in 1905 suggested that it was probably of protozoal origin, and was communicated by sand flies, as sleeping-sickness is by the tsetse fly or malaria and yellow fever by mosquitoes. Since that time Dr. Sambon has made careful studies in Italy and elsewhere, and his views are accepted by a number of leading authorities, he calls attention to the analogy with malaria, especially in its seasonal occurrence. While Dr. Sambon has been able to produce no experimental evidence of the causes of the disease, Dr. W. H. Harris, of Tulane University, has recently published in The Journal of the American Medical Association a note on experimental production of pellagra in monkeys. These monkeys were injected with filtrates, made through a Berkefeld filter, obtained from cases of pellagra shortly after death, and all showed the typical symptoms of the disease.
As recently as 1906 Sir William Osier in the sixth edition of his "Principles of Medicine" stated that the disease has not been observed in the United States. In the following year. Dr. G. H. Searcy in Alabama and Dr. J. W. Babcock and J. J. Watson in South Carolina recognised the disease. Their reports were received with skepticism and even with ridicule, but now pellagra is known to exist in no fewer than thirty-three states and there are probably at present 30,000 cases. It is strange that pellagra and the hookworm disease, both of which are so prevalent and so disastrous in our southern states, should have remained until recently unrecognized. Both diseases are preventable, and we may look forward to a great advance in health and social efficiency when they have been brought under control in the south. We should be grateful to the General Education Board for the work that it has accomplished in this direction, but the national government, the states and the municipalities should now take up the suppression of preventable diseases with all the resources at their command.
SCIENTIFIC ITEMS
We record with regret the death of Dr Horace Jayne, formerly professor of vertebrate morphology in the University of Pennsylvania; of Professor N. H. Alcock, professor of physiology in McGill University, and of Dr. Philip Lutley Sclater, from 1859 to 1902 secretary to the Zoological Society of London, distinguished for his work on systematic zoology.
Dr. Joseph Swain, president of Swarthmore College, has been elected president of the National Educational Association; Dean Gardner C.Anthony, of Tufts College, president of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, and Dean Victor C. Vaughan, of the University of Michigan, president of the American Medical Association.
In the article on "Ancient Man, his Environment and his Art," which appeared in the July number ofThe Popular Science Monthly, Fig. 4 is from a photograph by Professor V. Commont, and Figs. 7-10 are from photographs by Count Bégouen.
The editor has received a letter from Professor Karl Pearson, the Francis Galton Eugenics Laboratory, University of London, under date of June 9, in which he says:
The following paragraph occurs in your June issue in a paper by Professor H. E. Jordan: "We are now in possession of facts, thanks mainly to the labors of Professor Karl Pearson and his collaborators at the Galton Eugenics Laboratory, and to Professor Davenport and his staff of assistants at the Eugenics Record Office, showing that the inheritance of several scores of human physical and mental traits are in close conformity with Mendelian formulæ" (p. 580). Such a statement will astonish those who are acquainted with the work done here, and I feel bound at once to state that, as far as my experience reaches, I find no physical or mental trait with which we have dealt hero to be "in close accordance with Mendelian formulæ." The almost amusing aspect of the matter is, that the one paper in which I have dealt with the mulatto was an endeavor to show that Mendelian formulæ did not hold for him.
