August 2 2, 1889] 



NATURE 



191 



founding. To begin with, iron-founding is an art most 

 difficult for the non-professional man to understand, even 

 when going through a foundry, where the various branches 

 of the work are going on before his eyes. How much 

 more difficult it must be for a student to get much real 

 knowledge of the art from a book it is easy to imagine. 



As an elementary hand-book this volume will, no doubt, 

 serve its purpose. At the same time, it ought to be clearly un- 

 derstood that the iron-foundry is the only place where iron- 

 founding can be learned thoroughly. A little idea of the art 

 may be obtained by other means, but moulding, of all the 

 engineer's arts, is the one which requires the practical work 

 in an engineer's foundry for its development. The machine 

 tool is largely to blame for the deterioration of our skilled 

 workmen generally, but this has been least felt in the 

 foundry. The moulder must still have his trade between 

 his fingers to be efficient, and no amount of machinery 

 as at present designed will help him to mould, say, a pair 

 of locomotive cylinders in one casting. The book is 

 carefully written, and represents good all-round practice 

 as far as it goes. The illustrations of tools, &c., are clear 

 and accurate. N. J. L. 



LETTERS TO THE EDITOR. 



[ The Editor does not hold himself responsible for opinions ex- 

 pressed by his correspondents . Neither can he undertake 

 to return, or to correspond with the writers of, rejected 

 manuscripts intended for this or any other part of Nature. 

 No notice is taken of anonymous communications. ] 



Ice Blocks on a Moraine. 



Blocks of ice, so far as I know and so far as I remember to 

 have read, are not usual constituents of a moraine. So it may 

 be well to call attention to an instance which I saw lately when 

 walking over the Corner Glacier with my friend Mr. J. Eccles, 

 who is even more familiar than I am with glaciers, and to whom 

 the sight was novel. At the base of Monte Rosa, where it 

 begins to rise from the Corner Glacier, are two buttresses of ice- 

 worn rock ; the northern called Oh dciii See, the southern Atif 

 der Platte. Between these a glacier, evidently of no great thick- 

 ness, descends towards the west, and adjacent to each, rather on 

 the in-side, as it may be called, is a little lake. In the northern 

 of these (called the Corner See, and the only one some five-and- 

 twenty years ago, if I remember rightly) several blocks of ice 

 are now floating ; not far from it are the blocks on the moraine. 



To explain how they attained their present position, in some 

 cases more than a hundred yards from the water, and probably 

 quite twenty above it, a little more topographical description is 

 needed. The moraine of which they forai a part is not a ridge 

 composed of, or at least masked by stones, but a very gentle 

 swell of ice, over which, especially on the eastern side, blocks 

 are scattered in open order. It extends from one lakelet to the 

 other, and is produced as follows. As said above, the glacier 

 which passes between these rock-buttresses is by no means a 

 thick one, but the southern flank of Auf der Platte is swept by 

 a huge ice-stream which descends from the snow-fields of the 

 Lys-joch, and is prevented from much lateral expansion by the 

 pressure <if a second large glacier which drains the northern face 

 of the Zwillinga. This enormous mass of ice tends to pond 

 back the smaller glacier ; thus the moraine, mentioned above, is 

 mainly formed by the left lateral moraine of the latter, by a few 

 blocks which come down its mid stream, and possibly by the 

 right lateral moraine of the Lys Glacier. The obstructed ice, 

 however, is forced up so as to form a sort of flattened wave, so 

 that if one were coming right down the face of Monte Rosa one 

 would mount 50 or 60 feet from the margin of the Corner See, 

 or perhaps half as much from the middle part of the Monte 

 Rosa glacier, and then, after a slight descent, would again ascend 

 a gentle slope in order to arrive on the broad united ice-stream 

 which bears the name of the Corner Glacier. 



The blocks of ice are numerous. A few of the largest must 

 contain about 8000 cubic feet — many vary from 2000 to 5000 

 cubic feet— indeed, in the northern part of the moraine I think 

 the ice exceeds the rock in actual volume. These ice-blocks, in 

 some cases, are mounted on ice-pedestals, just as is rock in a 

 glacier-table ; the support rising perhaps a couple of feet above 



the level of the glacier. Of course they were "perspiring" 

 freely under a July sun, and do mt make a longjiurney ; probably 

 few succeeding in getting a furlong away from their source. 



That these blocks of ice began as bergs in the Corner See is 

 indubitable. They have been elevated to their present position 

 by the strugggle between the confluent ice-stream^ ; the smaller 

 of these impinging upon the larger almost at right angles, and 

 being thus forced upwards by the obstacle. The number of 

 the blocks suggests the possibility that the glacier it«elf may 

 form part of the bed of the Corner See ; for they would be more 

 readily removed from the water, if the actual bed of the lakelet, 

 instead of being at rest, were slowly travelling forward and 

 upward. 



The above description illustrates the way in which (as I have 

 seen suggested) blocks of rock in past geological ages may some' 

 times have been carried up-hill by glaciers. At the same time I 

 may observe that I should myself be reluctant to found upon it 

 any very sweeping generalization. T. G. Bonney. 



The Inheritance of Injuries. 



In the notice of Dr. Weismann's " Ueber die Hypothese einer 

 Vererbung von Verletzungen " (Nature, July 25, p. 303) there 

 occurs the following commentary : — It is not so certain that all 

 will admit Weismann's contention that the demolition of the in- 

 heritance of injuries furnishes strong presumptive evidence that 

 acquired characters are not inherited. // might w:ll be urged 

 that there is a great distinction between characters which are 

 obviously not useful {such as injuries) and useful characters." 



I have italicized the last sentence, desiring to call the attention 

 of those interested in the subject to some points of difference be- 

 tween useful and not useful or disabling variations, as these may 

 be supposed to lend themselves to transmission by inheritance. 

 The appreciation of these points of difference is calculated, I 

 believe, to greatly assist in settling the important question as to 

 the inheritance of acquired characters. 



In my work on " Dissolution and Evolution and the Science 

 of Medicine " (Longmans and Co.) an attempt is made to show 

 from various considerations that non- congenital diseases, includ- 

 ing injuries, are not inheritable. The chief contention is that 

 diseases and injuries are simply disorganizations of pre-existent 

 functions and structures. They are not, as useful and normal 

 characters are, integrated and organized arrangements of the 

 organism's energies, but bodily disintegrations inseparable from 

 the actions of the environment. Diseases as dissimilar as a 

 common burn and general paralysis of the insane, are shown, in 

 the work I speak of, to be alike in so far that they are dis- 

 integrations of the body and causally related to the environment. 

 It is this intrinsic nature of disease and injuries and their de- 

 pendence on external conditions which goes far, as I believe, to 

 make them uninheritable. Since my work is probably accessible 

 to few of the readers of Nature, I may perhaps be permitted to 

 quote the following extracts as further argument and illustration. 



" True diseases, as we have just seen, cannot be separated from 

 their causes ; and causes, being of the environment, are not 

 handed down But there are additional reasons for the feeble 

 hold which heredity has upon pathological states. When we 

 discriminate between the variations of function and structure that 

 are passed on by parent to offspring and those that are not, we 

 are forced to see that natural selection, working always in con- 

 federation with heredity, seizes upon favourable variations. 

 Natural selection appropriates organismal acquisitions. But 

 analysis discloses the fact that diseases are losses, not gains ; are 

 unfavourable variations, and offer no ' purchase ' for the co- 

 operative influence of these two modes of action. . . . But more 

 important than influences of this sort is that influence which 

 springs from the differences of nature and conditions between 

 normal and abnormal traits. Normal structures were evolved 

 in long periods of time, and have been transmitted through 

 generations unnumbered ; therefore, the tendency to their per- 

 petuation by inheritance must be immensely piedominant over 

 any tendency to the perpetuation by inheritance of the transitory 

 changes of disease. I believe that the 'vestiges' of once useful 

 structures owe their astonishing persistence to the fact that they 

 have become deeply pressed into the organic arrangement by 

 the selection and transmission of such structures for secular 

 periods. This makes intelligible the rarity with which depriva- 

 tion of a limb or other part leaves any impress upon offspring. 

 Though circumcision has been practised among the Jews for ages, 

 it has not produced congenital preputial imperfection in the race. 



