what is now the Ohio Wesleyan University. He taught natural history and the physical sciences in western institutions until called to Tufts College in 1874. He was early an inventor and later made inventions which led him to believe that had anticipated both the telephone and wireless telegraphy. He was, however, unsuccessful in his suit against the Bell Telephone Company. But Dr. Dolbear did not confine himself to inventions; he did experimental work in various directions, wrote text-books and made addresses, and in his last work, entitled "Matter, Ether and Motion," discussed the fundamental principles of his science. Dr. Dolbear, in whose personality were commingled some of the traits of the scholar, the clergyman, the mechanic and the farmer, won the affectionate regard of all who were associated with him.
SCIENTIFIC ITEMS
We record with regret the deaths of Dr. Charles R. Barnes, professor of plant physiology at the University of j Chicago; Dr. Henry Byron Newson, professor of mathematics in the University of Kansas; Professor J. Edmund Wright, associate professor of mathematics in Bryn Mawr College; Dr. J. A. Bergstrom, professor of pedagogy in Sanford University, and Dr. Charles F. Wheeler, botanical expert in the Department of Agriculture.
Lord Rayleigh has been elected a foreign associate of the Paris Academy of Sciences in succession to the late Simon Newcomb.—The Edison medal of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers has been presented to Professor Elihu Thomson.—Dr. Hugo Münsterberg, professor of psychology at Harvard University, has been appointed exchange professor to lecture at Berlin in 1910-11.—Dr. S. Weir Mitchell celebrated his eightieth birthday on February 15. On the following day he gave a lecture before the College of Physicians of Philadelphia on "William Harvey, the Discoverer of the Circulation of the Blood."—Sir William Huggins, F.R.S., the eminent astronomer, celebrated his eighty-sixth birthday on February 7 at his residence at Tulsehill.
For the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which is to take place this year at Sheffield, beginning on August 31, under the presidency of the Rev. Professor T. G. Bonney, F.R.S., the following presidents have been appointed to the various sections: Section A (Mathematical and Physical Science), E. W. Hobson, F.R.S.; Section B (Chemistry), J. E. Stead, F.R.S.; Section C (Geology), Professor A. P. Coleman, Ph.D.; Section D (Zoology), Professor G. C. Bourne,.D.Se.; Section E (Geography), Professor A. J. Herbertson, Ph.D.; Section F (Economic Science and Statistics), Sir H. Llewellyn Smith, K.C.B.; Section G (Engineering), Professor W. E. Dalby, D.Sc.; Section H (Anthropology), W. Crooke, B.A.; Section I (Physiology), Professor A. B. Macallum, F.R.S.; Section K (Botany), Professor J. W. H. Trail, F.R.S.; Section L (Educational Science), Principal H. A. Miers, F.R.S.—The French Association for the Advancement of Science will hold its thirty-ninth annual meeting at Toulouse in August under the presidency of M. Gariel, professor of biological physics in the faculty of medicine of the University of Paris.
Columbia University has received an anonymous gift of $350,000 for a building for the faculty of philosophy.—A gift of $150,000 for the erection of an administration building and library at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute has been made by the Pittsburgh Alumni Association.—The medical school of the University of Pennsylvania has been given $100,000 by an unnamed alumnus to endow a chair to be known as "the Benjamin Rush professorship of physiological chemistry."—Tufts College has been made the residuary legatee under the will of John Everett Smith, and will, it is said, receive on the death of Mrs. Smith the sum of $500,000.
