Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 76.djvu/521

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
THE PROGRESS OF SCIENCE
517

gated Lake Titicaca. Mr. Agassiz has done this entirely at his own expense. The results have been published by him through the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard College, in thirty volumes of memoirs and fifty-three volumes of bulletins, mostly containing the results of his own various expeditions and of the work of the specialists who examined his collections. Besides the numerous publications through the Harvard Museum, in 1888 Mr. Agassiz published in two volumes the narrative of his three cruises in the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean Sea, and along the Atlantic Coast of the United States, with charts and illustrations.

Mr. Agassiz had been president of the National Academy of Sciences, and was a foreign member of the leading academies of the world. He was not only the author of important contributions to science, but was also a great man, possessed of complete courage and frankness and a dominant will, which gave him leadership throughout the broad and rich experiences of his long life. As he was happy in his birth and in his life, it may be said that he was not ill-starred in his death, for he died with faculties undimmed, suddenly, on the sea, which he loved so well and had explored so persistently.

CHARLES REID BARNES

The death of Dr. Charles Reid Barnes, professor of plant physiology at the University of Chicago, as the result of a fall, is a serious loss to botany. He was born at Madison, Ind., in 1858 and was educated at Hanover College and Harvard University. After occupying successively the chairs of natural history and of botany and geology at Purdue University, he was called to the chair of botany at the University of Wisconsin in 1887, where he remained until he took up his final work at Chicago in 1898. During all of these years he was associated with Professor Coulter in the editorship of the Botanical Gazette. Professor Barnes had served as vice-president of the botanical section of the American Association and as president of the Botanical Society of America. Professor Barnes's best known earlier publications dealt with the taxonomy of mosses. Just before his death he completed the final proof-reading of the physiological part of a general textbook of botany that is expected soon to appear from the Hull Botanical Laboratory. Within the past few years Professor Barnes had become greatly interested in morphological problems among the bryophytes, two papers having been already published in conjunction with Dr. Land and several others being partly ready.

THE TROUBLES AT PRINCETON

The secret history of almost any American university is not less complicated than recent events at Princeton, but it is certainly unusual for such family quarrels to be so completely exploited before a public which can scarcely be expected to understand them. It is, however, probably not a bad thing for a university to conduct its affairs in the open and for large numbers to become interested in them, even though the principles involved may not be so vital as they appear to those immediately concerned. Probably the circumstance of greatest general interest at Princeton is the control exercised by the alumni. This is a factor likely to become increasingly important in the history of our universities, and it is not without its dangers, for the alumni bear gifts and are more likely to be concerned with athletics and fraternities than with scholarship.

The outlines of the Princeton story are now common property. Dean West has long urged with enthusiasm a graduate college on the lines of the Oxford colleges and President Wilson approved the plan. Then came President Wilson's move against the clubs—fraternities are forbidden at Princeton—and in favor of more democratic "quads," which divided the faculty and trustees and awakened the opposition