I04 



NATURE 



{Dec. I, 1887 



I say these things not because I like saying them, but because, 

 feeling as I do, I do not think I ought to abstain from saying 

 them. No one has a higher admiration for our President than I 

 have, and no one would less willingly utter a syllable that would 

 give him pain. I rejoice in one aspect of the case, that the 

 University of Cambridge has crowned a great scientific career 

 by a signal honour. But I cannot but feel that the authority 

 and position of the Presidency of the Royal Society belong to a 

 sphere of action infinitely above the conflict of parties, and that 

 they will run a serious risk of impairment when the honoured 

 name of its occupant appears for the first time in modern 

 scientific history in the lists of a party division. 



W. T. Thiselton Dyer. 



Royal Gardens, Kew, November 26, 1887. 



As a Fellow of the Royal Society who has sat for many years 

 continuously in the House of Commons, I have read with much 

 interest your article on the above subject, which, from a Royal 

 Society point of view (but not in any sense from a Parliamentary 

 stand-point) is one of very great importance. No reasonable 

 person would for a moment object, I presume, to Prof. Stokes 

 entering Parliament as a politician, if he be one, provided he be 

 very careful to doff at the door of the House of Parliament every 

 vestige of Royal Society representation, and appear there as a 

 private politician to be taken for just what he is worth in that 

 capacity, and no more. Do not let me be misunderstood : as a 

 man of science he will, even in the House of Commons, receive 

 the personal consideration due to his distinguished personal 

 attainments ; and few public assemblies are more ready than that 

 House to give the full value to personal qualities and achieve- 

 ments. But the President of the Royal Society will put that 

 distinguished body, no less than himself, in a thoroughly false 

 position if he presumes to utter there a single sentence in its 

 name. Should I be present — and the same may be said, I trust, 

 of other Fellows — I shall not hesitate to rise instantly and dis- 

 claim his pretensions, and declare that he has no more authority 

 than one of the doorkeepers to speak in a political assembly in 

 the name of the Society over which in a purely scientific capacity 

 he presides. 



Having a most careful regard to the purity of your columns 

 in respect of everything merely political, I find it very difficult 

 to say much of what I think and feel on this question ; but when 

 I consider the depths to which a certain ex-Professor has 

 descended since he seated himself upon the steep and slippery 

 slope of politics, I must very earnestly deprecate any similar 

 proceeding on the part of the highest officer of the Royal 

 Society, in that capacity. In the political arena, I fear, we are 

 on both sides daily getting a lower and lower opinion of our 

 opponents, and I must confess that it is rapidly becoming hard 

 to reconcile with the scientific spirit the rancorous abuse and 

 unreasoning misrepresentation with which we are now too 

 familiar. 



But I must not be drawn into either polemics or personality. 

 I must content myself with saying, that, if Conservatives think 

 meanly of Liberal politicians just now, their sentiment is 

 thoroughly reciprocated, and probably more than reciprocated, 

 by those who, like myself, believe we have at heart the true 

 greatness, the lasting tranquillity and the intellectual and social 

 progress of the country. For Heaven's sake let us keep the 

 Royal Society, if not above, at least most distinctly apart from, 

 all political contentions ; and, in order that we may do this, let 

 its President, who has now become a professed party politician, 

 either vacate the chair, or make it absolutely clear that on the 

 floor of Parliament he will not presume to speak with any kind 

 or degree of authority in the name of the Society. 



I have no idea, Sir, of your political views, but I appreciate 



your desire to keep the Royal Society politically neutral — aye, 

 politically non-existent — and I hope your timely and courageous 

 warning will not have been given in vain. 



I have no care to conceal my name, but the end in view 

 may be best promoted, perhaps, by my merely signing myself, 



F.R.S. andM.P. 



Library of House of Commons, November 21. 



The Vitreous State of Water, 



To-day, between 2 and»3 p.m., with the barometer standing 

 at 29 inches, the thermometer a little below 0° C, and the wind 

 north-east, we had for the space of about twenty minutes an 

 interesting fall of hail in this neighbourhood. The stones varied 

 in size from that of a mustard-seed to that of a hemp-seed or 

 thereabouts. Some rain accompanied them, and this became 

 frozen in part on cold exposed surfaces. The stone sill of my 

 study window, which faces nearly north-west, was soon covered 

 in this way with a thin pellicle of ice, which served as a con- 

 venient resting-place for the hailstones at a low temperature. I 

 was struck at once with their glassy appearance, and examined 

 a number of them with a pocket lens as they lay on the cold 

 surface of the stone, not having at hand any refrigerating 

 arrangem.ent adjustable to the stage of a microscope. Nor was 

 the latter necessary. The lens showed most distinctly the clear 

 transparency of the glass of which these hailstones consisted, and 

 the vitreous fracture of some which had been broken by impact. 

 Watching them as they lay, one saw minute nests of crystals 

 form, in some cases in a peripheral zone, extending gradually 

 inwards; but in the majority of instances the crystallization 

 began in the centre of the ice, and gradually extended in a 

 beautiful crystal growth more or less through the mass. 



There would seem to be no room left for doubt that this 

 crystal -building process (sometimes in bands, sometimes in 

 confused nests of crystals) was a simple case of devitrification — 

 as distinct a case, one may almost say, as the well-known devi- 

 trification on a larger scale which is clearly exhibited by some 

 glassy slags. The fact of lying on a surface below 0° C, and 

 undergoing devitrification instead of liquefaction, seems to lend 

 direct support to the theory of latent heat of the vitreous state, 

 which I have ventured elsewhere to propound (see Nature, 

 vol. xxxvi. p. 77). 



I may add that last July, in a much heavier hailstorm in the 

 Trent Valley, I noticed a very great number of hailstones, many 

 of them as large as a moderate-sized hazel-nut, and peg-toi> 

 shaped, with a zonal or banded structure thus : — 



The layers or zones were alternately transparent and opaque 

 (apparently crystalline), but in this case the temperature caused 

 them to melt away without allowing a good opportunity for 

 observation of any devitrification of the glassy portions. To-day 

 Nature has performed the experiment suggested in my previous 

 letter, and the result is found to accord with the theory. 



A. Irving. 

 Wellington College, Berks, November 18. 



The Bagshot Beds, 



It may interest some of your readers to know that I recently 

 obtained some casts of fossils from the Bagshot Sands of the 

 Newbury district, from which, with one doubtful exception 

 ("Survey Memoir," vol. iv. p. 330), they have not, I believe, 

 hitherto been recorded. The fossils are of the nature of ferru- 

 ginous casts, and were found in a sand-pit about one-third of a 

 mile south-east of the London lodge of Highclere Park, mapped 

 by the Survey as Lower Bagshot, They consist both of uni- 

 valves and bivalves, and four or five genera are represented. 

 They resemble, both in appearance and mode of occurrence, the 

 fossils found in the Upper Bagshot of the Bagshot district ; and 

 the sands in which they occur have a strong resemblance to the 



