War Notes 55 



tion of a scientific truth, which seems pure in the sense that it has no 

 present application, may be discovered ; and that, on the other hand, 

 innumerable applications are nowadays made of truths which five 

 years or fifty years ago seemed as remote from all human interests 

 as the Observation attributed to Thaies, that a bit of amber rubbed 

 with a piece of silk would repel pith-balls suspended by fine fila- 

 ments. Yet all magnetism and electricity with their infinite appli- 

 cations hark back to this experiment by Thaies and to Galvani's 

 Observation of twitchings in a frog's legs. Science: 19 15, xlii, 

 p. 928. 



IL WAR NOTES 



Univ. item. About 1200 past and present students and mem- 

 bers of the staff of the Imperial Coli, of Science and Tech., London, 

 are serving with the forces. 



Recovery of wounded soldiers and return to the ranks. The 

 Münch. med. Woch. quotes a Russian daily to the effect that there 

 is great complaint in Russia because only 18 percent of the wounded 

 soldiers recover sufficiently to return to the ranks, while the Ger- 

 mans report that 60 percent are returned to the front. The Rus- 

 sians regard this ratio, 60 to 18, as testifying to the superior tech- 

 nical skill of the Germans in treating the wounded. 



Miscellaneous items. A number of German physicians and 

 pharmacists, taken prisoners by the British in Southwestern Africa, 

 have been exchanged for a corresponding number of British medical 

 men in German hands. 



The landslide in the Panama canal has interfered with the ex- 

 port to England of sodium nitrate, from Chile, by prolonging the 

 time of the voyage. English scientists urge the Substitution of 

 artificial calcium nitrate. 



In an address on " Science and the War," before the Leeds Med. 

 Seh., Sir William Osler said : " In the war my Lady Science is busy 

 both ways. She employs artists in death and artists in life; she 

 supplies them — so impartial are abstractions — with asphyxiating 

 gases and with antiseptic dressings; she manufactures with equal 

 mind high explosives and protective vaccines, submarines and 

 motor-ambulances. What a thing it is to be an abstraction, a name 

 for systematized thought; to have no niorals, no likes or dislikes; 



