SCIENTIFIC ITEMS WE record with regret the death at the age of ninety-two of Henri Fabre, the distinguished French entomologist and author; of William Henry Hoar Hudson, late professor of mathematics at King's College, London; of Dr. Ugo Schiff, professor of chemistry at Florence; of Susanna Phelps Gage, known for her work on comparative anatomy; of Charles Frederick Holder, the California naturalist, and of Dr. Austin Flint, a distinguished physician and alienist of New York City. DR. RAY LYMAN WILBUR, professor of medicine, has been elected president of Leland Stanford Junior University. He will on January 1 succeed Dr John Caspar Branner, who undertook to accept the presidency for a limited period on the retirement of Dr. David Starr Jordan, now chancellor of the university. Dr. Wilbur graduated from the academic department of Stanford University in 1896. AT the Manchester meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Sir Arthur J. Evans, F.R S., the archeologist, honorary keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, was elected president for next year's meeting, to be held at Newcastle-on-Tyne. The meeting of 1917 will be held at Bournemouth. DR. MAX PLANCK, professor of physics at Berlin, and Professor Hugo von Seeliger, director of the Munich Observatory, have been made knights of the Prussian order pour le merite. Dr. Ramon y Cajal, professor of histology at Madrid, and Dr. C. J. Kapteyn, professor of astronomy at Groningen, have been appointed foreign knights of this order. MR. JACOB H. SCHIFF, a member of the board of trustees of Barnard College and its first treasurer, has given $500,000 to the college for a woman's building. It will include a library and additional lecture halls as well as a gymnasium, a lunch room and rooms for students' organizations. BY the will of the late Dr. Dudley P. Allen, formerly professor of surgery in the Western Reserve University, $200,000 has been set aside as a permanent endowment fund for the Cleveland Medical Library. THE SCIENTIFIC MONTHLY DECEMBER, 1915 THE INSIDE HISTORY OF A GREAT MEDICAL DISCOVERY BY ARISTIDES AGRAMONTE, M.D., Sc.D. (HON.) UNIVERSITY OF HAVANA. THE construction of the Panama Canal was made possible because it was shown that yellow fever, like malaria, could be spread only by the bites of infected mosquitoes. The same discovery, which has been repeatedly referred to as the greatest medical achievement of the twentieth century, was the means of stamping out the dreaded scourge in Cuba, as well as in New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, Vera Cruz, Colon, Panama and other Cities in America.