40 



NATURE 



[September 9, 1920 



Indian university conditions, and co-operated in 

 designing- the new institution of which he is to be 

 the chief academic officer. His abundant expe- 

 rience, gained amid the conflicts of London Uni- 

 versity, will be invaluable for his new duties, for 

 it is the transformation of examining into teaching 

 universities that constitutes the central problem in 

 India. If the difficulties have been great at home, 

 they are still greater there. Nothing seems so 

 urgent, among all the ills that afflict Indian educa- 

 tion, than that the strangling grip of university 

 examinations should be released from the throat 

 of learning. 



It is true that under the strong and per- 

 suasive influence of the Calcutta Commission the 

 aspiration for university reform has received a 

 large measure of native assent, and this is no 

 doubt quite sincere. But the currents of an evil 

 tradition are strong and deep ; rights and privi- 

 leges of very serious social import have become 

 established ; a suspicion is apt to arise that at- 

 tempts at reform are attempts to restrict and 

 deprive, and that they are actuated by a desire to 

 check, rather than to aid, the advance of that kind 

 of learning which will best help the Indian to 

 progress and self-dependence. This hovering dis- 

 trust will assuredly attend the early labours of 

 Mr. Hartog and his colleagues, but even if they 

 cannot move far towards realising "a fresh syn- 

 thesis of Eastern and Western studies,^' which is 

 the stated ideal of their university, they may, with 

 good fortune, inaugurate a salutary and far-reach- 

 ing reform. 



The Foundations of Aircraft Design. 

 Applied Aerodynamics. By G. P. Thomson. 

 Pp. XX + 292. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 

 Ltd., n.d.) Price 425. net. 



MR. THOMSON has made no mention of his 

 own share in the work which he describes, 

 but it is common knowledge that the development 

 of experimental methods, more particularly in 

 full-scale research, owed much to his initiative 

 during the war. At one period, as a member of 

 the experimental staff of the Royal Aircraft 

 Establishment, he took an active part in the now 

 historic debate on " scale effect " : at a later date 

 he joined the staff of the Aircraft Manufacturing 

 Company, and there obtained first-hand acquaint- 

 ance with the routine of a commercial design 

 office. Such varied experience, combined with a 

 considerable amount of actual flying, constitutes 

 the best possible qualification for authorship of a 

 text-book on the practical applications of aero- 

 NO. 2654, VOL. 106] 



dynamic theory, and the present volume, as we 

 should have expected, abounds in happy illustra- 

 tions of the interaction of constructional and aero- 

 dynamic considerations in design ; but it does not 

 of itself tend to ensure clear and systematic 

 presentation of results, and we believe that by 

 devoting a longer period to deliberation and plan- 

 ning Mr. Thomson could have produced a better 

 book. 



Let us confess at once that we have found it 

 quite exceptionally difficult to form our judgment 

 of this volume, and that we may have had a 

 wrong idea of the class of readers for which it 

 is primarily intended. Mr. Thomson's preface is 

 not very explicit on this point, but taken in con- 

 junction with Col. O'Gorman's introduction it 

 certainly seems to suggest that he has catered 

 principally for the designer, whilst keeping in 

 view the needs of R.A.F. officers training; in 

 other words, that his book is intended both as a 

 work of reference and as a manual of instruction. 

 But if so, then form and arrangement, we cannot 

 but think, become matters of very real import- 

 ance, and it is on this score that we venture the 

 foregoing criticism. At our first reading of the 

 text, the difficulties which confront the student 

 impressed us so much as almost to obscure its 

 very real merits ; and although on a second exam- 

 ination we were able, with our acquired know- 

 ledge of the whole book, to appreciate and enjoy 

 the author's success in compressing so much 

 valuable material into some 280 pages of large 

 type, we cannot help thinking that our first im- 

 pression was more representative of the view 

 which an uninitiated reader would obtain. We 

 suspect that Mr. Thomson, when he wrote, was 

 too close to the work which he describes to be 

 able to see his subject from the point of view of 

 his readers. 



The student, for example, who comes new to 

 the subject ought always to be given the defini- 

 tions of special terms and the meanings of special 

 symbols used before he meets them in the course 

 of the argument : he ought not to find casual 

 references to "interference" scattered throughout 

 chap.- iii., and yet be denied a definition, even 

 by implication, of this term until he reaches the 

 very end of the chapter ; nor ought he in chap. x. 

 to find himself suddenly confronted by symbols 

 to the meaning of which he is given no clue, save 

 a general reference to two chapters in the second 

 part of the book. In our experience, much of 

 the difficulty of aeronautical literature consists in 

 the sheer number of the symbols which it is found 

 necessary to employ, and we would gladly ex- 

 change the glossary of aeronautical terms, which 

 forms an appendix to this volume, for a tabu- 



