acquired additional land, including an island in the sound which can be used for the experimental isolation of plants and animals.
While the work of the Carnegie Institution is mainly in the natural and exact sciences there are departments cf economics and sociology and of historical research, certain classics of international law are being republished and appropriations are made to the American schools of classical studies at Athens and Rome.
THE HOUSE OF ASA GRAY
The Harvard Graduate's Magazine gives a picture, here reproduced, of the house in the Botanic Garden of the university with some account of the history of this old landmark by Professor Robinson. Such a frame dwelling house is almost as characteristic of Cambridge conditions as the courts and quads of the colleges of English universities, for it has scarcely been respectable for a Harvard professor to live in a house of brick or stone. This house was built in 1810 for William Dandridge Peck, the first professor of natural history at Harvard and the organizer of the Botanic Garden. After Peck's death in 1822, it was apparently used as a boarding house and in it lived Thomas Mitchell, lecturer on natural history, an eccentric bachelor of English birth. Asa Gray was appointed professor of natural history in 1842, and lived in this house from his marriage in 1848 to his death in 1888, and Mrs. Gray continued to live there until her death in 1909. In this wooden house were kept the herbarium and library of Asa Gray until 1864, when the university provided a building, fireproof according to the standards of these days. To obtain space for the enlargement cf the herbarium building and to avoid the danger from fire, the old house has now been sold and is being removed from the botanic garden, but will be restored without considerable changes in its form.
SCIENTIFIC ITEMS
We record with regret the deaths of Dr. Edward Hitchcock, for fifty years
