50 



NA TURE 



[Nov. 17, 1887 



It is eminently true of political passion that a "little 

 leaven leaveneth the whole lump " ; once inoculate the 

 Royal Society with that virus, and the poison will spread 

 through the whole organism. The Council practically 

 chooses the President : it will therefore be necessary to 

 look to the politics of the Councillors. The Fellows 

 elect the Council : have a care, therefore, to the politics 

 of the new Fellows. We may yet see a politico-scientific 

 caucus. Some years ago a most sagacious and experi- 

 enced man of affairs in the United States was asked why, 

 in drawing up the constitution of a new University, he 

 had not given such persons as the Governor and Chief 

 Justice of the State an ex-officio position on the governing 

 body. " Ah," said he, wath a shrewd smile, " if you only 

 knew the trouble my colleagues and I have taken to 

 render it impossible for any political person to have any- 

 thing whatever to do with the administration of the 

 University ! We know to our cost that wherever politics 

 enters corruption follows." 



The records of the Royal Society tell us of more than 

 two centuries of scientific hfe, fertile in good work and 

 unstained by anything worse than an occasional outbreak 

 of prejudice or jealousy. The only occasion on which it 

 ever manifested a political bias was in the case of 

 Priestley ; and it has no reason to be proud of that 

 episode. 



The Society is now at the parting of the ways. Either 

 it will continue its beneficent work for untold ages to come, 

 untroubled by the transitory political and social storms 

 raging around it ; or, headed by politicians pledged to 

 serve their party, it will gradually be dragged down into 

 that miserable slough in which no capacity seems proof 

 against the temptation to sophistical special pleading and 

 no" character strong enough to refuse degrading sub- 

 serviency to party exigencies. 



The occasion is grave and demands action. It is for 

 the President, by the course which he may think fit to 

 adopt, to determine what that action shall be. 



THE STORAGE OF ELECTRICAL ENERGY. 

 The Storage of Electrical Energy. By Gaston Plantd. 

 (London: Whittaker, 1887.) 



TO the author of this book we owe the use of lead 

 plates instead of platinum plates in voltameters. 

 His experiments showed that, after repeated charging and 

 discharging of lead-plate voltameters, accumulators of 

 energy were producible which might be employed in a 

 great variety of useful ways. He showed that his accu- 

 mulators might be charged in parallel by a few Bunsen 

 or Daniell cells, and discharged in series. As his accu- 

 mulators had small internal resistances, he was able to 

 give to circuits either of small or great resistance very 

 considerable supplies of electric power for short times, 

 and as an experimenter he availed himself of this novel 

 power in heating wires, melting beads of metal, and 

 generally of observing effects produced by strong 

 currents. 



Many of the phenomena observed by him were new, 

 and well worthy of being recorded, as they were recorded, 

 in the proceedings of scientific Societies ; and the present 

 book, in addition to a fine portrait of the author, and 

 many other engravings, and a dedication to the Emperor 



of Brazil, seems to be merely a collection of these papers of 

 M. Plants, published between the years 1859 and 1879. 

 In the first chapter of the book and part of the second we 

 find an interesting account of experiments with various 

 electrodes in voltameters, which led the author to use 

 lead instead of platinum, and of the forms which the 

 author gave to his cells, with directions for their forma- 

 tion, and speculations as to the chemical actions involved. 

 The remaining twelve and a half chapters may be re- 

 garded as almost solely devoted to the " effects created 

 by currents combining quan-tity with high tension " — to 

 use the old-fashioned phraseology which Mr. Elwell, the 

 translator, has thought fit to use upon the title-page— and 

 to the author's speculations upon things in general. 



The infancy of the electric accumulator lasted to 

 1879, its boyhood to 1883, and we may now be said to 

 know it in its manhood. The advance since 1879, not only 

 in our knowledge of the chemical and electrical actions 

 going on in the accumulator, but also in our methods of 

 applying this knowledge, has been quite as wonderful as 

 the advance made in any other part of applied physics. 

 Batteries of accumulators capable of driving boats 80 

 feet long, of driving numbers of tram-cars, of maintain- 

 ing large installations of electric lights, are now in actual 

 use. Plates of lead are now used as in 1879, but the 

 salts of lead in contact with the metallic plates are 

 attached mechanically, hundreds of devices having been 

 tried and rejected or adopted in the last eight years for the 

 purpose of obtaining great capacity and longevity. Of 

 these great changes, the results of numerous, most 

 costly, and carefully conducted experiments, made by 

 scientific n^en, M. Plantd tells us nothing. He was in 

 charge of the accumulator in its infancy ; it was taken 

 away from him in 1879, and its subsequent history seems 

 to be as unknown to him as the boyhood and early 

 manhood of Harry Bertram were to Dominie Sampson. 



The dominie looked upon his pupil, now grown to be a 

 man, as if he were still a boy who was about to resume 

 his childish studies, and in the same way it is probable 

 that M. Plantd regards the accumulator of 1887 as in 

 no respect different from the laboratory toy with which 

 he obtained such remarkable effects prior to 1879. 

 M. Plants gives in this book what may be regarded as 

 the history of the infancy of the electric accumulator ; 

 and it is obvious that if he had written it as charmingly 

 as Mrs. Molesworth herself could have written it for the 

 nursery, yet, with the misleading title which it possesses, 

 he has given occasion to the ordinary reader to feel 

 greatly disappointed. We are here assuming that M. 

 Plant^ shares with Mr. Elwell the responsibility of publi- 

 cation, and also of change in the name of the book from 

 that of the first edition—" Recherches sur I'Electricit^"— 

 published in 1879, which is the only French edition with 

 which we are acquainted. 



The technical terms used by the translator are not now 

 so familiar to students as they used to be in the good 

 old times when strength., intensity, quantity, and power 

 of a current were synonymous with each other or with 

 electromotive force. 



It was this freedom in " the older electricity " which 

 enabled statements like " The E.M.F. was thus found 

 equal to i"4i, the current from the Bunsen cell being 

 (p. 17) to be enjoyed by readers. Other statements 1 



I 



