the strength of the association and to the interest of its meetings.
New Elected Officers of the American Association.—The following are the officers elect for the next meeting (Detroit, 1897) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science: President: Wolcott Gibbs, of Newport, R. I. Vice-Presidents: (A) Mathematics and Astronomy, W. W. Beman, of Ann Arbor, Mich.; (B) Physics, Carl Barus, of Providence, R. I.; (C) Chemistry, W. P. Mason, of Troy, N. Y.; (D) Mechanical Science and Engineering, John Galbraith, of Toronto, Canada; (E) Geology and Geography, I. C. White, of Morgantown, W. Va.; (F) Zoölogy, G. Brown Goode,[1] of Washington, D. C.; (G) Botany, George F. Atkinson, of Ithaca, N. Y.; (H) Anthropology, W. J. McGee, of Washington, D. C.; (I) Social and Economic Science, Richard T. Colburn, of Elizabeth, N. J. Permanent Secretary: F, W. Putnam, of Cambridge, Mass. (office, Salem, Mass.). General Secretary: Asaph Ball, Jr., of Ann Arbor, Mich. Secretary of the Council: D. S. Kellicott, of Columbus, Ohio. Secretaries of the Sections: (A) Mathematics and Astronomy, James McMahon, of Ithaca, N. Y.; (B) Physics, Frederick Bedell, of Ithaca, N. Y.; (C) Chemistry, P. C. Freer, of Ann Arbor, Mich.; (D) Mechanical Science and Engineering, John J. Flather, of Lafayette, Ind.; (E) Geology and Geography, C. H. Smyth, Jr., of Clinton, N. Y.; (F) Zoölogy, C. C. Nutting, of Iowa City, Iowa; (G) Botany, F. C. Newcombe, of Ann Arbor, Mich.; (H) Anthropology, Harlan I. Smith, of New York, N. Y.; (I) Social and Economic Science, Archibald Blue, of Toronto, Canada. Treasurer: R. S. Woodward, of New York, N. Y.
The President's Address at the British Association.—The opening session of the Liverpool meeting of the British Association, September 16th, was witnessed by about three thousand persons. Sir Douglas Galton, the retiring president, in introducing the new president. Sir Joseph Lister, spoke of the occasion as marking the termination of his own services to the association which, as general secretary and finally as president, had extended over a quarter of a century. The presidency of Sir Joseph Lister, who is also President of the Royal Society, offers the first case in which a surgeon has held this position in the body solely in virtue of his professional attainments. It may well be so, for those attainments, as Sir Douglas Galton observed, "have been mainly devoted to mitigate suffering, and have revolutionized the surgeon's art"; and an English journal is moved to declare him" one of the greatest, if not the greatest, benefactor mankind has ever had." The new president's address was devoted to the illustration of the Interdependence of Science and the Healing Art, and began with an estimation of the value of the aid the Röntgen rays may render to the surgeon and physiologist. The fact that this is the jubilee of anaesthesia in surgery brought that subject properly forward. Next, the speaker referred to the researches of Pasteur on fermentation and his disproval of spontaneous generation as leading up to his own application of aseptic surgery, the development and ultimate method of which he described briefly and with remarkable clearness. The work of Robert Koch, Pasteur's attenuated virus and artificial immunity, the centenary of vaccination and Pasteur's application of the principle in rabies, Behring and Kitasato's antitoxic serum and its use in diphtheria, and Metchnikoff's investigations of the phagocytes, or white corpuscles, and their power to counteract infection were presented as specimens, culled from a wide field, of what the art of healing has borrowed from science and contributed to it.
The Sectional Addresses in the British Association.—In the sectional meetings of the British Association, Prof. J. J. Thomson, in Section A, made The Teaching of Physics the subject of his presidential address; Dr. Ludwig Mond, in the Section of Chemistry, reviewed the History of the Manufacture of Chlorine, with especial reference to the influence which the progress of pure science has had upon its development and simplification; Mr. J. E. Marr, of Cambridge, in Section C, spoke of Stratigraphical Geology and the effect which the work done upon the subject has had upon our knowledge of geology considered as a
- ↑ Died since his appointment.
