Women

The twelve " greatest" women chosen by the League of Women Voters have, of course, aroused rabid discussion. The burden of many criticisms is: " We never heard of some of them! " Some of the less known:

Dr. Annie Jump Cannon, curator of the Harvard College Observatory, was born in Delaware 59 years ago, and educated at Wellesley. She has been at Harvard continuously since 1896 and ranks among the most distinguished American astronomers. Her main subjects of research are photographic spectra of stars and variable stars. She has discovered more one hundred and fifty new and variable stars, compiled a bibliography of 45,000 references, and completed a catalogue of 220,000 stellar spectra which will fill nine volumes of the Harvard Observatory Annals.

Anna Botsford Comstock, professor of nature study at Cornell, is 68 years old and studied at Cornell. She is the wife of Prof. John Henry Comstock, eminent entomologist, with whom she collaborated. She has made a special study of wood engraving and entomological illustration, and received medals for engraving at the Buffalo and Paris expositions. She is widely known as a lecturer and writer on nature study, the author of numerous handbooks on butterflies, bees, trees, etc., and the editor of the Nature Study Review.

Dr. Florence Rena Sabin is professor of histology at Johns Hopkins Medical School. She is 51 years old, a B. S. and Sc. D. of Smith and an M. D. of Hopkins, After a varied teaching experience, she became an intern at the Hopkins Hospital in 1901 and worked up through the ranks in the department of anatomy until she stands today among perhaps a score of the leading anatomists of the country. She is favorably known for her work on the medulla oblongata and the lymphatic and vascular systems. When American women presented Mme. Curie with a gram of radium on her recent American visit Dr. Sabin was selected spokesman as the greatest American woman scientist.

Martha Van Rensselaer, another Cornell light, is head of the department of home economics at the Ithaca institution. For almost 40 years she has taught in the schools and colleges of New York State, bringing through extension work a more scientific knowledge of dietetics and homemaking to thousands of less accomplished women. During the war, she was a member of the executive staff of the U. S. Food Administration. If the League's list can fairly be criticized, it is for its incompleteness. Women have made their marks in all branches of science, and to limit their professions to anatomy or astronomy is arbitrary. There are 404 of them among the 9,500 names in American Men of Science. The League might well have mentioned, for instance, Margaret F. Washburn (president of the American Psychological Association, 1922), Lillien J. Martin, Mary W. Calkins, Ethel Puffer Howes, Christine Ladd-Franklin or Helen B. Woolley, psychologists; Florence Bascom, geologist; Alice C. Fletcher (who died last month) or Elsie Clews Parsons, anthropologists; Cornelia Clapp, Katharine Foot or Mary J. Rathbun, zoologists; Lydia DeWitt or Louise Pearce, pathologists; Anna Johnson Pell or Charlotte Scott, mathematicians; Mary E. Pennington, chemist; Ellen Churchill Semple, geographer; S. Josephine Baker or Daisy Robinson, sanitarians, and several others. All of these women have national or international scientific reputations.