296 SCIENCE PROGRESS 



be quite candid, we doubt whether it would be worth 185, to very many 

 people ! (Paper covers, H.M. Stationery Office, 1921.) 



Bulletins Nos. 19, 20 and 21 of the Institute of Science and Industry, 

 Australia, deal respectively with Wood Waste, the White Ant Pest in Northern 

 Australia, and with Power Alcohol. The first of these, by Mr. I. H. Boas, 

 M.Sc, contains a most exhaustive account of the possible ways of utilising 

 the waste product of the saw mills, which amounts to about one-and-a-half 

 million tons per year in Australia. In the United States the Forest Service 

 has organised a highly-successful Wood Waste Exchange to bring producers 

 and buyers into contact with one another. The purposes to which this waste 

 — either in the form of trimmings, edgings, etc., or of sawdust — are manifold ; 

 Mr. Boas gives a list of forty-one for sawdust alone, including such diverse 

 usages as circus rings, soap-making and the manufacture of alcohol and 

 viscose. This last industry had grown to enormous dimensions in the States ; 

 for example, in 1919 there were exported fifteen million pairs of silk stockings 

 made from wood pulp. The report embodies the results of experiments 

 made to determine the suitability of typical Australian woods {e.g., Jarrah 

 and Karri) for various purposes, and should result in the establishment of 

 a number of new and remunerative industries in the continent. Bulletin 

 No. 20 is a reprint of No. 6, with an addendum summarising the work which 

 has been done since January 1918, when the report was first published. It 

 is clear that the petrol position is rapidly becoming critical ; the consumption 

 in the U.S. in September 1920 was about fourteen million gallons per day 

 or two millions in excess of the production in that country. Experiments 

 have shown that power alcohol is satisfactory as a motor spirit and that, 

 with suitable priming, any ordinary motor-car engine can be started from 

 the cold. Unfortunately, however, the ideal source of this alcohol has yet 

 to be discovered and the only progress made in Australia has been distinctly 

 negative for the yield obtained from sorghum (the source favoured in the 

 first report), by the methods so far employed, has been disappointingly low. 

 The third Bulletin contains some preliminary observations on the Mastotermes 

 Darwiniensis and other Termites in Northern Australia. These insects are 

 enormously destructive (it is stated that they have even penetrated a leaden 

 water pipe !) and at present there seems no way of eradicating them, hence 

 the chief recommendations in the report are concerned with methods of 

 rendering the materials most frequently attacked termite proof. 



We have received from the Oxford University Press a copy of No. 7 of the 

 Harvard Bulletins of Education, which contains an account of the methods 

 employed in the " sight-saving " classes in the schools of certain American 

 cities. These classes are intended for children who, while not being blind, 

 have eyesight either so defective as to seriously handicap them in ordinary 

 class-work or such as is likely to be still further impaired by continual use of 

 ordinary school-books. It is found that one in every 1,000 children in the 

 large towns and one in every 500 in the smaller ones fall within this category. 

 Previous to 19 13 these children either had to do their best in the normal 

 classes or were sent to schools for the blind. In either case the child suffered, 

 for amongst ordinary children he appeared a dunce, and at a school for the 

 blind endeavoured to read Braille by sight in class-rooms where no attention 

 at all had been paid to lighting, either natural or artificial. A sight-saving 

 class is a class held in a properly lighted room by a special teacher, whose 

 duty it is to help the children to keep pace with those enjoying normal eyesight. 

 Special text-books are used, printed in twenty-four point heavy type, and most 

 of the written work is done on blackboards, or, with pupils above the fourth 

 grade, on typewriters, using the touch method. Whenever possible [e.g., for 

 all oral work) these weak-sighted children work in the same class as their 

 fellows ; this guards against the danger of a lower standard being set for them 

 than for the others. Finally, it may be noted that precautions are taken 



