22 



NATURE 



[March 3, 192 1 



June q the party will proceed by special train to Fort 

 William or Banavie (Inverness Canal), and on the 

 following day a steamer will take the visitors down 

 Loch Linnhe to Kinlochleven, where the hydro-electric 

 installation of the British Aluminium Co. will be 

 visited. In the afternoon the steamer will continue 

 its journey southwards and land the party at Oban, 

 where the visit will end on Friday evening, June lo. 

 The journev to Fort William and thence to Oban will 

 give an opportunity of seeing the most magnificent 

 scenery of the Western Highlands. 



A JOINT discussion on "The Failure of Metals 

 under Internal or Prolonged Stress," to be held on 

 April 6, is being organised by the Faraday Society, 

 the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, the Institute 

 of Metals, and the Iron and Steel Institute. Other 

 institutions of engineers and shipbuilders are also 

 participating in the discussion, which will occupy an 

 afternoon and an evening session. The proceedings 

 will be opened by Dr. W. Rosenhain, and the pre- 

 liminary programme contains a list of sixteen papers 

 on specific aspects of the subject, in which the 

 chemical influences at work, the effects of stress at 

 high temperature, corrosion, the mechanism of failure 

 from internal stress, as well as particular points in 

 relation to the failure of steel, brass, and lead, will be 

 discussed. An exhibition of specimens will be held in 

 connection with the meeting. Further information 

 can be obtained from Mr. F. S. Spiers, secretary to 

 the joint committee, lo Essex Street, Strand, W.C.2. 



The Electro-Therapeutic Section of the Royal Society 

 of Medicine and the British Association of Radiology 

 and Physiotherapy have organised a congress to be 

 held in London on April 14-16. Sir Humphry 

 RoUeston will be president of the meeting, and Dr. 

 G. Harrison Orton secretary-general. The honorary 

 secretaries for general correspondence are Dr. S. 

 Melville and Dr. Justina Wilson, and the sectional 

 secretaries Dr, N. S. Finzi for radiology, Dr. G. 

 Murray Levick for electrology, and Dr. C. V. MacKay 

 for physiotherapy. A provisional programme of the 

 meeting has been arranged which includes discussions 

 and visits to the electrical departments of selected 

 London hospitals. Abstracts of papers should reach 

 the secretaries at the Royal Society of Medicine before 

 March 24; communications may be written either in 

 English or in French. 



The Teyler Society of Haarlem announces that a 

 gold medal of the value of 400 florins will be offered 

 in 1924 for a treatise dealing with the following 

 investigations : — " Referring to the studies of V. 

 Gr^goire, which show that the nuclei of both animal 

 and vegetable cells are built up of karyomeres, the 

 society invites investigation into the nature of these 

 organs, especially during the period of rest of the 

 nuclei, and of their bearing on questions of heredity." 

 Papers may be submitted in English, Dutch, French, 

 or German (in Latin characters), and must be type- 

 written or written by someone other than the author; 

 they become the prop^erty of the society, and the right 

 to publish them in its Proceedings is reserved. The 

 works should be sent under a pseudonym, and the 

 author's name and address enclosed in a sealed 

 NO. 2679, VOL. 107] 



envelope bearing the same pseudonym. Papers must 

 reach the society on or before April i, 1923, and 

 should be addressed : aan het Fundatiehuis van 

 wijlen den Heer P. Teyler van der Hulst, te Haarlem. 



An inquiry into the present-day problems connected 

 with the spread and prevention of filarial diseases in 

 the tropics, more especially as they affect Demerara 

 and the West Indies, has been undertaken at the 

 request of the Colonial Office by the London School 

 of Tropical Medicine. Dr. J. Anderson and his 

 laboratory staff sailed from England on February 24 ; 

 Prof. R. T. Leiper, the leader of the expedition, and 

 the other members. Dr. Vevers, Dr. C. U. Lee, and 

 Dr. Khalil, will proceed by different routes during 

 March. The whole party will meet in Deme- 

 rara early in April. The expedition will be away 

 for upwards of seven months. The sending of this 

 expedition at the present moment is particularly 

 opportune in view of the proposed Intercolonial 

 Medical Conference which is to be held shortly at 

 Georgetown, British Guiana, to consider the sanitary 

 problems of the West Indies. The expedition has 

 been made possible through the generous public sup- 

 port accorded to the appeal recently made by Lord 

 Milner on behalf of the London School of Tropical 

 Medicine. 



In a communication from the Decimal Association 

 on the progress of the metric system of weights and 

 measures, it is stated that since the war the system 

 has made notable headway in many foreign countries 

 which have not yet officially made it compulsory for 

 use in trade. In China the system is already in 

 exclusive use on the railways, and it is expected that 

 the Government will adopt the metric units when 

 standardising their weights and measures. Legisla- 

 tive proposals having for their object the exclusive 

 use of the system for trade purposes are at present 

 under consideration in the United States, Japan, and 

 Siam. Our own Ordnance Survey Office has an- 

 nounced that on all small-scale maps an alternative 

 scale of kilometres and tenths will be printed in 

 addition to the scale of inches, and on all small-scale 

 layer maps the metric heights will be added in whole 

 numbers of metres. The Decimal Association urges 

 the Government to abandon its attitude of passive 

 permission of the metric system and to embark on a 

 campaign of active encouragement, and adds that it 

 appears inevitable that the metric units will ulti- 

 mately become the world standards of weight and 

 measure, and that the longer we delay its exclusive 

 adoption the more difficult and costly will be the 

 transition. 



Sir Herbert Jackson, the retiring president of the 

 Institute of Chemistry, in the course of his address- 

 at the annual general meeting on March i, remarked 

 that Government Departments and official authorities 

 generally have shown more inclination in recent times 

 than in the past to accord higher recognition to the 

 services of men of science. The institute is taking 

 part in many matters affecting the public life of the 

 country where chemistry is concerned, and the 

 annual report shows that chartered professional bodies 

 of this character are able to render the State valuable 



