242 



NATURE 



[April 21, 192 1 



the range of physical, if not of commercial, prac- 

 ticability. Indeed, there are many fields where 

 wireless telephony already rivals telephony over 

 the metallic circuit, especially now that methods 

 of linking up the two have been perfected, and 

 we look forward with interest to the results of 



the experiments now being made with the view 

 of establishing a commercial wireless telephone 

 service between London and Birmingham, and. 

 the competition which appears likely between 

 cable and wireless telephony from England to 

 Holland. 



Obituary. 



BY the death at Cambridge, on April 9, of 

 Dr. Richard Henry Vernon, at thirty-six 

 years of age, the younger generation of chemists 

 in this country has suffered a serious loss. The 

 elder son of the late Hon. William Vernon, 

 Dr. Vernon was educated abroad and took the 

 degree of Ph.D. at the Zurich Polytechnic. At 

 the close of his course at Zurich the war broke 

 out, and although his health had always been 

 delicate he hastened to offer his services and 

 enlisted as a private, receiving later a commission 

 in the Dorset Regiment. After having been 

 invalided home, he worked for the Chemical War- 

 fare Committee, first at the Imperial College of 

 Science, and afterwards in the University Chemi- 

 cal Laboratory, Cambridge. He was then sent to 

 the Shell Filling Factory at Chittening, where his 

 health became seriously affected. After the 

 armistice he returned to Cambridge, and was 

 appointed to the official position of assistant to 

 the professor of chemistry. Dr. Vernon 

 possessed in a remarkable degree the special sense 

 of the organic chemist, and his manipulative 

 ability was quite exceptional. His work on 

 tellurium, which led to the discovery of the iso- 

 meric dimethyltelluronium iodides, had an impor- 

 tant bearing on the stereochemistry of elements of 

 higher atomic weight and impressed all who had 

 seen it with his powers. He had a personality of 

 singular charm and attractiveness that rapidly 

 won the friendship of all with whom he was 

 brought into contact. 



We 'notice with much regret the announce- 

 ment of tiie death, on April 13, of Mr. Howard 

 Payn in his eighty-first year. In his early life 

 Mr. Payn qualified as a barrister, but never prac- 

 tised. In middle life, after some years' service 

 on a Sugar Commission, he became greatly in- 

 terested in astronomy, and in 1899 entered Sir 

 Norman Lockyer's laboratory at South Kensing- 

 ton as a volunteer worker. Mr. Payn took part 

 in the eclipse expedition to Santa Pola, Spain, in 

 1900, and obtained a fine series of photographs 

 of the corona and prominences with a lens of 

 i6-ft. focal length. In 1905 he was with Sir 



Norman Lockyer's eclipse party at Palma^ 

 Majorca, but the spectroscopic photographs 

 which he had planned to take were only partially 

 successful, on account of clouds. In collabora- 

 tion with Prof. Fowler, he was among the first 

 to investigate the vacuum arc spectra of metallic 

 elements, and to show that enhanced lines are 

 strongly developed under these conditions. Mr, 

 Payn also rendered considerable assistance to Sir 

 Norman Lockyer in his work on "Stone Circles. "^ 

 He died in a nursing home at Hounslow after a 

 long illness, and will be greatly missed by his' 

 many friends. 



The sudden and unexpected death, from heart, 

 failure, of Dr. Herbert Haviland Field, at the 

 age of fifty-two, is a great loss to scientific 

 workers. Some thirty years ago Field, then an 

 American student at Paris, left the path of bio- 

 logical research for the less inviting road of biblio- 

 graphy. His aim was to provide a bibliographic 

 service by cards of standard size. Each card 

 carried numbers according to a modification of the 

 Dewey decimal system, enabling it to be sorted 

 mechanically into place according to the classifica- 

 tion desired. Later he became associated with 

 the bibliographic section of Zoologischer Anzeiger, 

 and eventually founded at Zurich the well-known 

 Concilium Bibliographicum, which has had the 

 support of the Swiss Government and of various 

 American funds. There he died at his work. It 

 is to be hoped, especially in the present circum- 

 stances of the International Catalogue, that the 

 institution he founded will continue and expand. 



We much regret to announce the death, on 

 Monday, April 11, at the age of seventy-seven 

 years, of Prof. Arnold William Reinold, 

 F.R.S., lately professor of physics in the Royal 

 Naval College, Greenwich. 



We regret to record the death, on April 9, of 

 Mr. Bertram Blount, the well-known chemist, 

 at fifty-four years of age; and, on April 13, of 

 Mr. R. a. Rolfe, of the Royal Botanic Gardens, 

 Kew, at sixty-five years of age. 



Note s. 



With the intention of saving the lives of number- 

 less birds of bright plumage slaughtered in foreign 

 lands for no better purpose than unnatural decora- 

 tion, a " Bill to prohibit the importation of the 

 plumage of birds and the sale or possession of plumage 

 illegally imported " has again been introduced in the 

 NO. 2686, VOL. 107] 



House of Commons, and on April 13 passed the 

 second reading by a majority of 143 votes against 25. 

 The scope of the Bill is wide. As it stands, it pro- 

 hibits the importation of all birds' plumes excepting 

 those of African ostriches and eider-ducks, of birds 

 imported alive, of birds ordinarily used in the United 



