322 NATURAL SCIENCE. Nov.. 



that habit has been that almost every change in the professoriate has 

 been followed by an alteration in the staff. As a general rule, that 

 alteration has been such as to substitute for Oxford graduates, gra- 

 duates of other universities. Even apart from this, very few demon- 

 strators have stayed at their posts longer than a year or two. So far there 

 are at once advantages and disadvantages in this custom. But what is 

 an unmixed evil, and what is being agitated against at present, is the 

 absolute want of University status possessed by demonstrators. Ap- 

 pointed and removed at the will of the professor, unrepresented on the 

 Councils of the teaching staff, practically unrecognised by the Uni- 

 versity and totally unrecognised by the Colleges, the posts have nothing 

 to compensate the meagreness of the stipends. If the leaders of 

 Oxford University really want to stimulate Science at Oxford there is 

 a full programme of reform before them. The planks in such a reform 

 might well be : — 



Increase of Scientific Fellowships. 



Increase of Stipends of Demonstrators. 



Improvement of Status of Demonstrators by 

 (i.) Recognition by the University. 

 (2.) Recognition by the Colleges. 



(3.) Admission of Demonstrators, at least when these are 

 Oxford graduates, to the Board of Faculties, and to the 

 Museum delegacy. 



In a word, demonstratorships should be University appointments : 

 like other University appointments, they should be attached to 

 colleges, so that by virtue of office a demonstrator should become a 

 member of some senior common-room. 



Science as She is Taught. 



Being anxious to obtain some information about popular encyclo- 

 paedias, we recently set our office-boy to study and report upon them. 

 Our first selection — Saxon's " Everybody's Scrap-Book of Curious 

 Facts," by Don Lemon — was apparently not a fortunate one, and 

 the following extracts will show that our office-boy's report that the 

 statements therein contained are more correctly described as "curious '" 

 than as " facts," was not without justification. We told him to 

 commence with the Natural Sciences, and he was naturally startled 

 by finding our respected contemporary, the Zoologist, made respon- 

 sible for the statement that whalebone forms the substitute for teeth, 

 and that sheep have no teeth in the upper jaw ; we shall expect a 

 libel action to result from this. The author, however, accepts him- 

 self the responsibility for making centipedes into reptiles (p. 189), 

 and placing the teeth of the sea-urchin round the stomach (p. 300), 

 and for revealing to geologists (p. 47) that granite " is from two to 

 ten times as thick as the united thicknesses of all the other rocks," 

 and that from granite all other rocks have been derived ; if he stopped 



