176 



NATURE 



[December 8, 1910 



HOTES. 



Sir J. J. Thomson, F.R.S., has been elected a corre- 

 sponding member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. 



The principal trustees of the British Museum have 

 appointed Mr. Walter Campbell Smith, of Corpus Christi 

 College, Cambridge, to an assistantship in the mineral 

 department. 



Prof. E. P. di Sessa (Rome), Prof. E. G. Warburg 

 (Charlottenburg), Prof. J. H. Poincaf^ (Paris), Prof. 

 Alexander Graham Bell (Washington), and Prof. P. N. 

 Lebedew (Moscow), have been elected honorary members of 

 the Royal Institution. 



The sixth annual exhibition of electrical, optical, and 

 other physical apparatus, arranged by the Physical Society, 

 will be held at the Imperial College of Science, 

 Imperial Institute Road, South Kensington, on Tuesday, 

 December 20. 



At the request of the council of the Roj-al Society of 

 Arts, Sir Edward Grey, Secretary of State for Foreign 

 Affairs, authorised the transmission of the society's Albert 

 medal to his Majesty's Ambassador at Paris for its 

 presentation to Madame Curie. Sir Francis Bertie re- 

 ceived Madame Curie at the British Embassy on 

 November 25, and handed to her the Albert medal, tell- 

 ing her that he had been instructed by the Secretary of 

 State to present it to her on the part of the Royal Society 

 of Arts in recognition of the services rendered to the 

 world by her discovery of radium, and adding that it gave 

 him great pleasure to be the medium of carrying out the 

 wishes of the society. 



In view of the candidature of Madame Curie for 

 membership of the Paris Academy of Sciences, great 

 interest attaches to the discussion at the last monthly meet- 

 ing of the central administrative committee of the five 

 French academies, on the admission of women as members 

 of the Institut de France. .According to the Paris corre- 

 spondent of the Times, the committee was unable to agree, 

 and it was decided, finally, that the question should be 

 remitted to the administrative committees of the various 

 academies, that their decisions should be considered at the 

 next sitting on December 28, and that the whole question 

 should be then transferred to the plenary trimestral united 

 sitting of all the academies on January 4. It may be 

 mentioned here that Madame Curie has just been elected 

 an honorary foreign member of the Stockholm Academy 

 of Sciences. 



The Vienna correspondent of the Times states that Mr. 

 Alton, of the Radium Institute in London, has bought 

 from the Austrian Ministry of Works, on behalf of Sir 

 Ernest Cassel, i gram of radium for the sum of nearly 

 15,000/. The radium is a gift by Sir Ernest Cassel to the 

 institute, and is intended for use in cancer research. One 

 half of the gram is now being tested at the Vienna Radium 

 Institute, and will be sent to England next month. The 

 other half is being extracted from the pitchblende at 

 Joachimsthal, and will be available in three or four 

 months. Mr. J. W. Gifford, of Chard, Somerset, has 

 announced to Prince Alexander of Teck, chairman of the 

 Weekly Board of the Middlesex Hospital, his intention of 

 presenting 40 milligrams of radium to the cancef research 

 laboratories of that institution for the prosecution of their 

 investigations. At current rates this quantity of radium, 

 weighing approximately one seven-hundredth of an ounce, 

 is worth about 600Z. 



NO. 2145, VOL. 85] 



The following are among the lecture arrangements at 

 the Royal Institution before Easter : — Prof. Siivanus P. 

 Thompson, a Christmas course of six illustrated lectures 

 on sound, musical and non-musical, a course of experi- 

 mental acoustics, adapted to a juvenile auditory ; Prof. 

 F. W. Mott, six lectures on heredity; Dr. A. E. H. Tutton, 

 three lectures on crystalline structure : mineral, chemical, 

 and liquid ; Dr. M. Aurel Stein, three lectures on explora- 

 tions of desert sites in Central Asia ; the Astronomer Royal, 

 Mr. F. W. Dyson, three lectures on recent progress in 

 astronomy ; Dr. P. Chalmers Mitchell, three lectures on 

 problems of animals in captivity ; Prof. Arthur Keith, two 

 lectures on giants and pygmies; Prof. W. A. Bone, two 

 lectures on surface combustion and its industrial applica- 

 tions ; Sir J. J. Thomson, six lectures on radiant energy 

 and matter. The Friday evening meetings will commence 

 on January 20, when Sir James Dewar will deliver a dis- 

 course on chemical change at low temperatures. Succeed- 

 ing discourses will probably be given by Prof. W. H. 

 Bragg, Mr. A. E. Shipley, Prof. H. E. Armstrong, Prof. 

 Jean Perrin, Prof. Karl Pearson, Mr. J. H. Balfour- 

 Browne, Sir David Gill, Prof. H. S. Hele-Shaw, Sir J. J. 

 Thomson, and other gentlemen. 



An important question with regard to the distribution 

 and occurrence of the various species of tsetse-flies in 

 Africa is to what extent the areas infested by them re- 

 main constant. It has long been known that in a given 

 tract of country certain parts harbour tsetse-flies, while 

 from other parts they are absent ; but of late years an 

 impression has grown up that these areas are liable to 

 change, and that the fly is spreading. Sir Alfred Sharpe. 

 in a memoir on the habits of Glossina morsitans in 

 Nyasaland (Bulletin of Entomological Research, vol. i., 

 part iii.), is of opinion that fly-areas do not alter their 

 limits to any appreciable extent. He states, however, 

 that within the area, fly may sometimes be found in one 

 part, sometimes in another, and in very variable quantity 

 at different times. He believes that the numbers of the 

 fly depend largely on the season of the year, but also on 

 other causes impossible as yet to define. On the other 

 hand, Mr. P. E. Hall communicates to the same journal 

 some notes on the m.ovements of G. morsitans in N.E. 

 Rhodesia, and indicates on a map a number of areas 

 which, to the best of his knowledge, were clear of fly 

 up to 1906, but are now fly-infested. This conflict of 

 opinion (perhaps more apparent than real) shows how 

 urgent is the need of systematic investigations by expert 

 entomologists upon these and other questions relating to 

 the bionomics of tsetse-flies. 



In the Philippine Journal of Science for June Dr. R. B. 

 Bean, of the Anatomical Laboratory, Manila, reports the 

 discovery of a living specimen in the island of Luzon 

 which he believes to bear close relationship to the Palaeo- 

 lithic type represented by the Neanderthal skull. The 

 massive lower jaw with its square ramus and receding 

 chin, the low cephalic index (73-68), heavy brow ridges, 

 rounded orbits, large nasal apertures and high nasal index 

 (102-2), combined with small stature (156-8 cm.), muscular 

 frame and short femur, all approximate to a form similar 

 to that of the antediluvian man of Europe, Homo heidel- 

 bergensis. Dr. Bean in the same issue of the Journal 

 continues his study of the racial anatomy of the people 

 of Taytay, dealing here with the women, whom he finds 

 to be more primitive than the men, and closely resembling 

 the women of Siberia. The Blend type is largely primitive 

 in character, and the Austroloid variety comes between the 

 Iberian and the primitive. > 



