u6 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



few of the younger genei-ation will be able to read it. The Committee has 

 drawn up a scheme for an English compendium in 53 volumes, each containing 

 1,000 quarto pages and costing £2 2s. — an amount estimated to cover expenses 

 if an edition of 2,000 copies be subscribed for. The sum involved is, of course, 

 rather large, but it becomes considerably less imposing when it is remembered 

 that German chemists have recently (before Nov. 11 last) subscribed ,£125,000 for 

 the further extension of their literature. It is proposed that the Organic section, in 

 18 volumes, should be arranged on the lines of Stelzner's Li teratur- Register ; 

 the Inorganic section, which would require 16 volumes, would similarly be based 

 on Abegg ; while the Physico-chemical volume would be of the form adopted by 

 Landolt and Bernstein in their Tabellen. The 18 volumes which remain would 

 be needed for an abstract of the English Organic patents. These would appeal to 

 a much smaller public than the first three sections, and the Committee are of the 

 opinion that the question of its publication should be deferred for the present. The 

 Committee further suggest that chemists in France and the United States should be 

 invited to co-operate in the scheme, but it is not impossible that these will consider 

 that they should have been approached before its format had been decided on, 

 especially as the Physico-chemical tables which the Committee desire to have 

 published are even now rendered unnecessary by the Annual Tables published 

 by a Committee appointed by the seventh Congress of Applied Chemistry held in 

 London in June 1909, and which receive financial aid from the Governments of 

 England, France, and the United States. It is not, indeed, at all clear why these 

 tables should have been ignored in the report, for at least one of the signatories is 

 also a member of the Annual Tables Committee. Surely it would have been 

 much more fitting if the work and organisation of this latter Committee had 

 been made the basis of the larger scheme. A larger circulation would thus have 

 been ensured, and the standard of the work would be raised owing to the wider 

 choice then possible in the selection of the compilers. Indeed, it is by no means 

 certain that a sufficient number of these, with the necessary qualifications, could 

 be found in England alone. It is not impossible that the pre-eminence of 

 Germany in this class of work in the past was largely due to its suitability for the 

 national temperament. 



The report of the General Education Board of the U.S.A. for 1917-18 contains 

 an account of an investigation of the technique of handwriting carried out by 

 means of the cinematograph. The analysis of movement by this method has been 

 used for several years for speeding up manufacturing processes and minimising 

 fatigue with remarkable results, and it would seem that it may be equally 

 successful in its application to penmanship. An examination of the motion 

 pictures of the movements of good writers, poor writers, and writers who had 

 received different kinds of training, showed that certain features of position and 

 movement were of considerable importance, and others much less so than is 

 commonly supposed. A teaching method has been organised on the basis of the 

 results obtained, and a year's trial in a public school in Chicago has shown 

 the new method to be full of promise. 



From experiments on the action of mustard gas (Dichloroethyl sulphide) on 

 marine organisms, Messrs. Lillie, Clowes and Chambers have obtained sub- 

 stantial support for the theory, advanced by Marshall and Smith, that the gas 

 penetrates the walls of living cells (in virtue of its high lipoid-solubility), and 

 inside liberates hydrochloric acid, which, in free state, is relatively incapable of 

 penetrating the cell. They suggest, therefore, that to obtain a remedy, search 

 should be made for a substance whose physical properties, solubilities, and rate 



