to Major Victor Lenher, Chemical Warfare Service, U. S. A., chief, governmental and State Relations Branch, Unit F, Corridor 3, Floor 3, 7th and B Streets, N.W., Washington, D. C. THE AMERICAN COLLEGE OF SURGEONS THE American College of Surgeons will convene at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, New York City on October 21. Arrangements for the meeting, which is expected to attract surgeons from all parts of the United States and Canada, are in charge of a committee headed by Dr. J. Bentley Squier. Three important meetings at which the latest discoveries in medical science will be discussed and demonstrated will be held on October 22, 23 and 24. The first will be addressed by the retiring president, Dr. John G. Clark, of Philadelphia, after which Dr. William J. Mayo, of Rochester, Minn., president-elect, will be inducted into office. Other speakers at this meeting will be Surgeon-General Gorgas, of the army, Surgeon-General Braisted, of the navy, and Sur geon-General Victor Blue, of the public health service. Clinics will feature the remaining sessions. Among the surgeons expected from abroad are Sir Thomas Myles, C.B., of Dublin; Gray Turner, of Newcastle-on-Tyne; Raffaele Bastianelli, of Italy; Major R. Ledeaux Lebard, of the French army; Theodore Tuffler, SurgeonGeneral of the French army; Lieutenant Colonel Clarence L. Starr, of Toronto; Sir Robert Jones, of Liverpool; W. W. Chipman, of Montreal; Pierre Duvall, of Paris; SurgeonGeneral Antoine de Page, of the Belgian army, and Colonel Cuthbert Wallace, of the British army. Prominent American surgeons who are expected to attend are Major-General M. W. Ireland; Surgeon-General Blue, of the public health service; Major General Gorgas, of the army; Surgeon-General Braisted, of the navy; Colonel Frank Billings and Colonel Joseph Miller, of the Army Medical Corps, and Dr. Frank Martin, founder of the American College of Surgeons. An invitation has also been sent to Colonel Joseph A. Blake and Colonel George E. Brewer, New York surgeons, now with the forces in France. THE AMERICAN AGRICULTURAL COMMITTEE THE United States Department of Agriculture announces the arrival in England of a committee of men familiar with food production and agricultural organization and activities in the United States. The personnel of the committee is as follows: Dr. W. O. Thompson, chairman, president of Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio; Mr. Carl Vrooman, Assistant Secretary of Agriculture; Mr. R. A. Pearson, president of Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, Ames, Iowa; Mr. T. F. Hunt, director of the Agricultural Experiment Station and dean of the College of Agriculture, University of California, Berkeley, Cal.; Mr. D. R. Coker, farmer and member of National Agricultural Advisory Committee, Hartsville, S. C.; Mr. Wm. A. Taylor, chief, Bureau of Plant Industry, U. S. Department of Agriculture; Mr. George M. Rommel, chief, Animal Husbandry Division, Bureau of Animal Industry, U. S. Department of Agriculture; Mr. George R. Argo, specialist in cotton business methods, Bureau of Markets, U. S. Department of Agriculture; Mr. John F. Wilmeth, administrative assistant, Bureau of Markets, U. S. Department of Agriculture. The committee will secure general information regarding food production conditions in England, France and Italy, so that, when they return, they will be able to reveal the needs more effectively to the leaders of agriculture in the United States and to farmers generally. They will also study agricultural problems in England, France and Italy, including the use of machinery and the assignment of labor in farming operations, the livestock situation, the depletion of herds and the probable extent to which Europe may call on this country for live stock to replenish herds, the seed situation and the probabilities of securing supplies from Europe and similar matters. SCIENTIFIC NOTES AND NEWS MAJOR GENERAL MERRITTE W. IRELAND, of the Medical Corps, has been appointed Surgeon General of the Army, to succeed Major William C. Gorgas, who was retired on October 5. General Gorgas will remain in Europe as the medical representative of the United States Army at the Interallied War Council. DR. ARTHUR L. DAY, director of the Geophysical Laboratory of the Carnegie Institution of Washington since its establishment in 1906, has resigned to accept a research position with the Corning Glass Works, Corning, N. Y. SECRETARY HOUSTON has visited the droughtstrickened sections of the country to confer with field representatives of the Department of Agriculture in regard to making loans to farmers from the special fund of $5,000,000 set aside for that purpose. Professor G. I. Christie and Mr. L. M. Estabrook, assistants to the Secretary, are supervising the work in the northwest and southwest, respectively. PROFESSOR FRANK P. UNDERHILL, of Yale University, has received the commission of Lieutenant Colonel in the Chemical Warfare Service. He is in charge of gas investigations at New Haven. WILLIAM H. Ross, of the Bureau of Soils, has been commissioned captain in the Chemical Warfare Service and has been assigned to work in the chemical laboratory, at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland. DR. LUCIUS POLK BROWN, chief of the Bureau of Food and Drugs of the New York City Health Department, has been granted leave of absence without salary for the period of the war, to accept a commission as a captain in the food and nutrition division of the sanitary corps. DR. PAUL E. KLOPSTEG, formerly of the physics department of the University of Minnesota, is now with the Leeds and Northrup Company, of Philadelphia. THE Italian Scientific Society has awarded the natural sciences gold medal for 1918 to Professor Filippo Eredia for his work in meteorology. IN honor of Professor Golgi, who retires this year from the chair of pathology and histology at the University of Pavia, it is proposed to found a scholarship in the medical department for the orphan of some physician, preferably one whose father was lost during the present war. Contributions may be sent to the treasurer, Tesoriere dell' Ordine dei Medici della Provincia di Pavia. MR. WILLIAM BOWIE has resigned as treasurer of the Washington Academy of Sciences on account of having been commissioned a major in the Engineering Corps, U. S. A., and is succeeded by Mr. R. L. Faris, of the Coast and Geodetic Survey. MR. GEO. F. FREEMAN, plant breeder in the college of agriculture of the University of Arizona, has left for Egypt and will take up his permanent residence in Cairo, in connection with the Société Sultanienne de Agriculture. THE first lecture of the series of the Harvey Society will be given in New York City on Oc tober 19, at 8.30 P.M., by Dr. E. K. Dunham, on "Certain aspects of the application of antiseptics in military practise." PROFESSOR EDWARD F. NORTHRUP, of Princeton University, addressed the meeting of the Institute of Radio Engineers on October 9, on the subject "Special heating effects of radio. frequency currents." DR. CHARLES R. EASTMAN, of the American Museum of Natural History, the author of important contributions to paleichthyology, was drowned at Long Beach on September 27. By the will of Alfred Louis Moreau Gottschalk, American Consul General at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, who was one of the passengers on the United States collier Cyclops, which mysteriously disappeared from the seas last March, the U. S. National Museum receives a valuable collection of Inca pottery, Aztec idols, Trojan lamps, eastern brasses and arms, pottery and porcelains from Spanish America. BRAZIL is sending a medical mission to France. The party is to consist of fifty doctors besides a number of students. They are to be attached to the Brazilian Hospital already installed near the front. TWELVE professors chosen from the faculties of various Spanish universities spent August in Paris, visiting the principal medical and surgical centers. The mission was charged to prepare a report on the progress made by French war surgery. THE much-dreaded European potato wart disease for which the Federal Horticultural Board quarantined against further importation of potatoes in September, 1912, has been. discovered in ten mining villages near Hazleton, Pa., by Professor J. G. Sanders, economic zoologist of that state. Every effort of the state authorities, with the federal department assisting, is being directed to prevent the further spread of this insidious and most dangerous disease known to affect the potato. It appears that the disease has been established in some of these villages for at least seven or eight years, where it has been impossible to secure even the amount of seed planted in some gardens for the past few years. Only by accident was this disease discovered in these villages, which are largely made up of foreigners, who supposed that there was something affecting the soil and ruining the crop. It seems advisable that all state authorities should inspect large centers of consumption where imported potatoes may have been purchased during the past eight or ten years. THE British Ministry of Munitions has made an order prohibiting the sale, except under licence, of radio-active substances, luminous bodies and ores. The order applies to all radio-active substances (including actinium, radium, uranium, thorium and their disintegration products and compounds), luminous bodies in the preparation of which any radio-active substance is used, and ores from which any radio-active substance is obtainable, except uranium nitrate and except radio-active substances at the date of the order forming an integral part of an instrument, including instruments of precision or for timekeeping. MR. J. E. BARNARD, speaking at the British Scientific Products Exhibition at King's College on August 20, said that the microscope was the almost universal tool of scientists, and was used in every industry which had a technical side. There was little doubt that after the war the microscope industry would undergo a transformation that would lead to a state of affairs in which the British microscope would be preeminent, as indeed, it was somewhere about 1880 to 1890. SOME of the results of research on the nitrogen problem were shown at the British Scientific Products Exhibition at King's College, London. The Munitions Inventions Department of the Ministry of Munitions exhibited a unit plant for the oxidation of ammonia to oxides of nitrogen. The process (which was not extensively used outside Germany before the war) has been largely used by the enemy to obtain nitric acid for explosives, and also in the manufacture of sulphuric acid by the chamber process as a substitute for Chile nitrate, which he has been unable to obtain owing to the blockade. The method is now widely used in England, and large firms, |