built at a cost of $15,000,000 may be an asset or a burden. An equal sum spent in selecting and educating 3,000 scientific men would nearly double the number of men the country competent to advance science. The dreadnaught is a continual expense, it depreciates 'it the rate of a million dollars a year, Its existence tends to exert an influence toward a war of aggression. The three thousand scientific men would add to the wealth of the country in peace, to its strength in a war of defense. If two years ago the officers of the German army had been put on the ships of the British navy and the ships had been sunk in the Atlantic, it would have been for the welfare of the world. If the number of men engaged in scientific research and in the applications of science could be doubled, the gain would be incalculable.
If we wish to make the nation strong in defense we should care for our children and our schools, for our scientific men and our universities—in this particular number of The Popular Science Monthly it may be permitted to add—for our journals devoted to the diffusion and advancement of science.
SCIENTIFIC ITEMS
We record with regret the death of Frederick Ward Putnam, the distinguished anthropologist of Harvard University; of Dr. John Ulric Nef, head of the department of chemistry of the University of Chicago, and of Dr. Joseph Austin Holmes, director of the U. S. Bureau of Mines.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science held a successful meeting at San Francisco, Berkeley, and Stanford University, during the first week of August. The address of the president, Dr. W. W. Campbell, director of the Lick Observatory, which was printed in the issue of Science for August 20, is entitled "Science and Civilization."
A marble chair is to be placed in the open-air Greek Theater of the University of California in honor of Eugene Waldemar Hilgard, professor of agriculture and dean of the College of Agriculture from 1875 to 1906, and now professor emeritus.—Professor R. A. Millikan, of the department of physics, has been elected president of the University of Chicago Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.
Dr. William H. Welch, professor of pathology in the Johns Hopkins University, and Dr. Simon Flexner, director of the laboratories of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, have sailed for China where they go on behalf of the China Medical Board of the Rockefeller Foundation to report on the medical schools and hospitals.—The schooner George B. Cluett, chartered by the Crocker Land relief expedition to go in quest of Donald B. MacMillan and the members of his party in Greenland, has sailed from North Sydney, Nova Scotia. Dr. Edmund Otis Hovey, of the American Museum of Natural History, chairman of the Crocker Land Exploration Committee, is in charge.
Governor Dunne has signed the bill giving $5,000,000 to the University of Illinois for the biennium. It is the largest grant made in a single law to any university in the United States.
