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484 $5,000 to Dr. Lewis Boss, Dudley Observatory, Albany, N. Y., for astronomical observations and computations, and $4,000 to Professor W. W. Campbell for pay of assistants in researches at Lick Observatory.

Several of the largest appropriations were made in bibliography: $10,000 to Dr. Robert Fletcher, Army Medical Museum, Washington, D.C., for preparing and publishing the Index Medicus; $7,500 to Ewald Flügel, Stanford University, for the preparation of a lexicon to the works of Chaucer, and $5,000 to Mr. Herbert Putnam, Washington, D. C, for preparing and publishing a handbook of learned societies.

Other grants as large as $5,000 were for the desert botanical laboratory, described by Professor Lloyd in the last issue of the Monthly, $5,000; to Bailey Willis, U. S. Geological Survey, Washington, for geological exploration in eastern China, $12,000; for the Marine Biological Laboratory, at Woods Hole, Mass., $10,000; to Professor W. F. M. Goss, Purdue University, for a research to determine the value of high steam pressures in locomotive service, $5,000; to Professor W. O. Atwater, Wesleyan University, for investigations in nutrition. $7,000; to Professor Arthur Gamgee, Montreux, Switzerland, for preparing a report on the physiology of nutrition, $6,500. Numerous smaller grants were made from $100 upwards, and twenty-five research assistants were appointed with stipends ranging from $1,000 to $1,800. It is perhaps too early to express an opinion on the fruitfulness of the work of the institution. It appears that the large projects are more likely to yield valuable results than the smaller grants. The department of experimental evolution is certainly a useful undertaking, though we should prefer to see a laboratory established and left to develop as a separate institution on its own lines. The same is true of the solar observatory on Mount Wilson. Admirable work is sure to be accomplished under Professor Hale's direction, and an observatory should be established where the 'seeing' is the best. But the Yerkes Observatory was recently built and equipped with the largest of telescopes, and it seems unfortunate that it should be necessary for the director and part of the staff to be transferred at the expense of the Carnegie Institution to a new observatory in California, where there is already a mountain observatory of world-wide reputation. In most, though not in all, cases the secondary grants appear to have been safely bestowed, but usually for rather obvious and routine work, which might proceed