Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/675

Rh by the president, with the recommendation that provision be made for the appointment of a board of surveys to superintend national surveys and explorations in the islands. This board would consist of representatives of the Coast and Geodetic Survey, the Geological Survey, the Biological Survey, the Division of Botany, the Forest Service, the Bureau of Fisheries and the Bureau of American Ethnology. The president urges that while these surveys would be beneficial to the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands, they should be undertaken as a national work valuable for the people of this country and of the world. It is to be hoped that congress will find time to take up this measure at the approaching session.

American Academy of Arts and Sciences has published a pamphlet regarding the Rumford Fund administered by it which contains some facts of general scientific interest. Benjamin Thompson, who was created a count by Prince Maximilian of Bavaria and who chose to be called Count Rumford after a New Hampshire town from which the family of his wife had come, was born in Massachusetts in 1753 and died in France in 1814. He founded the Royal Institution of Great Britain in 1799, and by a bequest established the Rumford professorship for the application of science to the useful arts at Harvard University. In 1796 he gave to the Royal Society of Great Britain and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences of Boston the sum of $5,000, the income of which in each case was to be given once every second year to the author of the most important discovery or useful improvement made during the preceding two years in heat or in light. The premium was to take the form of medals. An illustration of the medal awarded by the American Academy is here reproduced.

The Royal Society made the first award from the fund of Count Rumford himself in 1802; and every second year since, with the exception of several years, the medal has been awarded. The list of those on whom the premium has been conferred by the Royal Society is an illustrious series of men of science closing with Professor Ernest Rutherford, of McGill University, on whom it was conferred in 1904. The Royal Society was not limited in regard to the nationality of those on whom the premium could be conferred, but the American Academy by the terms of the gift could only confer it on authors on the continent of America or the American Islands. It appears that for many years there was no claimant whose merit was such in the opinion of the academy as to justify the award, and the fund accumulated to the amount of $20,000, when in 1831 application was made to the Supreme Court of Massachusetts for relief. It was ordered that in addition to the