February 25, 191 5] 



NATURE 



717 



Prof. Arthur Keith, con>ervator of the museum 

 of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, will 

 deliver, during the latter part of March, a course of 

 five lectures upon the bearing of recent discoveries 

 on our conception of the evolution and antiquity of 

 man. The lectures will be given under the terms of 

 the Macbride Foundation in Western Reserve Univer- 

 sity, Cleveland. 



The London County Council has arranged for a 

 series of five public lectures to be given at the Horni- 

 man Museum, Forest Hill, on Wednesday evenings 

 at 7.30 o'clock. The series commenced yesterday with 

 a lecture on the Andamanese and other pigmies. The 

 subjects of the remaining lectures will be : the 

 Australian Aborigines ; the Eskimo ; the Papuans of 

 New Guinea ; and the Maori and other Polynesians. 

 Each lecture is complete in itself, and there is no 

 charge for admission. 



A LECTURESHIP in Ophthalmology has been estab- 

 lished in Dublin by the bequest of Mr. R. J. Mont- 

 gomery, who desired that it should be known as the 

 Mary Louisa Prentice Montgomery lectureship, and 

 that the appointment to it should rest each alternative 

 five years with the Board of Trinity College, Dublin, 

 and with the president, vice-president, and council of 

 the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. Joint 

 regulations for the lectureship have now been drawn 

 up, and the first election will take place at the begin- 

 ning of the next summer session. 



The distribution of prizes and certificates at the Sir 

 John Cass Technical Institute and the opening of the 

 new metallurgy laboratory for the mechanical testing 

 of metals and alloys, presented to the institute by the 

 Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, by Sir Robert 

 G. C. Mowbray, Bart., Prime Warden of the Worship- 

 ful Company of Goldsmiths, will be held on Wednes- 

 day, March 3, at 8 o.m. The chair will be taken by 

 Sir Thomas H. Elliott, K.C.B., chairman of the 

 governing body. There will be an exhibition of work 

 by students of the department of arts and crafts and 

 by members of the .Arts and Crafts Society, as well as 

 an exhibition of students' work and apparatus in the 

 laboratories and workshops. 



A NOTE in the Daily Chronicle of February 24 refers 

 to the effect of the war upon the attendance of students 

 in the twenty-two German universities. It appears 

 that entered on their books are 52,504 students, against 

 59,600 this time last year. But of these 29,882 have 

 been "permitted" to join the military forces of the 

 Empire, including 300 women students in the army 

 medical department. The actual attendance at lec- 

 tures is given as 18,922 men and 3700 women. If 

 the students of technical high schools with university 

 status are added the grand total of 38,400 is reached, 

 or about 75 per cent, of the entire number. The 

 universities most depleted of students are those nearest 

 the frontiers — Bonn and Heidelberg in the west, and 

 Konigsberg and Breslau in the east. It is stated in 

 Science of February 12 that there are matriculated 

 in the University of Berlin 7037 men and 898 women, 

 as compared with 8200 men and 859 women last 

 winter. These numbers show a marked contrast 

 with those of our own universities ; for at Oxford and 

 Cambridge alone the number of undergraduates now 

 in residence is about 2300, whereas at the like period 

 last year it was 6700. 



The Council of the London (Royal Free Hospital) 

 School of Medicine for Women is now arranging for 

 a considerable extension of laboratory and teaching 

 accommodation. This extension is necessitated both 

 by the increasing number of women desirous of 

 entering the medical profession and by the recogni- 



NO. 2365, VOL. 94] 



tion of the fact that research work must be regarded 

 as an integral part of education, and that no medical 

 school can be considered as satisfactorily equipped 

 without full facilities for the carrying out of scientific 

 investigations. A site adjoining the present buildings 

 of the school has been secured, and the extension 

 will include additional accommodation for teaching 

 and much improved facilities for research work. ¥ot 

 this very necessary extension the sum of 25,000/. is 

 necessary for building and equipment, and a further 

 similar sum for endowment. By the kindness of the 

 Duchess of Marlborough a meeting was held at 

 Sunderland House on February 18 to promote the 

 extension. The speakers were the Duchess of MarU 

 borough (in the chair), Surgeon-General Sir Alfred 

 Keogh, Dr. Mar^• Scharlieb, Dr. Florence Willey, Dr. 

 Winifred CuUis, and Mr. .Acland, M.P. The Duchess 

 of Marlborough in her speech brought out the 

 extreme urgency of the careful use of medical service 

 during this present crisis and the great necessity for 

 an increased service in the future, and particularly 

 of medical women, who were needed as medical in- 

 spectors of school children and as workers in maternity 

 and infant welfare centres, whilst there was also a 

 very great need amongst women for practitioners of 

 their own sex. Sir Alfred Keogh, Director-General 

 of the Army Medical Service, paid an eloquent tribute 

 to the work of the school, with which he had fami- 

 liarised himself when, a few years ago, he had for 

 the Board of Education to inspect practically every 

 medical school in the country-, saying that he yielded 

 to none in his admiration of the school. He further 

 made the gratifying announcement that as a result 

 of the excellent work done by medical women in the 

 war he had offered to two medical women who had 

 organised a hospital unit in Paris, and later one at 

 Boukjgne, a hospital of 500 beds, or, if they could 

 staff it, of 1000 beds here in England. The other 

 speakers emphasised the necessity there would be for 

 medical women after the war, when prophylactic 

 measures would be of greater importance than before, 

 and such work as ante-natal treatment and infant 

 care would be of even greater significance when every 

 child would be of added value. 



SOCIETIES AND ACADEMIES. 

 London. 

 Royal Society, Februarv i8.— Sir William Crookes, 

 president, in the chair.— Prof. W. A. Bone and others : 

 Gaseous combustion at high pressures. .Mixtures of 

 methane with less than its own volume of oxygen were 

 exploded in steel bombs at initial pressures of between 

 8 and 32 atmospheres. The results were in harmony 

 with the " hvdroxylation " theory- of hydrocarbon com- 

 bustion put forward some years ago by Prof. Bone. 

 Results of experiments upon an equimolecular mixture 

 of ethane and oxygen have again confirmed the 

 hvdroxylation theorv. Another section of the paper 

 deals with an experimental determination of the rela- 

 tive affinities of methane, hydrogen and carbon 

 monoxide for oxvgen in flames. It is shown (i) that 

 the affinity of methane is at least twenty' times as 

 great as that of hvdrogen; (2) that when mixtures 

 corresponding to CH, + 0, + a:H, are fired under high 

 initial pressures, in which the partial pressures of 

 methane and oxvgen are kept constant and x only 

 varied, the distribution of oxygen between the methane 

 and hydrogen varies with x*— which means that 

 hydrof^'en is burnt directly to steam in flames as the 

 result of the tri-molecular change 2Hs + = 2H,0, 

 and not (as some have supposed) indirectly through 

 hvdrogen peroxide. The affinity of carbon monoxide 



