plete staff of mechanics, which, with his recent endowment of the professional chair, gives that department a complete staff. It also provides for the establishment of a Summer School in Mining. Sir William's present gift is about $400,000, and it raises the total amount that he has given to McGill University to over $3,000, 000.

MR. WILLIAM K. VANDERBILT has made a donation of $100,000 to Vanderbilt University for the erection of a new domitory on the campus.

It is reported that the sum of over $250,000 has been subscribed toward an endowment for Brown University. A committee is endeavoring to collect $2,000,000, which it is intended to devote to strengthening the departments already existing in the University.

A BILL has passed the Kansas Legislature appropriating $55,000 for the erection of a new chemistry building at the State University.

By the will of the late Senator Justin S. Morrill, of Vermont, $1,000 is given to Vermont University, for the establishment of a scholarship.

MRS. FREDERICK C. T. PHILLIPS, of Lawrence, L. I., has given Harvard University an endowment of $50,000, the income to be used for the purchase of books in English literature.

THE Royal Geographical Society has offered £400 a year for five years' maintenance of a school or institute of geography at Oxford on condition that the University contribute an equal sum. The common University fund will contribute £300, and it is expected that the University chest will add £100. The school will be under the direction of the present reader, Mr. H. J. Mackinder, and an assistant and two lecturers will be appointed.

In addition to its great Lick Observatory, the University of California is erecting an astronomical observatory for the use of students. It contains a central dome 25 feet in diameter, which will contain a 16-inch telescope, and four domes for smaller telescopes.

DEPARTMENTS of Mining Engineering and of Mechanical Engineering have been added to

the School of Engineering of the University of Kansas.

THE College of Agriculture of Cornell University will conduct a school of nature-study at Ithaca for six weeks, beginning July 6th. Nearly 25,000 teachers in New York State are now receiving, at their own request, the Nature-Study publications of the College of Agriculture, and it is believed that many will be glad to attend a summer school devoted to this subject.

DR. JOHN T. NICOLSON, professor of mechanical engineering in McGill University, has accepted an appointment to the chair of mechanical and electrical engineering in the great Technical College recently established at Manchester, England.

Ar the University of Kansas the following promotions have recently been made: William C. Stevens, associate professor of botany, to professor of botany; Edward C. Franklin, associate professor of chemistry, to professor of physical chemistry; Arthur St.C. Dunstan, assistant professor of physics, to associate professor of physics; Marshall A. Barber, assistant professor of botany, to associate professor of bacteriology and cryptogamic botany; George Wagner, assistant professor of pharmacy, to associate professor of pharmacy; Samuel J. Hunter, assistant professor of entomology, to associate professor of entomology; Walter K. Palmer, assistant in graphics, to associate professor of mechanical engineering; Edward Bartow, instructor in chemistry, to associate professor of chemistry.

AMONG foreign appointments we note the following: Dr. Curt Hassert, of Leipzig, has been appointed associate professor of geography in the University of Tübingen; Dr. Geppert, of the University of Bonn, professor of pharmacology in the University of Giessen; Professor Schilling, of the Institute of Technology at Karlsruhe, professor of mathematics in the University of Göttingen; Dr. Georg Karsten, of Kiel, associate professor of botany in the University of Bonn, and Dr. Dove, of Berlin, professor of botany in the University of Jena. Dr. Georg Bohlmann, docent in mathematics in the University of Göttingen, has been promoted to a professorship.

past, and whose remains lie entombed in the rocks, mute but unimpeachable witnesses of the story of their becoming and development.

It was generally agreed

and fully admitted by the foremost thinkers of this critical period that these remains not only once formed parts of living animals, but that they furnish safe guides for the determination of the deposits in which they are found, in the general time scale of the earth's history.

Fossils representing the higher forms were not unknown in Europe at the time this discussion arose, but the specimens from which they were known were in general so fragmentary and lacking in consecutiveness as to furnish little evidence for or against the pretensions of the Darwinian hypothesis. To such an extent was this true that Darwin was compelled to add a chapter in his great work on the Origin of Species, on what he was pleased to call the Imperfections of the Geological Record.'

It was at this juncture or shortly afterward that the famous American trio appeared upon the scene, and the tremendous weight of their testimony derived from the unrivaled record of the fossil deposits of Western America has served to take the whole question practically out of the realm of discussion and reduce it to the plane of a demonstrated fact. It has been very truly said that if we regard the truth of Evolution from Mr. Darwin's especial point of view, viz. that of living plants and animals, we shall conclude that it is a possibility; if we look at it from the standpoint of embryology our judgment must be that it is a probability, but if we examine it from the evidence of paleontology it is no longer a possibility or a probability, but a living truth.

Such, in brief, is the basis of the claims to distinction which the works of these men offer. The share which Leidy took in the

performance of this great work has already been told; the second chapter, devoted to the brilliant discoveries of Cope, has likewise been written, and it remains now to speak of the work of the man whose scientific labors form the subject of the present sketch.

Othniel Charles Marsh was by nature a student and early gave evidence of what his future career was to be by a love for nature and natural objects. As a boy he collected birds, insects, minerals and fossils. He was born in Lockport, N. Y., October 29, 1831, and in 1852 went to Phillips Andover Academy, where he graduated with honors. He afterwards entered Yale, from which institution he graduated in 1860. in college he became deeply interested in geology, paleontology and mineralogy, and spent two additional years after his graduation in the Sheffield Scientific School at Yale and three years in Germany in pursuit of these branches. In 1866 a professorship of vertebrate paleontology was established in Yale and he was called to fill it. Between this and the time of his graduation he had published a number of important papers on 'Minerals and Fossils,' many of which appeared in the American Journal of Science. In 1868 he began his investigations of the Western fossil deposits, and this he was all the better able to do on account of the inheritance of a considerable fortune from his uncle, George Peabody, the banker. It was largely through his influence that this latter gentleman was induced to make the munificent gifts to the University which led to the establishment of the Peabody Museum at Yale.

The record of his discoveries from the time of his appointment to the professorship is one of almost continual triumph in the bringing to light of new and strange forms of life that had inhabited the western hemisphere in the distant past. Pre