452 



NATURE 



[April 8, 1922 



the wide-ranging history, learned but never dry^ 

 was a literary success, receiving praise from all sides 

 and from thinkers of all schools. The impartiality 

 with which the author treated the contributions made 

 to thought by England, France, and Germany re- 

 spectively was universally recognised. This work he 

 was able to complete so far as scientific and philo- 

 sophical thought are concerned. A third part to be 

 devoted to the less systematic thought that has found 

 its expression in helles lettres was projected,, and was 

 to consist, like the two parts on scientific and philo- 

 sophical thought, of two volumes ; but this Dr. Merz 

 finally decided,, though he had collected much material, 

 must be left for some successor. 



Dr. Merz's labours, however, did not by any mean§ 

 cease. At the end of 1915 he published a very interest- 

 ing essay on Religion and Science, in which he showed 

 that the certainty of science within its limits depends 

 on its method of abstraction. A view of things " all 

 together," in which the mind, without which the 

 external world cannot be known, is restored as part 

 of the total system of reality, leads to recognition of 

 the religious attitude as a mode of comprehending 

 the universe, including man. Philosophy mediates 

 between science and religion, explaining the validity 

 in its own manner of each mode of viewing things. 



In a like essay, " Fragment on the Human Mind " 

 (1919), Dr. Merz showed his freedom from some 

 prejudices of that reaction in nineteenth-century 

 English thought which had gone to Germany for a 

 more spiritual doctrine than the native philosophy 

 seemed to result in. Knowing and appreciating the 

 rule of Kant and Hegel and their successors, in the 

 end he found in the psychological method of Locke, 

 Berkeley, and Hume the most valid, as well as the 

 most accessible way to show the fallacies of the 

 " mechanical Philosophy " when regarded, not simply 

 as the most powerful instrument of scientific thought, 

 but as revealing the ultimate nature of the universe. 

 To give us a suggestion that reality is spiritual, Locke's 

 " plain historical way," namely, the method of intro- 

 spection, remains sufficient. 



Colonel Sir Henry Thuillier, K.C.LE. 



The late Sir Henry Thuillier, who died on March 4, 

 was Surveyor-General of India from 1886 to 1895, 

 and was distinguished as an able and tactful adminis- 

 trator. His name is so generally associated with 

 administrative work, that his success as a geodetic 

 observer in the earlier part of his career is apt to be 

 overlooked. 



Thuillier was commissioned in the Bengal Engineers 

 in 1857, the year of the Mutiny, and he was appointed 

 to the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India in 1859. 

 In 1 859-1 861 he was one of the observers employed in 

 canying a chain of principal triangulation round the 

 Punjab frontier along the line of the river Indus ; 

 this chain has been the fundamental base of all the 

 later surveys, which have been extended during 

 campaigns into Afghanistan, Waziristan, and Tirah. 



In 1862 Thuillier was appointed to the eastern 

 frontier of India, and for the next six years he had the 

 difficult task of extending the principal triangulation 

 eastwards from Calcutta to Burma. During the first 



NO. 2736, VOL. .109] 



half of the nineteenth century the geodetic triangula- 

 tion had been carried across mountains and plains, 

 deserts, fields and forests, and the observers had had 

 to adapt their methods of observation to the varying 

 types of country ; but in Eastern Bengal Thuillier 

 encountered a type of country that had not been met 

 with before, and which was probably the most un- 

 suitable of all types for triangulation. He had to 

 carry chains of triangles over the deltaic swamps of 

 the Ganges and Brahmaputra ; the country was 

 absolutely flat and overgrown with heavy jungle. 



Thuillier had to cut glades through the jungle so 

 as to render the several stations of his triangulation 

 mutually visible from one another. The party suffered 

 continually from malaria ; the clearing of the glades 

 was so laborious that their width had to be limited to 

 a few feet. The exact line in which any particular 

 glade had to be cut from one station to another was 

 not known with sufficient accuracy to enable the 

 men to clear the jungle in the correct direction, and 

 numerous trial glades had to be cut in order to deter- 

 mine the true alignment. In one year on the Brahma- 

 putra series of triangulation, Thuillier had to clear 

 700 miles of glade through dense jungle, and in the 

 six years the total length of the clearance lines was 

 nearly 4000 miles. 



Sir Henry Thuillier had also considerable experience 

 of surveying at high altitudes. He was trained in the 

 famous Kashmir survey of Montgomerie and Godwin- 

 Austen (1861), and from 1870 to 1873 he was vet 

 charge of the survey of the Kumaun Himalayas, 

 including the glacial areas of Nanda Devi and TrisuL 

 Many of his survey marks were above 20,000 feet. 



Prof. J. A. Green. 



We are grieved to hear of the sudden death, following 

 upon an operation, of Prof. John Alfred Green, professor 

 of education in Sheffield University. Many of us 

 knew Prof. Green best in connection with the Educa- 

 tional Science Section of the British Association, of 

 which he was for several years Recorder. He had the 

 virtue we admire in a Tangye silent gas engine — 

 converting all his energy into work and none into fuss — 

 of a restrained enthusiasm, able to work in harness, 

 but no less enthusiastic because he did not boil over 

 into the vapid. Hence he was invaluable in the early 

 days of the Educational Science Section, when many 

 doubted whether there were, or could be, such a thing 

 as educational science. But Prof. Green had visions 

 and lived to realise them. He was secretary of the 

 Committee on Mental and Physical Factors involved 

 in Education, and the opening pages of the Report 

 presented at Sheffield in 1910 make his attitude clear : 

 " application of experimental methods to the investi- 

 gation of mental phenomena " . . . " study of the 

 persons to be educated and their attitude towards 

 methods of instruction." If Section L still devotes a 

 day annually to education and psychology, that is 

 largely Prof. Green's doing. The work was carried 

 further by him in The Journal oj Experimental Pedagogy, 

 which he edited. In that journal Prof. Green has left 

 us a monument and a guidepost which may encourage 

 us to go forward in the way which he was one of the 

 first to tread. H. R. 



