January 31, 1901] 



NATURE 



329 



next meeting of the Society. Th6 general opinion in Salisbury 

 and district is that Stonehenge ought to be purchased by the 

 nation, but the price which was mentioned some time ago is 

 regarded as too great. 



The Right Hon. R. W. Hanbury, M.P., President of the 

 Board of Agriculture, has appointed a committee for the purpose 

 of conducting experimental investigations with regard to the 

 communicability of glanders under certain conditions, and as 

 to the arresting and curative powers, if any, of mallein when 

 repeatedly administered. The committee will consist of: — 

 Mr. A. C. Cope, chief veterinary ofificer of the Board of 

 Agriculture (chairman) ; Prof. J. McFadyean, principal of the 

 Royal Veterinary College ; Mr. William Hunting, one of the 

 veterinary inspectors of the London County Council ; Mr. J. 

 Mcintosh McCall, assistant veterinary officer of the Board of 

 Agriculture. Mr. A. H. Berry, of the Board of Agriculture, 

 will act as the secretary to the committee. 



It is proposed in Dundee to erect a granite monument over 

 the grave of James Bowman Lindsay, in the Western Cemetery of 

 the city. Lindsay was a very remarkable man, whose memory 

 should not be permitted to fade. He was born in 1799, and taught 

 electricity, magnetism and other subjects in Dundee for many 

 years, dying there about forty years ago. In 1834 he foresaw 

 that "houses and towns will in a short time be lighted by 

 electricity instead of gas, and machinery will be worked by it 

 instead of steam." This prediction was the result of his own 

 observations of effects produced by the electric current, and not 

 merely imaginative suggestions. In 1854 Lindsay transmitted 

 telegraphic signals through water electrically ; and when the 

 British Association visited Aberdeen in 1859, he demonstrated 

 the success of his method by transmitting signals across the 

 harbour. He also read a paper upon it, entitled, " Telegraphing 

 without Wires." Sir John Leng has set on foot the scheme to 

 commemorate the genius of Lindsay by a suitable memorial, and 

 there should be no difficulty in raising the modest amount 

 required for that purpose. 



On Saturday night and Sunday last the metropolis, and 

 indeed all parts of the British Islands, were visited by a storm of 

 great severity. The storm approached from the Atlantic so rapidly 

 that very little notice of its appearance was visible a few hours 

 previously. On Saturday morning the centre of a large de- 

 pression which had passed to the north of Scotland lay over the 

 north of Sweden, and the only indication of the approach of 

 another serious disturbance was that the wind in the south-west 

 of Ireland showed no inclination to veer beyond west. But the 

 telegraphic reports received by the Meteorological Office showed 

 that in the course of Saturday night the wind had rapidly 

 increased, and on Sunday morning the centre of the storm lay 

 near the north of Scotland. Its influence was felt as far as 

 the south of France, and without doubt far to the north of 

 Scotland. The gusts were very violent, and caused much 

 damage to trees and buildings, the pressure at Greenwich 

 amounting to 34*4 lbs. on the square foot about noon on 

 Sunday, which is equivalent to force il of the Beaufort 

 notation. By Monday morning the centre of the disturbance 

 lay over the Baltic, but the interruption to telegraphic com- 

 jpunication was so great that scarcely any reports from Northern 

 Europe reached this country in time to be available for the 

 ordinary weather forecasts. Smart showers of hail, snow and 

 rain occurred in most parts of the country. 



The Shanghai Meteorological Society has published its 

 seventh annual report, containing much useful information 

 relating to the atmospheric conditions and movements in the 

 far East. As an appendix to the report an atlas is published 



NO. 1 63 I, VOL. 63] 



showing the mean isobars and the mean directions of the wind 

 for each of the six winter months. The number of stations in 

 the Chinese Empire is too limited to allow of precise information 

 being given, but all that was available, relating to the sea 

 and adjacent shores, has been collected and carefully collated. 

 The average number of storms varies from two in October to 

 four in November, December and January, and five or six in 

 February and March. The general direction of the storm track 

 is E.N.E. with a tendency to bend to N.E. The violence of 

 the storms seldom attains the intensity of a true hurricane ; force 

 10 or II of the Beaufort scale is seldom recorded. The report 

 is drawn up by the Rev. A. Froc, S.J., director of the Zi-ka-wei 

 Observatory. 



Mr. W. McDougall contributes to Mind (January 1901) 

 some new observations in support of Thomas Young's theory 

 of colour- vision. The author has attempted a re-examination of 

 the fundamental and comparatively simple phenomena of vision, 

 and he describes in some detail certain phenomena which he 

 designates " the complete fading of visual images" and "the 

 mutual inhibitions of visual images." The author is unaware of 

 any previous mention of these phenomena, and he applies the 

 knowledge derived from their study to an exhaustive examination 

 of the question of a separate black-exciting process, comparable 

 to the processes that excite the sensations of colour. It is shown 

 that the assumption of such a process is unnecessary and 

 groundless. 



A SHORT time ago we noticed a paper, by Signor C. Viola, 

 on the law of rationality of indices in crystallography. A much 

 more exhaustive examination of the actual basis of the thirty- 

 two classes of crystals is now given by Mr. William Barlow in 

 the Philosophical Magazine for January. Mr. Barlow's proofs 

 are based on the fundamental assumption of a molecular struc- 

 ture combined with a suitable definition of homogeneous 

 structure. This definition implies the existence of points dis- 

 tributed evenly at regular intervals through the mass, such that 

 the aspect of the structure, viewed from all such corresponding 

 points, is the same, but that an inferior limit to the distance 

 between corresponding points always exists. The method of 

 arriving at the thirty-two classes combines some of the argu- 

 ments used by Sohncke with some of those used by Gadolin and 

 others, and the paper includes a discussion of Haiiy's law. 



Some new experiments by M. G. Sagnac on the transforma- 

 tions of Rontgen rays by matter are summarised in No. 157 of 

 the Bulletin of the French Physical Society. The study of 

 the electric action of the secondary rays emitted by a body 

 affords a test of the presence of small quantities of relatively 

 active substances such as copper, iron, aluminium. Hence, 

 also, a method of searching for new elements. The energetic 

 absorption of the more active rays from such a metal as, 

 platinum in the first few millimetres of adjacent air has been 

 verified directly by rarefying the air surrounding the metal. 

 Finally, a pencil of Rontgen rays discharges a conductor even 

 when it does not pass through the portion of air acted on by 

 the electric field of the conductor. It is sufficient that the rays 

 shall traverse a portion of air separated from the field of the 

 conductor by a Faraday screen (such as a metal gauze), and 

 that there shall be a field of force in the part traversed, of like 

 sense to that due to the conductor. If the charge of the con- 

 ductor is reversed in sign, the rate of discharge is altered in 

 the ratio of I to 10 or 20, but in the absence of the field in 

 the second region no such change takes place. M. Sagnac's 

 explanation of the phenomena is that the ions produced in the 

 second region acquire, under the influence of the external field, 

 sufficient kinetic energy to carry them through the openings of 

 the screen into the region surrounding the conductor. 



