of the Champlain canal at Schuylerville has been selected and an effort is being made to complete the necessary constructions before the spring spawning season is over. If these can be intensively stocked this spring their usefulness will be clearly demonstrated in season to prepare for an expansion of operations another year.

A portion of the canal may be stocked with smallmouth bass fry from the hatchery ponds thus providing them new pasturage and thereby reducing the loss by cannibalism. Other portions may be used for the production of largemouth bass and other nest building fishes. Yellow perch can be hatched Yellow perch can be hatched by the million to stock prepared sections of the canals in May, and then left to grow to

Portions stocked with fry require no protection from poachers. In some sections brood fish will be introduced and then operations will be similar to those at the regular pond cultural stations except that there will be less overhead expenses. The removal and distribution of the product will be under the supervision of several hatchery foremen. It is pond culture on a large scale.

The opportunity is an unusual one, and the efforts of the conservation commission to increase the abundance of food and game fishes by the use of portions of the old canals, which otherwise appear to have little commercial value, promise to be of great economic importance.

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LOSELY following the capture of Jerusalem by the British army came an announcement from the American Red Cross that it was making plans for the relief of the people of the Holy Land, who had suffered for centuries under the oppressive burdens of Turkish rule. The capture of this territory by the English merely served to emphasize the great need for assistance, as the conditions in that long-suffering country became better known.

The Red Cross determined to study the conditions of the country at first hand, and in April an

nounced the appointment of a commission to Palestine. Dr. John H. Finley, commissioner of education of the State of New York, was selected as head of the commission. Dr. Finley is peculiarly fitted to assume the many responsibilities which will be involved in this work. He is one of the best known educators of the country, having been successively president of Knox college, professor of politics at Princeton university, president of

the College of the City of New York, and commissioner of education of the State of New York. He has been a Harvard exchange lecturer in the Sorbonne, is a knight of the French legion of honor, and has had the Order of the Rising Sun bestowed upon him by Japan. He spent several weeks last

The Red Cross has had under consideration for some time methods of relieving the conditions in Palestine, which have long been known to be deplorable. In no country, perhaps, had the ravages of war been felt to so great a degree. A fearful toll of human lives had been

exacted by both famine and disease, and there have been many epidemics of cholera and typhus.

Dr. E. St. John Ward, for several years a professor of surgery in the Syrian Protestant college at Beirut, Syria (which, by the way, is a member of the university of the State of New York, of which Dr. Finley is president), who is intimately acquainted with conditions throughout the Holy Land, made an exhaustive report to the Red Cross and submitted a plan of relief. The war council of that organization granted an initial appropriation of $390,000. Dr. Ward was appointed deputy commissioner.

The Red Cross commission will devote its efforts at first to the establishment of four medical units to combat the diseases which are causing so much suffering throughout the country. It is purposed to set up a fully equipped hospital at some central point, and to organize dispensaries and village work in the more sparsely populated districts. The lay assistants attached to the medical units will devote their time to general civilian relief, such as the distribution of clothing and food and the rehabilitation and reconstruction of devastated areas.

The commission took from this country a complete equipment for the work at hand, including, besides the large store of medical and surgical supplies, automobiles and trucks, stone crushers, concrete mixers, agricultural implements, farm tractors, ice-making machines, sewing machines, lighting plants, and a quantity of foodstuffs intended largely for hospital use. In fact, the commission. has a complement of equipment which will enable it to do very much toward alleviating conditions arising from unhappiness, poverty, sickness and starvation. Other shipments will follow as needed.

The commission sailed from this country the latter part of April. Dr. Finley, whose safe arrival in Europe has been reported, will spend a short time in France and Italy

before reaching his destination. He undertook the direction of this important relief work at the request of the Red Cross and the war department, with the consent and approval of the board of regents of the university of the State of New York. The appropriations so far made by the Red Cross are intended to cover a period of six months, and Dr. Finley is expected back in Albany this fall.

The commission will work in connection with the British Syria and Palestine relief fund and the American Armenian and Syrian relief committee, which have already been doing what they could. The personnel consists of twenty-six commissioned executive officers, surgeons and engineers, and thirty-three enlisted nurses, chosen from various parts of the country.

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O have been eminently engaged in the State and in the city of New York for more than half a century is a distinction attained by few men. To be able to retire from public service at the end of that time at the age of 95 years, not to enter a quiet life, but to pursue literary work, is perhaps without parallel in this or any other State. Such a distinction belongs to Dr. Stephen Smith, commissioner of the State board of charities in New York city. Dr. Smith resigned a few months ago to Governor Whitman. It is fitting that more than usual recognition of his distinguished services to the State and to the nation be observed. STATE SERVICE is glad to reproduce here the formal action taken by the State board of charities on April 10th. It briefly sets forth the achievements of a wonderful public servant and scientist who unostentatiously labored for the improvement of health conditions for 70 years and who is still in the harness.

President Stewart of the board offered the following minute, which was seconded by Commissioner Lewis, and unanimously adopted:

"The members of the State board of charities have learned with great regret of the resignation of Dr. Stephen Smith, commissioner of this board from New York city, which was tendered tendered to Governor Whitman on February 6th last. The long continued and valuable public services of Dr. Smith to the people of the State of New York seem not only to justify but to demand extended and unusual mention in the records of this board, with which he has been associated for a longer period than with any

other of the public bodies of which he has been a member.

Stephen Smith was born on a farm near Skaneateles, Onondaga county, New York, February 19, 1823. He came of English descent, both his father's and his mother's ancestors having come from Oxfordshire, England, to New England in the seventeenth century. Later they removed to Onondaga county, New York. Stephen Smith's early years were spent on the farm and his education was that common to country boys of that time. He attended a rural village school and later on a high school at Homer in Cortland county.

"Having determined to adopt medicine as his profession, he began his studies while at the high school and in 1848 attended lectures at the Geneva medical college. In 1849 and 1850 he was a resident medical student in the hospital of the sisters of charity, Buffalo, but he came to New York in 1850 and entered the College of Physicians and Surgeons, attaining on graduation in 1851 his degree of doctor of medicine. At this time there were only two hospitals in the city of New York, Bellevue and the New York hospital, the latter then located at Duane street and Broadway. Dr. Smith obtained in 1851 the appointment as interne at Bellevue hospital in a competitive examination over ten other candidates and remained for two years in that great laboratory of human diseases. He became surgical and clinical teacher there in 1854 and so continued until 1891. He was also professor of anatomy at Bellevue hospital medical college.

"In the early '70's the governing board of Bellevue hospital desiring to improve the nursing there, referred to a committee of

three physicians, of whom Dr. Smith was one, a highly favorable report upon the training school for nurses recently established in St. Thomas hospital, London, by Florence Nightingale. This committee, under

Dr. Stephen Smith at 95

Dr. Smith's leadership, recommended the opening of a training school for women nurses and Miss Nightingale was requested to send out an instructor. She selected for that purpose Sister Helen of a Protestant Episcopal order, who opened a school and graduated nurses so efficient that they soon succeeded those untrained. From this experiment has developed the whole system of trained nursing in the United States and from that time the nursing of the sick has steadily become of a higher order.

"The first medical paper from Dr. Smith's pen was published in 1851 in the New York Medical Journal,' in May of that year, on a surgical subject and immediately estab

lished his reputation as a sound thinker and clear writer which he has retained to this day. This paper was translated into several foreign languages and led to the author's election as a member of the surgical society of Paris. In 1856 he became visiting surgeon at Bellevue hospital and in 1858 editor of the New Journal of Medicine and Collateral Sciences.' From 1860 to 1864 he was editor of the American Medical Times' and during all the years 1878-1906 he was the New York correspondent of the London Lancet' regularly sending to that leading surgical paper American medical and surgical news.

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Early in the civil war Dr. Smith published, in 1862, a Hand Book on Surgical Operations,' which proved an invaluable guide to the operating surgeon during the war, 15,000 copies of it being sold. This book was followed in 1887 by another useful book, The Principles and Practice of Operating Surgery.' His important work, the 'Civil Obligations of the Surgeon' came from the press in 1908. The medical profession has always recognized in him a wise teacher with charming methods of instruction, a brilliant and original surgical operator and a great physician and untiring worker.

"In February, 1864, a committee on sanitary inquiry of the citizen's association of New York city as its first act appointed a Council of Hygiene' comprising 29 medical practitioners, among whom was Dr. Smith. Its investigations of the sanitary condition of the city of New York were organized and supervised by Dr. Smith, and its report published in 1865 so impressed the public by its revelations and suggestions as to bring about the enactment by the legislature on April 21, 1866, of the statute creating the metropolitan board of health, with almost autocratic powers. Governor Fenton appointed Dr. Smith a commissioner of the new board of health in