SCIENCE IN 1901. 427 



Board was made master of the situation, for Parliament, while passing 

 the Bill for the Behr Monorail high-speed line between Liverpool and 

 Manchester, practically delegated the power to authorize the construc- 

 tion of the line to that body, which must approve of the engineering 

 details before work can be begun, and may require the promoters to 

 carry out any preliminary experiments it thinks necessary. From the 

 point of view of public safety there are doubtless advantages in this 

 policy of entrusting everything to the Board of Trade, but its practical 

 effect will probably be that British engineers will be debarred from tak- 

 ing the lead in any new electrical development which conceivably in- 

 volves risk to human life. In connection with high-speed lines, men- 

 tion must be made of the experiments carried out in Germany on the 

 Berlin-Zossen military line, where, by the aid of electricity at a high 

 voltage, a speed of about 100 miles an hour was obtained, not, it would 

 appear, without some damage to the permanent way. 



That wide field of inquiry which lies in the borderland between 

 physics and chemistry is attracting an ever-increasing number of work- 

 ers. Though no discovery of outstanding importance was made, the 

 Cambridge school can point to a year of solid work on the phenomena 

 of ionization and the existence of bodies many times smaller than mole- 

 cules, and, in spite of the protests of some chemists, the ionic dissocia- 

 tion hypothesis continues to find increasing favor among the great body 

 of physicists. In France progress was made in the investigation of the 

 radio-active bodies by M. and Mme. Curie, Becquerel, and others; the 

 first-named inquirers made the observation that the rays emitted by 

 radium exercise a burning and eroding effect on the skin. In Germany, 

 Bredig and Ikeda continued their remarkable experiments with 'inor- 

 ganic ferments,' in particular following out the analogy between the 

 catalytic action of colloidal platinum and that of organic ferments in 

 regard to the action of poisons. They find that the rate of decomposi- 

 tion of hydrogen peroxide in presence of colloidal platinum is in- 

 liuenced to an extraordinary degree by substances like prussic acid, hy- 

 drogen sulphide, and mercuric chloride, even in minute quantities. 

 Thus the catalytic effect of a platinum solution is halved by prussic 

 acid, even when the concentration of the latter is only 0.0014 milli- 

 gram per liter; the effect of this substance is, however, only tem- 

 porary, and the solution gradually recovers in course of time. A large 

 number of substances exert this poisoning action to a greater or less 

 extent, but there are some which intensify the catalytic action of the 

 colloidal platinum, among them being formic acid and dilute nitric 

 acid. Experiments have also been tried with a colloidal solution of gold 

 obtained in a manner similar to that employed in the case of platinum, 

 by passing an electric current between gold wires in a dilute solution 

 of sodium hydroxide. This gold solution, which is bluish-violet in color 



