May 26, 192 1] 



NATURE 



40: 



graduated as a Doctor of Science at St. Andrews 

 . University, has been in charge of the Crustacea at 

 the Natural History Museum since 1904, and is the 

 author of "The Life of Crustacea " and of numerous 

 articles on this group. 



A MEETING on the subject of "Constructive Birth 

 Control : Its Ideals and Helpfulness to the Individual 

 and to the Race" will be held at Queen's Hall on 

 Tuesday next, May 31. The chair will be taken at 

 8.30 by the Right Hon. G. H. Roberts, and among 

 the speakers will be Dr. Jane L. Hawthorne, Dr. 

 C. Killick Millard, the Right Hon. J. M. Robertson, 

 Admiral Sir Percy Scott, and Dr. Marie Stopes. 



The Ottawa Field-Naturalists' Club has decided to 

 open a subscription list for a permanent memorial to 

 the late Prof. John Macoun, naturalist of the Geo- 

 logical Survey of Canada, who died at Sidney, British 

 Columbia, on July 18, 1920. The wide field of work 

 to which Prof. Macoun devoted his life is known to 

 many naturalists. He specialised particularly in 

 botany, and was the founder of the Canadian 

 National Herbarium. Other sciences, however, 

 especially zoology, were also greatly enriched b\- him. 

 He will be remembered as the great pioneer in 

 Canadian natural history. The memorial will take 

 the form of a portrait to be hung in the Victoria 

 Memorial Museum, which will be executed by Mr. 

 Franklin Brownell, of Ottawa. The expenses in con- 

 nection therewith will be about 700 dollars, and sub- 

 scriptions, which should be forwarded to Mr. Arthur 

 Gibson, Dominion Entomologist, Ottawa, are invited. 



The third meeting- of the Council of Agriculture 

 for England, constituted by the Ministry of Agricul- 

 ture and Fisheries Act, 1919, will be held at the 

 Middlesex Guildhall, Westminster, S.W., on Friday, 

 May 27. The proceedings will begin at 11 a.m. and 

 will be open to the public. The Earl of Sel- 

 borne, K.G., will be in the chair. The purpose of 

 the council is to provide an opportunity for the dis- 

 cussion of matters of public interest relating to agri- 

 culture and other rural industries by persons repre- 

 senting the various interests of the industry from all 

 parts of the country. Several interesting resolutions 

 will be considered, among which may be mentioned 

 two to be moved bv Sir Douglas Newton, dealing 

 with the facilities of railway goods stations for the 

 rapid transit of soft fruit and other perishable pro- 

 duce. The question is especially difficult at the pre- 

 sent time, when railway services have to be curtailed. 



In connection with the presentation on June 29 of 

 the John Fritz medal to Sir Robert Hadfield, which 

 was announced in Nature of May 5, it may be of 

 interest to record the events which led to the institu- 

 tion of this medal. In 1902 a number of friends and 

 associates of John Fritz, the American engineer who 

 brought about great changes in the iron and steel in- 

 dustry in the United States, decided to celebrate his 

 eightieth birthday by establishing a fund, the income 

 from which should be used to strike annually a John 

 Fritz medal for scientific and industrial achievement 

 in any field of pure or applied science. A committee 

 consisting of representatives of the American Societies 

 NO. 2691, VOL. 107] 



of Civil and Mechanical Engineers and the American 

 Institutes of Mining and Electrical Engineers was 

 appointed, and an impression of an appropriate design 

 was presented to John Fritz at a great dinner given in 

 the Waldorf Hotel, New York. After the die had 

 been completed the committee continued in existence 

 as the John Fritz Medal Fund Corporation. One 

 member of each of the societies instrumental in found- 

 ing the fund is now elected annually to serve on the 

 committee for a period of four years ; the members 

 of the committee also act as a board of award. The 

 medal, which is of gold, is awarded annually, without 

 restriction on account of nationality or sex, and it is 

 accompanied by a diploma reciting the origin of the 

 medal and the specific achievement for which the 

 award is made. The first award, in i902,»was made 

 to John Fritz, and the second, in 1905, to Lord Kelvin, 

 "for work in cable telegraphy and other general 

 scientific achievements." Since then an award has 

 been made every year with the exception of 1913, and 

 the list of recipients contains such well-known names 

 as George Westinghouse, Dr. Alexander Bell. 

 Thomas A. Edison,' Sir William H. White, and Elihu 

 Thomson. 



The second issue, that for April, of the kniiquarxes' 

 Journal, the journal of the Society of Antiquaries of 

 London, is fully up to the level of the first number, 

 and the publication marks a distinct advance in the 

 popularisation of the science of archaeology. Mr. A. 

 Leslie Armstrong announces the discovery of engrav- 

 ings found at Grime's Graves, Norfolk, on flints 

 associated with a series of flint implements of Le 

 Moustier type, bone tools, and potter}^ on a level 

 immediately overlying glacial land. One is a 

 naturalistic representation on flint-crust of a stag or 

 perhaps an elk. The authorities at the Natural His- 

 tory Museum regard this animal as an elk, known 

 in America as "moose." In the discussion which 

 followed, the president suggested that the art of the 

 engravings seemed to be of the same character as the 

 French cave series, though he would not say the 

 resemblance was conclusive. " In recent years dis- 

 coveries at Grime's Graves, Northfleet, and elsewhere 

 had reduced the sequence of prehistoric periods to .a 

 state of flux. If type, material, and coloration, singly 

 or collectively, meant nothing at all, the whole struc- 

 ture of prehistoric study was undermined. In an}' 

 case, the Grime's Graves industry did not seem to 

 belong to the ordinary Neolithic period." 



In the April issue of Man Sir Ray Lankester 

 describes, with illustrations, a remarkable flint im- 

 plement found lying on the surface of a field within 

 ten yards of the gravel-pit in which the jawbone of 

 Eoanthropus was discovered in 1912. He proposes 

 to call this specimen "the Piltdown batiform," and 

 he expresses the hope that it may be placed with 

 the other Piltdown flints in the Geological Depart- 

 ment of the British Museum. He thus sums up the 

 question : — " In my opinion the facts hitherto ascer- 

 tained do not justify the identification of the period 

 at which Eoanthropus lived with the period at which 

 any of the flint implements discovered in the Pilt- 

 down gravel were fashioned, nor do we know enough 



