The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has received, by the will of
Mr. Edward Austin, deceased at the age of ninety-four years, a bequest
of $400,000, the interest of which is to be used for the assistance
of needy and meritorious teachers in prosecuting their studies. In
addition to this bequest, the institute received, during 1898, an
accession of $928,000 to its general funds, and one of $46,000 to its
scholarship funds.
* * * * *
At the recent meeting of the Allied Scientific Societies, at New Haven,
Conn., Mr. G. K. Gilbert, of the United States Geological Survey, was
chosen to act as retiring President of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, in place of Prof. Edward Orton, deceased.
* * * * *
The meeting of the Allied Scientific Societies of the United States was
held in New Haven, Conn., during holiday week. It was much larger than
either of the meetings previously held, and was attended by nearly five
hundred members, representing ten societies--viz., the American Society
of Naturalists, the Association of American Anatomists, the American
Morphological, Physiological, Psychological, and Chemical Societies,
the Society for Plant Morphology and Physiology, the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Archæological
Association of America. The discussions were all interesting.
* * * * *
The great Roman Catholic Missionary Society, the Sacred Congregation
of the Propagation of the Faith, is reported to have sent a circular
to all its missionaries urging them to interest themselves in the
collection of natural-history specimens for scientific societies and
institutions. This is intended, it is said, to interest and encourage
missionaries who have a scientific bent, and to inform the world that
the Church is not hostile to biological research.
* * * * *
We have to record, among the later deaths of men in science, the
names of Francis Guthrie, formerly Professor of Mathematics in Graaff
Reinet College and afterward in South African College till 1898, aged
sixty-eight years; he was interested in botany, on which he gave public
lectures, and, with Harry Bolus, revised the order of Heaths for _Flora
capensis_; Prof. P. Knuth, botanist and author of researches on the
relations of insects and flowers and on cross-fertilization, at Kiel,
Germany, aged forty-five years; he had published two of the projected
three volumes of the _Handbuch der Blüten Biologie_; Prof. R. Yatube,
Japanese botanist; Ferdinand Tiemann, honorary Professor of Chemistry
in the University of Berlin; Alexander McDougall, inventor, sixty years
ago, of an atmospheric railway, and since of many useful mechanical and
chemical appliances, at Southport, England; Dr. Camera Pestana, chief
of the Bacteriological Institute at Lisbon, Portugal, of plague, which
he contracted while experimenting with it at Oporto; and Prof. Elliott
Coues, an American naturalist, most distinguished in ornithology, in
Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, December 25th, after a surgical
operation, aged sixty-seven years; he had been a professor in Norwich
University, Vermont, and in the National Medical College in Washington,
and had done scientific work while in the military service of the
Government, in the Geological Survey, and in the United States Northern
Boundary Commission; and was the author of several books on ornithology
and on the Fur-bearing Animals, besides editing the journals of Lewis
and Clark and other books of American exploration.