composed of five members, one selected from each group of trustees from the different organizations represented on the board. The present members of the committee are the president and vice-president of the board, Dr. J. McKeen Cattell and Dr. J. C. Merriam. A member from the journalistic group is yet to be selected.

As editor the board of trustees has selected Edwin E. Slosson, Ph.D., who for twelve years was professor of chemistry in the University of Wyoming and for seventeen years literary editor of The Independent, New York. He has been associate in the Columbia School of Journalism since its foundation and is the author of "Creative Chemistry," "Easy Lessons in Einstein," and other scientific and literary publications.

As manager of the new enterprise the board has selected Howard Wheeler, formerly editor of the San Francisco Daily News, Pacific coast manager of the Newspaper Enterprise Association, managing editor of Harpers Weekly, and for five years editor of Everybody's Magazine.

The headquarters of Science Service have been provisionally established in the building of the National Research Council, at 1701 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington, D. C.

ciation, Cleveland. He was born in 1869 at Leavenworth, Kansas, graduated from the Kansas Agricultural College and received from Cornell University the degree of doctor of science in 1897. In 1892 Dr. Nichos was appointed to the chair of physics and astronomy at Colgate University, where he remained for six years. More than two years of this time, however, was spent on leave of absence during which he studied at the University of Berlin. There he discovered the metallic reflection of quartz and its anomalous dispersion in the infra-red spectrum, which led to a new method of spectrum analysis by which the spectrum was extended to six times the previous limits. Rubens, Wood and von Bayer were thus enabled to make a further extension, detecting heat waves 1/64 inch in length.

In 1898 Dr. Nichols was called to the professorship of physics in Dartmouth College, where he made the first measurements of the heat received from several of the brighter stars and planets, by using a radiometer of his own invention, and with Dr. Hull, in 1901, discovered the of a beam of light which pressure had been predicted by Maxwell. Simultaneously the Russian physicist, Lebedev, was able to detect this pressure, but unable to measure it.

After five years at Dartmouth, Dr. Nichols was called to the chair of experimental physics in Columbia University. The year 1904-05 Dr. Nichols spent at Cambridge, England, and lectured at the Royal Institution in London and the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge University. He remained at Columbia until 1909, when he was called to the presidency of Dartmouth, resigning in 1916 to become professor of physics at Yale University. This latter position he held until 1920, but during the war he was associated with the Bureau of Ordnance of the Navy Department.

SCIENTIFIC ITEMS

WE record with regret the death of John Burroughs, the distinguished naturalist; of Henry P. Cushing, professor of geology in Western Reserve University, and of Louis Compton Miall, the English biologist.

THE annual meeting of the American Philosophical Society at Philadelphia and of the National Academy of Sciences at Washington were held toward the end of April. The evening lecture before the American Philosophical Society was given by Professor James H. Breasted, of the University of Chicago, whose series of lectures on "The Origins of Civilization" were recently printed in this journal. Prince Albert of Monaco gave the evening address before the National Academy of Sciences, and its Alexander Agassiz gold medal was conferred on him in recognition of his promotion of oceanographic research.

THE Albert medal of the Royal Society of Arts has been presented to Professor Albert Michelson, for his discovery of a natural constant which has provided a basis for a standard of length. The award was made last year, but the actual presentation was deferred until Professor Michelson could go to England to receive it.

DR. WILLIAM CROCKER, associate professor of botany in the University of Chicago, has been appointed director of the newly founded Thompson Institute for Plant Research at Yonkers, New York. He will enter on his work next autumn. The board of trustees of the new foundation will consist of three business men and three scientific men. Professor John M. Coulter, head of the department of botany at the University of Chicago, and Raymond F. Bacon, of the Mellon Institute of Pitisburgh, will be two of the scientific men, and these two will select the third.

From Punch.