Oct. 20, 1887] 



NATURE 



589 



id very thoroughly explored in recent years by several Russian 

 ravellers, while Mr. Ney Elias has done much to make known 



||ts peculiar features. The three French travellers seem to have 

 iffered much daring their journey across this mountain mass, 

 specially from the extreme cold and the rarefaction of the air. 

 rhey had frequently to throw themselves down upon the snow 



rem exhaustion. These enforced halts were taken advantage 



by M. Capus to register the pulse-beats of himself and his 



jmpanions ; he found the mean number per minute rise to 170. 



The Danish Expedition to the coast of Northern Greenland 

 ^as just returned to Copenhagen. It has been absent since the 

 jring of 1886, and was directed by Herr C.?Ryder. During the 

 vo summers it was enabled to proceed from lat. 72° to lat. 74^°. 

 It investigated the Upernivik glacier during the winter. Many 

 "neteorological, magnetic, and astronomical observations were 

 lade, many anthropological measurements were taken, and 

 botanical and zoological collections have been brought back. 

 The investigations of the western coast of Greenland are not 

 likely to be continued for the present. 



The Dutch Geographical Society has abandoned its plan of 



sending a scientific expedition to the Dutch part of New Guinea, 



but intends sending one to the Key Islands instead. The researches 



will not only be ethnographical and anthropological, but 



,. especially botanical. 



tAx the recent meeting of the French Association M, Schrader 

 escribed the results of his ten years' study of the Pyrenees, 

 'hich has led him seriously to modify previously accepted ideas 

 pon the contour and structure of that range. According to the 

 id descriptions the mass of the Pyrenean Chain was com- 

 arable to a fern-leaf with its transverse nerves, or to the back- 

 one of a fish. In reality the Pyrenees consist of a long series 

 of lines of elevations oblique to the imaginary axis of the chain, 

 with which they often form an acute angle. It is impossible to look 

 at the network exhibited in the map by the valleys and the ridges 

 w ithout being struck with the extreme precision of the meshes. 

 These meshes are broken up in all directions, the slopes, however, 

 presenting very different aspects. On the French side the crests 

 are blunted. The incessant humidity of the atmosphere has 

 used them up ; mountains, ravines, crests, all are effaced to assume 

 the form of juxtaposed cones or pyramids. On the Spanish 

 side, again, the fractures have remained much fresher, the 

 angles sharper, the forms rougher, due no doubt to the much 

 drier climate of the south side. The slope on the Spanish side 

 is very gradual, while on the French side the mountains rise like 

 a wall. 



To the Zeitschrift of the Berlin Geographical Society (Nos. 

 129-30), Herr Erich von Drygalski contributes an elaborate 

 paper of over 100 pages on the deformations of the earth's form 

 during the Glacial epoch. Dr. Oppel brings together much 

 useful information on the religious conditions of Africa, his map 

 showing very strikingly the distribution of the various forms. 

 The whole of North Africa is covered with the Mohammedan 

 tint (with the exception of Abyssinia and part of Algeria), 

 coming down on the east to beyond the equator. Different 

 shades of the tint show the oldest Mohammedan region as a 

 narrow fringe along the Mediterranean. A lighter tint indicates 

 the spread of Islam from the eleventh to the seventeenth cen- 

 turies, and the lightest the broad belt in the south, which has 

 been included during the present century. 



THE HARVEIAN ORATION. 



A T the Royal College of Physicians, on Tuesday afternoon, 

 •**• the Harveian Oration was delivered by Dr. William H. 

 Stone. In the course of his remarks Dr. Stone sketched the 

 lineaments of Harvey, self-revealed, as a scholar, a lecturer, a 

 physicist, and as a man of genial, not to say humorous, dispj- 

 sition, and said : — " Perhaps the most important part of my 

 prescribed task is to draw a practical conclusion from the essen 

 tially physical and mechanical character of Harvey's great dis- 

 covery. That Harvey himself fully knew this, has been shown 

 in his own words ; it is also by his division of anatomy into 

 three ^s^ris—philosophica, tnedica, and mechanica. Now, at the 

 present time, investigation and research is carried on in the 

 pathological, physiological, and therapeutical aspects of medi- 

 cine, but the physical or mechanical side is somewhat neglected. 

 For hundreds of ardent questioners of Nature who are labouring 



with the microscope in the biological and bacteriological labora- 

 tories, those who attack medicine from its physical side may be 

 counted on the fingers of one hand. Nor, indeed, are the 

 written treatises on this subject abundant, in this country at 

 least. The ' Animal Mechanics ' of the Rev. Dr. Haughton, of 

 Trinity College, Dublin, is an exceptional work of great value, 

 which has hardly received the attention it deserves from the 

 in^dical profession, but it stands almost alone as the representa- 

 tive of its class. On the Continent, however, and in America 

 the case is very different. The admirable ' Medical Physics ' of 

 Prof. Wundt, of Heidelberg, has been translated from the 

 German into French, with valuable additions, by Dr. Ferdinand 

 Monayer, who regularly lectures on medical physics at the Lyons 

 Faculty of Medicine, and affords a storehouse of information of 

 the highest value to the medical practitioner. Dr. John C. 

 Draper, Professor of Chemistry and Physics in the Medical 

 Department of the University of New York, has also made a 

 valuable contribution to the literature of this subject in his 

 text-book of 'Medical Physics,' published the year before 

 last. There is, indeed, a small but scanty manual by Dr. 

 Macgregor Robertson, the Muirhead Demonstrator of Phy- 

 siology in the University of Glasgow, published in Cassell's 

 Student's Series, but it is entirely unfit to compete with the two 

 exhaustive treatises named before. As with the bibliography, so 

 with the teaching. With the exception of a course of lectures 

 which the present speaker has delivered since 1871 in St. 

 Thomas's Hospital, I am not aware of any systematic attempt 

 in London to teach the medical student the vast mass of physical 

 facts which underlie the daily practice of medicine. This Col- 

 lege, however, forms an honourable exception, for it has on two 

 occasions kindly given me the opportunity to bring before my 

 brother physicians some few of what our Harvey terms nma vel 

 noviter htventa, respecting the physical basis of auscultation in 

 the Croomian, and the electrical conditions of the human body 

 in the Lumleian, lectures of a few years back. It is true that the 

 University of London in its preliminary scientific examination 

 for the degree of Bachelor of Medicine requires students to satisfy 

 their examiners in physics by means of a written paper. But 

 this paper is the same as that set to Bachelors of Science not 

 medical. It is a terrible stumbling-block to the rising medical 

 generation ; it bristles with whit the late genial Prof. De 

 Morgan, himself a mathematician of the highest order, delighted 

 to call mathematical conundrums. It- is set by pure physicists, 

 who know nothing and probably care little for the problems 

 which interest us as medical men. It contributes a large per- 

 centage to the slaughter of innocent aspirants to the higher 

 degrees in medicine, on which one of their most distinguished 

 graduates, now Censor of this College, has feelingly and 

 righteously commented. In the sixteen years during which I have 

 carefully read the papers there set I have never once seen a 

 question directly or indirectly bearing on the physics of medicine. 

 The fact is that the large, difficult, and somewhat heterogeneous 

 branch of knowledge connoted by the word physics is rapidly 

 splitting into several independent portions. There are now 

 distinctly molecular, mathematical, industrial, and physio- 

 logical physics. It is the last of these with which we 

 are concerned. The third or industrial branch has been 

 enormously developed of late by the technical collies at 

 Bristol, Manchester, the City Guilds' at Kensington, and else- 

 where. The mathematical branch is well cared for by the two 

 old Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, but the physiological 

 section has been hitherto hardly enough recognized by our 

 teaching bodies. Surely an earnest student should be able 

 somewhere to obtain information as to the natural laws on which 

 the stethoscope, the microscope, the ophthalmoscope, and the 

 sphygmograph are f)unded without having to wade through 

 interminable problems on the C.G.S. system of units, or vortex 

 theories of matter, or, chimera of chimeras, the possibility and 

 advantages of four-dimensional space. It is to the promotion of 

 this particular branch of study by means of experiment that it is 

 this day my duty to exhort the College. An admirable oppor- 

 tunity exists, for in April of the present year the Committee of 

 Delegates appointed by this College and the Royal College of 

 Surgeons of England reported : (l) That it is desirable to utilize 

 tha vacant ground adjoining Examination Hall for scientific 

 purposes, under the c )ntrol and management of the two 

 Colleges. (2) That the ' scientific purposes ' be, in the first 

 place, the investigation and exposition of such branches of 

 science connected with medicine and surgery as the two Col- 

 leges may from time to time determine. The College has 



