SIGMA XI SOCIETY WILL ESTABLISH A HARVARD CHAPTER

The Society of the Sigma Xi, national scientific honor society, will hold a formal installation by the national officers in the Faculty Room of University Hall at 4.30 o'clock tomorrow afternoon, to establish a Harvard chapter. In the evening at 7 o'clock a dinner will be given in the Harvard Union, at which Professor Harlow Shapley, of the Harvard Observatory, who recently was awarded the American Society of Arts and Sciences' medal for great scientific achievement, will preside, and at which Professor G. W. Stewart, national president of the Society of the Sigma Xi, President Lowell, and Dr. K. T. Compton, president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, will be among the speakers.

The formal installation in the afternoon will be attended by the members and the members-elect of the Harvard chapter, the representatives from neighboring chapters, and other members of the society. Academic costume will be worn. Those members of other chapters now resident at Harvard are automatically members and a large list of other members will be elected at the afternoon meeting. Plans for the Harvard chapter are still in the making.

An Honor Society

The Society is an honor society, analogous in the field of science to Phi Beta Kappa in the field of the humanities. A number of the Harvard Faculty already hold membership in other chapters of the Society at other institutions. They will form the nucleus of the Harvard chapter. Harlow Shap- ley, Paine Professor of Practical Astronomy, is president pro tem. and K. F. Mather, professor of Geology, is secretary pro tem.

It is likely that the group here will decide to hold two or three meetings each year. On of these will be the annual Sigma Xi lecture, open to the public, another will be the annual initiation and banquet, at which newly elected members are welcomed into the Society.

It may be decided to hold, from time to time, meetings at which members of the local chapter will present the results of their own research.

Instaliation Dinner

The installation dinner tomorrow evening will be attended by the members and members-elect of the Harvard chapter, members of the neighboring chapters, and wives of members, and invited guests.

The speakers, in addition to the President of the Society, and Presidents Lowell and Compton, will be Professor W. H. Snell of Brown University, Professor J. W. Howe of the Worcester Institute of Technology, and Professor J. S. Nicholas of Yale University.

Undergraduates will probably be elected only on rare occasions. The principal encouragement of the society will be given to the student in the graduate school where the student has demonstrated his aptitude for scientific research