which occurred in 1836, 1847, 1858, 1869. 1880 and 1891. So also the mean conditions between maxima and minima which came in 1852-53, 1863-64, 1874-75 and 1885-86, are very close to the famine years 1854, 1865-66, 1876-77 and 1884-85. The possibility of predicting famines in India is too obvious for comment. The present famine is, according to the Lockyers, to be explained by abnormal solar temperature. A mean temperature would, acording to precedent, have been reached in 1897 or 1898, but observations of the spectrum show that it has not even yet been reached. To the absence of the minimum condition, which should have obtained in 1899 and caused rain from the southern ocean, the present famine is due.
Among recent events of scientific interest we note the following: Professor W. W. Campbell has been elected director of the Lick Observatory, in the room of the late Professor James E. Keeler.— Otto H. Tittman, assistant superintendent of the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, has been promoted to the superintendency, vacant by the resignation of Dr. Henry S. Pritchett, to accept the presidency of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.—The vacancy caused by the death of William Saunders, for the past thirty-eight years superintendent of Experimental Gardens and Grounds, United States Department of Agriculture, has been filled by the appointment of B. T. Galloway, who in turn has been succeeded by Albert F. Woods as chief of the Division of Vegetable Physiology and Pathology.—President D. C. Gilman, of the Johns Hopkins University, has privately intimated to the trustees his intention of resigning at the close of the present academic year, which will complete twenty-five years of service since the opening of the university in 1876.—Sir William Huggins, the eminent astronomer, has succeeded Lord Lister as president of the Royal Society. The medals of the Society have been presented as follows: The Copley Medal to M. Berthelot, For. Mem. R. S., for his services to chemical science: the Rumford Medal to M. Becquerel, for his discoveries in radiation proceeding from uranium; a Royal medal to Major MacMahon, for his contributions to mathematical science; a Royal Medal to Prof. Alfred Newton, for his contributions to ornithology; the Davy Medal to Prof. Guglielmo Koerner, for his investigations on the aromatic compounds; and the Darwin Medal to Prof. Ernst Haeckel, for his work in zoology.—Lord Avebury has given the first Huxley Memorial Lecture, which the Anthropological Institute of London has established to commemorate Huxley's anthropological work.—It is proposed to found two memorials in honor of the late Miss Mary Kingsley, one a small hospital at Liverpool for the treatment of tropical diseases and one a society for the study of the natives of West Africa.—The death is announced of Dr. John Gardiner, until recently professor of biology in the University of Colorado, and of Dr. Adolf Pichler, formerly professor of geology at the University at Innsbruck, and an eminent German poet and man of letters.—Mr. D. O. Mills, of New York, has promised the University of California about $24,000, to defray the expenses of a two years' astronomical expedition from the Lick Observatory to South America or Australia, the object of which is to study the movement of stars in the line of sight.—Surgeon Major Reed and a board of experts are continuing the investigation into the propagation of yellow fever by mosquitoes, and an experimental station will be established outside Havana.—Tufts College will open at South Harpswell, Me., next summer, a small marine biological laboratory under the direction of Prof, J. S. Kingsley.
