250 



NATURE 



[Apfil 20, 10 1 1 



taken place already, the progrramine of which wai agreed 

 upon with thf! dnlcgntt^s of the Austrian Government. We 

 und('rstand that a fifth cruise will soon start. 



It is announced that Mr. J. H. Grisdalc has been 

 appointed director of the Dominion Govemmt-nt's Experi- 

 mental Farm System, in succession to Dr. William 

 Saunders, C.M.G., who has retired. 



The death is announced of Colonel I. C. Walker, who 

 from 1881 to 1890 was Chief Conservator of Forests in 

 Madras, and from 1895 to 1898 Inspector-General of 

 Forests in Mysore. 



We regret to see the announcement of the death, at 

 ninety-one years of age, of Mr. T. Rupert Jones, F.R.S., 

 formerly professor of geology at the Staff College, Sand- 

 hurst, and the author of many papers and essays on 

 geological subjects. 



At the meeting of the Faraday Society to be held on 

 Tuesday, May 2, Mr. A. Scott-Hansen, the well-known 

 Norwegian engineer, will deliver a lantern lecture on 

 " Hydro-electric Plants in Norway, and their Application 

 to Electrochemical Industries." On the same evening a 

 paper is down for reading by Mr. Verdon Cutts, of 

 ShefTicld, entitled " Electrometallurgy in the Steel 

 Foundry." 



On Thursday next, April 27, Prof. R. W. Wood, of the 

 Johns Hopkins University, will begin a course of three 

 lectures at the Royal Institution on " The Optical 

 Properties of Metallic Vapours," these being the Tyndall 

 lectures. The Friday evening discourse on April 28 will 

 be delivered by Prof. W. M. Flinders Petrie on " The 

 Revolutions of Civilisation," on May 5 by Prof. M. O. 

 Forster on " New Organic Compounds of Nitrogen," and 

 on May 12 by Prof. William Stirling on " Biology and the 

 Kinematograph. " 



The annual conversazione of the Selborne Society will be 

 held on May 5, in the theatre and halls of the Civil Service 

 Commission, Burlington Gardens, W. This year there will 

 be very interesting exhibits of rural industries, including 

 the prehistoric occupation of Flint Knapping, whch still 

 survives in Suffolk, where gun flints and strike-a-lights for 

 tinder boxes to export to tropical countries is still carried 

 on. The president, Lord Avebury, will take the chair in 

 the theatre, and a lecturette will be given on " The Eggs 

 of Butterflies and Moths," illustrated by photographs by 

 Mr. F. Noad Clark. 



The 1912 Boston Electric Show will be held in Boston, 

 Massachusetts, U.S.A., from September 28 to October 26, 

 1912. It will occupy the whole of the great Mechanics' 

 Building, with more than 105,000 square feet of exhibit 

 floor space and accommodations for more than 100,000 

 visitors at one time. This building is the largest exhibi- 

 tion structure of the kind in the world. The organisation 

 of this electric show, the financial responsibility of its 

 management, and the scope and policies of the great under- 

 taking, are under the auspices and supervision of the 

 Edison Electric Illuminating Company of Boston. 



At the Plymouth Laboratory of the Marine Biological 

 Association, the usual Easter vacation course in marine 

 biology was conducted by Prof. W. Garstang, and was 

 attended by seventeen students from Oxford, Cambridge, 

 the Imperial College of Science, Leeds University, and 

 Bedford College. Dr. C. Shearer, of Trinity College, took 

 a class of six Cambridge students to Plymouth for a course 

 of work on experimental embryology. Artificial partheno- 

 genesis of the eggs of Echinus esculentus was successfully 

 NO. 2164, VOL. 86] 



carried out by the student*, and n number of experiments 

 on the line* of work of I-ocb and Driesch were repeated. 

 As t« usual at this time of the year, the research table* 

 have been well occupied, eleven visiting naturali'^f '-i 

 addition to three on the permanent staff, having; 

 engaged in zoological investigations. 



The first non-stop flight from Ix>ndon to Paris v.is 

 made, on April 12, on a Bl^riot monoplane by M. Pierre 

 Prier in 3h. 56m. M. Prier, who is the chief instructor 

 of the Bl^-riot School at Hendon, left that ground at 

 1,37 p.m., taking a course for Dover via Hampsf«ad, 

 Highgate, Greenwich, Chatham, and Canterbury, 

 was a slight north-east wind as he started, which ct 

 to a north-west by the time he reached Dover, at 2.50 p.m. 

 Thirty minutes later he was over Boulogne, and steering 

 a straight course over .'\bbeville and Beauvais for Paris, 

 where he arrived at 5.33 p.m., making a perfect landing 

 in front of the Bl^riot sheds at the Issy-les-Moulineaux 

 aviation ground. The height maintained throughout was 

 between 1500 and 2000 feet, except at the Channel cross- 

 ing, when he rose to more than 3000 feet. The machine 

 was fitted with a 50 horse-power Gnome motor and three 

 special tanks for an extra supply of petrol, of which, how- 

 ever, barely half was used. M. Prier, who found his way 

 by means of a compass designed by M. Bl^riot and a map, 

 suffered no inconvenience throughout the journey except 

 slight inflammation of the eyes, due to h-^ ...-i, .-.;.^,< tr^ 

 equip himself with goggles. 



The council of the Central and .Associated Chuaibtrs of 

 Agriculture has appointed a committee to report upon the 

 desirability of the adoption of uniform weights and 

 measures. It is not yet clear how this inquiry will be 

 conducted. On previous occasions when local bodies have 

 been consulted, the reports received from them have been 

 of a contradictory character, so that it has appeared hope- 

 less to propose a system likely to meet with general satis- 

 faction among agriculturists. It is improbable that the 

 metric system would meet with much support, hn opinion 

 appears to prevail in some quarters that the weights 

 specified in the Corn Returns Act of 1882 for a bushel of 

 wheat, barley, and oats, respectively, are in some way pre- 

 judicial to the cereals market in this country. There is 

 also a proposal to apply the term " hundredweight " to 

 the cental of 100 lb., and to fix the stone at 10 lb. instead 

 of 14 lb., as a preliminary to decimalising our present 

 system of weights. A Select Committee of the House of 

 Commons appointed to inquire into the various weights 

 and measures used in the sale of grain reported in 1893, 

 after a lengthy investigation, in favour of the retention of 

 the weights specified in the Corn Returns Act, and also 

 recommended that the sale of all cereals should be in 

 terms of the hundredweight of 112 lb., and that no other 

 weight or measure of capacity should be referred to in 

 any sale. 



Dr. John Duncan Gregorson, whose death is reporte 

 to have taken place in the recent massacre of the British 

 mission on the Assam frontier, was born in Lochgilphead, 

 .Argyllshire, in 1871. He entered the University of Edin- 

 burgh in i88q, and graduated M.B., CM., in 1894. After 

 a course of post-graduate study, he was for several years 

 in practice in Leytonstone, but formed a desire for work 

 in the domain of tropical diseases, which an offer made to 

 him about eight years ago enabled him to fulfil. During 

 this period he was medical officer to a group of tea 

 estates located around Tinsukia, in Upper Assam, and two 

 years ago published, in the Journal of Tropical Medicine, 

 a paper giving some interesting notes on the methods used 

 in combating disease among the coolies imported from 



