December 29, 1921] 



NATURE 



575 



regions of the forest. Roads appear to have been 

 made and villages built along the hillsides, and the 

 heroic age tells of adventurers seeking fame and 

 fortune by domination of territory dotted with 

 these villages of deeply engrossed cultivators. 

 The later organisation of power, especially in 

 France, promoted the cutting of the forests, and 

 market towns grew in what now became corn- 

 land, until, with the end of the Middle Ages, the 

 growth of communication made the forest in many 

 parts little more than a memory though still 

 dominant in remote corners. The change of per- 

 sonality from the unfriendly forest full of wild 

 beasts to the rich cornland dotted with villages 

 focussing on market towns, is one of the most 

 striking changes the earth has suffered since man 

 spread over it. In the process is wrapped up 

 more of the evolution of the nation-State and of 

 our modern political-linguistic difficulties than we 

 are apt to realise. 



Healthy interrelations between geographical 

 personalities are matters of urgent concern. There 

 is special need to think of the remote corners, the 

 Scottish highlands, the Welsh valleys, the Irish 

 West, with conditions of hard effort for small 

 return, and consequently with the export of men 

 and women as a leading function. The value of 

 this function is incalculable, for the great city eats 

 up men and women soul and body, and until we 

 have altered the basis of society our one hope of 

 avoiding collapse is to have a stream of supply 

 from the remote corners where treasures of ancient 

 thought and inspiration survive and impart facul- 

 ties especially of discernment and judgment. As 

 Stevenson has it, " an honest old countryman has 

 a sense of communion " with the powers of the 

 universe, but he cannot vary from his faith 

 unless he, " in a strict and not a conventional 

 meaning," changes his mind. If the State does not 

 yet provide education and heafth grants to the 

 remote corners on a basis of area instead of a basis 



of population, private effort is at least trying to 

 show the way ; city churches help mountain 

 churches, and industrial magnates and their de- 

 scendants are trying to help the people's effort to 

 equip the youth who go out into the world, as 

 well as, in Wales at least, to maintain the genius 

 loci. Such helpful interactions will, however, not 

 only stave off the collapse of our precarious civil- 

 isation ; they may also keep the remote corner 

 from hardening its activities into dead routine or 

 falling into sheer eccentricity. 



In the Midland \'alley of Scotland, so open to 

 the sea and the Continent, the inrush of new words 

 ousted Celtic speech, though isolation from 

 England allowed a good deal more of the heritage 

 of Celtic place-names to be passed on than was 

 the case in England, and also helped the Scots 

 law to live, whereas, though the Welsh language 

 persisted, Welsh law died largely for want of an 

 administrative centre. The personality of the 

 Central Lowland of Scotland is thus made very 

 different from that of the rural Welsh valleys, and 

 we see that we may consider geographical person- 

 ality of many grades developed in regions of 

 diverse size and character and owing much to the 

 accumulated result of human work and intercourse 

 through the ages. 



The very large unit must include such wide 

 diversities that, failing unusually strong links, the 

 common measure of memory and feeling that fur- 

 nishes the mainspring of social action may be low. 

 The very small unit and the very isolated unit are 

 apt to lose balance when intellectual, and perhaps 

 phvsical inbreeding over-emphasises certain herit- 

 ages. The healthy mean will generally be found 

 in units smaller than those of the great States of 

 Europe, and this reflection is full of bearing on 

 modern thought about social and political organ- 

 isation of a world which has become one market 

 for endlesslv diverse products of spiritual as well 

 as material kinds. 



Obit 



WE regret to see announced in the Chemical Age 

 the death on December 19 last, at the age of 

 seventy-three years, of Mr. Henry Rowlatt 

 Augustus Oertling. Mr. Oertling was educated 

 at University College, London, and as a young 

 man entered the balance-making business founded 

 by his father. For more than forty years he took 

 an active interest in the management of the firm, 

 and it was under his supervision and to his design 

 that the short-beam Oertling balance was made. 

 Other types of balance were also developed, and 

 for many years balances suitable for educational 

 purposes, as well as those necessary for scientific 

 work requiring the highest accuracy, have been 

 manufactured so successfully by the firm that the 

 name of Messrs. L. Oertling. Ltd., is now well- 

 known in scientific institutions throughout the world. 



Dr. John Harley, who died at Beedings, Pul- 

 borough, on December 9 last, aged eighty-eight, 

 NO. 2722, VOL. 108] 



uary. 



was born in Shropshire, where he studied the geo- 

 logy of the region round Ludlow. He specially 

 investigated the microscopical structure of the 

 skeletal fragments in the Ludlow bone-bed, and 

 published an important paper on this subject in the 

 Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society in 1861. 

 During the following years, while physician at 

 King's College Hospital, London, he contributed 

 several notes on drugs to the Pharmaceutical 

 Journal. He also wrote a memoir on the parasitism 

 of the mistletoe, published by the Linnean Society 

 in 1863. Dr. Harley bequeathed his geological col- 

 lection to the Ludlow Museum. 



We notice with regret the announcement of the 

 death on December 25, at the age of ninety, of 

 Dr. G. S. Brady, F.R.S., hon. prof essor of natural 

 history in the Armstrong College of the University 

 of Durham. Newcastle. 



