530 



NATURE 



{April \, 1889 



industry sit agape while enjoying phrases which have as 

 much meaning to them, and to the speaker, as " that 

 blessed word Mesopotamia" to a village crone. But, 

 surely, there must be a limit to their endurance. Even 

 from the point of view of the most practical of " practical 

 men " it must be a serious thing to find, in one line con- 

 taining eleven words and ten figures, the ratio of the watt 

 to the horse-power made seventeen times larger than it 

 really is, a decimal point misplaced so that the watt is 

 made ten times less than it really is, the vulgar fraction 

 from which the ratio is deduced in decimals inverted, and 

 the essential statement as to the time in which the work 

 is done omitted in a calculation of power. 



If men are to be "practical" and nothing else, they 

 must at all events be accurate. If they are to use formulas 

 which they do not understand, they must at all events 

 know how to use them correctly. If the representative 

 of a great firm— in explaining the answer to a question, 

 which is not sprung upon him unawares, but which he 

 himself puts forward as one which he has been "fre- 

 quently" asked, and to which, therefore, he volunteers 

 a reply — can in addition to employing language which 

 makes all his statements nonsense, turn a fraction upside 

 down, misplace a decimal, and, finally, pass the report of 

 his speech for press with these blunders uncorrected, how 

 can outsiders avoid suspecting that similar mistakes may 

 be not infrequent in calculations upon which specifica- 

 tions and contracts are based, and on which very " prac- 

 tical" questions of success or failure, and of pounds, 

 shillings, and pence, depend 1 



And now for the application of all this. The speaker 

 gave as his reason for using volts and ohms that they 

 are " so easy to measure, and so simply connected." Do 

 the supporters of the " practical man " think that this easy 

 measurement, this simple connection, came by accident .'' 

 Do they think that this system which they find so useful 

 could have been elaborated by men who, when it has been 

 before the world for years, cannot open their mouths or 

 put pen to paper, without showing in every sentence that 

 they are absolutely ignorant of the fundamental concep- 

 tions on which the whole system is based, and equally 

 incapable of using it correctly ? 



In the course of the evening the same speaker claimed 

 for himself and for practical men that "we don't want 

 to know what [electricity] is, but what it will do." He, and 

 such as he, have yet to learn that what electricity has done 

 is mainly the outcome of the work of men who did want to 

 know what it is, being certain that if they knew that they 

 could make it do more than under any other conditions. 



They elaborated a system of units which our authority 

 finds easy and simple, by the aid of investigations which 

 even now require a good knowledge of mathematics and 

 pbysics on the part of those who would really understand 

 them, and which at the date of their original performance 

 were masterpieces which only intellects of a very high 

 order and knowledge of a very wide grasp could have 

 achieved. Among them were numbered some engineers, 

 but these ranked among them not because they were 

 practical men who did not " want to know what elec- 

 tricity is," but because they had risen above such wretched 

 cant, and had become not only " practical " but scientific. 



The mischief done by the Bath meeting is not yet 

 ended. It may or may not be a good joke to discuss 



whether Sir William Thomson is or is not an engineer. 

 But the views then expounded are, all over the country, 

 leading so-called " electrical engineers," who are ignorant 

 of all that concerns what is, by their own confession, the 

 easy part of their subject, to fling their cheap sneers at 

 men who do " want to know what electricity is," who have 

 made it possible to use and measure electrical quantities, 

 and who have directly or indirectly created the very trades 

 by which their detractors earn their daily bread. 



" We don't want to know " will be the ruin of British 

 industry, unless its leaders use their influence to crush 

 the spirit indicated by this expression. In the March 

 number of the Fortfiightly Review, Lord Carnarvon re- 

 lates that chairs, of which the various parts are fastened 

 by glue, as is the custom in this country, will not hold 

 together in the warmer climate of Australia. English 

 makers did not know, perhaps did not " want to know, 

 this. " The Austrian manufacturers, on the other hand, 

 had discovered the cause of the defect, and, by a very 

 simple alteration in the fastening, had practically driven 

 out of a large part of the country our home-made fur- 

 niture." " Wherever I went," says Lord Carnarvon, " I 

 observed that, as a matter of fact, German, and not 

 English, furniture was in use." And so, while the columns 

 of every newspaper are full of the unity of the Empire, 

 and of the unemployed, another tie between mother- 

 country and colony is broken, another outlet for British 

 industry is closed, because our manufacturers do not 

 know what the Austrian discovers for himself. 



It is all of a piece with this that in England, in the 

 year of grace 1889, an electrical engineer, who is, as we 

 gather from the Chairman's statement, no tyro or under- 

 hng, but who was welcomed at an important meeting as 

 a worthy exponent of the views of a well-known firm, was 

 not ashamed to tell his hearers that he does not " want to 

 know what electricity is," and that he could '^ measure 

 all electrical quantities in foot-pounds." 



THE CEPHALOPODA, 

 Catalogue of the Fossil Cephalopoda in the British 

 Museum {Natural History), Cromwell Road, S.W. 

 Part I., containing part of the Sub-order Nautiloidea, 

 consisting of the Families Orthoceratitidas, Endo- 

 ceratidce, Actinoceratidas, Gomphoceratidce, Ascocera- 

 tidce, Poterioceratidas, Cyrtoceratida;, and Supplement. 

 By Arthur H. Foord, F.G.S. Pp. xxxii. and 344, and 

 Fifty-one Woodcuts. (London : Printed by Order of 

 the Trustees, 1888.) 



JUST as heraldry in the Middle Ages formed a neces- 

 sary part of the education of every knight and 

 noble, without which it would have been impossible to 

 trace the connection of the great families whose 

 genealogy was symbolized on banner, shield, and crest, 

 so palaeontology is essential to the biologist, if he 

 would successfully trace the connection of the living 

 forms around him with their remoter progenitors whose 

 records must be sought for in rocks of Palaeozoic age. 



Of such high lineage are the Cephalopoda, whose 

 ancient life-history Mr. A. H. Foord has essayed to 

 write in the carefully-prepared volume before us. There 

 is evidently a fascination about the nautilus and cuttle- 

 fish family, which seems specially to attract the attention 



