SELECTIONS FOR AN AMERI

CAN VALHALLA

The Senate of New York University has announced the report of the official canvas of ballots received from the electors of the Hall of Fame in the fifth quinquennial election. The electorate consists of 96 men and 6 women. Ballots were received from 95 men and 6 women as follows: University and college presidents, 27; professors of history and historians, 18; scientists, II; authors and editors, 14; high public officials and men and women of affairs, 19; actual or former justices,

national or state, 12.

It was possible this year to elect to the Hall of Fame for Great Americans 20 men, and to the Hall of Fame for Great American Women, 10 women, sixty-eight votes or two-thirds of the ΙΟΙ votes cast were required to elect a name unless that name bore the marking M. J. F. (more justly famous, but we are not informed in whose opinion), in which case 51 votes, or a majority of the votes cast, were required to elect. The result of the canvass showed that of the 177 names of men voted for, the following six were chosen:

Name

Samuel Langhorne Clemens..

James Buchanan Eads.....

Patrick Henry.

William Thomas Green Morton..
Augustus Saint-Gaudens..
Roger Williams...

was

Of the 27 names of women voted for, the name of one woman chosen for the Hall of Fame for Great American Women, that name bearing the M. J. F. marking and, therefore, requiring only 51 votes; the successful candidate being Alice Freeman Palmer, Educator, with 53 votes.

Prior to this election fifty men and six women had been elected to the Hall of Fame, the total now being fifty-six men and seven women. The sixth quinquennial election will take place in 1925. In the interim the Hall of Fame idea will be developed in various ways along educational lines to the end of stimulating interest in American history and inculcating reverence for our great dead. In May, 1921, there will be a public unveiling at the Hall of Fame on University Heights of twenty-six bronze tablets bearing the names of men and women who have been elected in this and previous elections, thirty-seven tablets having already been unveiled.

The votes for men of science in the recent election were as follows: Class V-Scientists

The selection of Dr. Morton as one of the sixty-two greatest Americans illustrate the inadequacy of the method of selection used by the Senate of New York University. Davy discovered the anaesthetic properties of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) in 1800, and Faraday showed that the inhalation of the vapor of ether produced anaesthetic effects in 1818. Which American physician or dentist from Dr. Godman in 1822 to Dr. Warren in 1846 deserves most credit for the introduction of anaesthetics is a question that even twenty-seven university presidents would find it difficult to decide by a majority vote.

THE THOMPSON MEDAL FOR GEOLOGY AND PALENOTOLOGY

We give here obverse and reverse views of the medal to be awarded by the National Academy of Sciences for distinguished achievement in the sciences of Geology or Paleontology or both. The medal is established on a foundation provided by Mrs. Mary Clark Thompson of New York,

and is to be struck only in gold, the intention of the foundress being that it shall constitute a reward and recognition for work done rather than an encouragement to further achievement. The designs are the work of Theodore Spicer-Simson of New York, who has expressed on the faces of the medal the symbolism of the two sciences.

The conception of "Paleontologia" is the development and emergence of life from the rocks. The female figure portraying the attainment of life, high in promise and fertility, is struggling to release herself from her ancestral environment, the rocks of the earth, and strains upward with exalted face toward the rising sun whose beams are breaking away the mists of the morning; about the rock ledges the eternal sea is pursuing its endless work of erosion and deposition. This central device is framed by representatives of lower forms of life, the encircling margin being a graceful crinoid with its stem, the branches of its calyx merging delicately into the crests of the waves.

The reverse is a more purely conventional and simple conception expressing the outweighing importance of practical observation and determination over against the deductive and speculative treatise.

The pictures here given are the ! full size of the medal which it is planned to award annually and these awards will be of international

scope.

THE ENGINEERING FOUNDA

TION

An anonymous gift of $200,000 toward a five-million-dollar fund for the promotion of research in science and in engineering is announced by Engineering Foundation at its headquarters in the Engineering Societies Building, New York City. This

contribution brings the foundation's fund to $500,000. It is the aim of the foundation to obtain one million dollars by January first.

The Engineering Foundation was organized to care for the gifts aggregating $300,000 of Ambrose Swasey, of Cleveland, Ohio, the income from these gifts being devoted to research. Since its organization as a trust fund in 1914, the funds of the foundation have been used to aid the National Research Council and others in performing research directly connected with engineering. Mr. Swasey's gifts were made to United Engineering Society as a nucleus of a large endowment "for the furtherance of research in science and in engineering, or for the advancement in any other manner of the profession of engineering and the good of mankind."

The Engineering Foundation is administered by the engineering foundation board composed of members from the American Society of Civil Engineers, American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and American Institute of Electrical Engineers and members at large. The board is a department of United Engineering Society. It is the instrumentality of the founder societies named for the stimulation, direction and support of research.

SCIENTIFIC ITEMS

The only scientific men of distinction whose death has been reported during the past month is Theodore Flournoy, formerly professor of physiology and psychology at the University of Geneva..

Dr. Edward Rhodes Stitt, head of the Naval Medical School at Washington, D. C., has been appointed Surgeon General of the Navy, to succeed Surgeon General Braisted, who retired on November 26.