14 



NATURE 



[March 7, 19 18 



various interests concerned— administrative and educa- 

 tional — and it received, either personally or by 

 memorandum, the evidence of fifty-six witnesses repre- 

 sentative of all shades of opinion and conditions of 

 experience, with the result that a report of sixty-three 

 folio pages of high value has been prepared, which will 

 do much to enhance the position of the teacher. " For 

 many years past," the report states, " it has not been 

 possible to secure recruits in numbers adequate to the 

 needs of the schools." The position will obviously be 

 seriously aggravated should Mr. Fisher's Bill become 

 law, and the children be required to remain at school 

 until fourteen, and continued education be imposed 

 within the usual hours of labour until the age of 

 eighteen is reached. Not only will a much larger 

 number of teachers be required, but also teachers of 

 higher qualifications. 



Already there are in the elementary schools 167,810 

 teachers of all grades, of whom 43,500 are men and 

 124,310 are women. Of this number. 109,250 are 

 trained certificated* teachers. There is a constant pres- 

 sure to induce a still larger number of teachers 

 to go through a course of two or more years 

 of college training with the view of securing either a 

 certificate or a degree, which means that the future 

 teacher will be at least twenty-one or twenty-two years 

 ■of age before remunerative employment begins, and 

 that on a scale not higher than that of an ordinary 

 artisan. 



It will be seen from the above figures how large a 

 proportion of the elementary-school teachers are women, 

 and yet it is clear that, at least for the older boy pupils, 

 it is most desirable that their teachers should be men. 

 The question of a more abundant recruitment is of vital 

 moment, and its solution lies not merely in the estab- 

 lishment of a higher scale of salaries and an adequate 

 pension scheme, but also in better prospects for the 

 more able of the teachers, so chat not only should head- 

 teacherships be open to them, the average salary of 

 which in England and Wales is about 176Z. for men 

 and 126Z. for women, but also inspectorships and ad- 

 ministrative posts with the central and local authori- 

 ties. 



It cannot be expected that men trained side bv side 

 in the same university with prospective lawyers, doc- 

 tors, divines, men of science, and technologists in in- 

 dustry and commerce seeking degrees of equivalent 

 standing will be content with the poor rewards the 

 profession of teaching in the elementary schools offers 

 to able men. If the nation desires that its children 

 shall have a prolonged and satisfactory education in 

 well-equipped schools, and also the best possible train- 

 ing at the hands of capable teachers, there is no course 

 open to it but to pay the price for this essential ser- 

 vice, and the reward of the nation will be great. 



The report, in its interesting analyses and tables, ex- 

 hibits an astonishing variety of scales of payments and 

 of increments prevailing in the various areas, urban 

 and rural, of England and Wales, but only in few 

 cases can they be said to be liberal or attractive. There 

 needs to be more uniformity than at present exists 

 in the salaries of teachers, and where the produce of 

 a id. rate per child is low, then it would appear desir- 

 able that the central authority, in order that the teacher 

 may not suffer, should give the necessary financial 

 assistance. Based upon the minimum initial salarv 

 which the President of the Board of Education stated 

 that he had in mind, namely, looZ. for men and 90L 

 for women, the report offers, by way of illustration, 

 five separate scales, according to the varying circum- 

 stances of urban and rural areas, for men and women 

 certificated class teachers, ranging from looL and 90I. 

 respectively to 300Z. and 240J., the maximum varying 

 according to the conditions of the area, and for head- 



teacherships a like set of illustrative scales, rising to 

 400/. in the case of men and to 300/. in that of women, 

 the maximum again to be determined by local condi- 

 tions. 



The principles insisted on in the report are that there 

 should be a reasonable initial payment, and a scale of 

 increment leading to a point representing an adequate 

 salary ; that this should be receivable as a matter of^ 

 right, and as part of the contract, by every teacher* 

 whose service is not characterised by definite default or 

 wilful neglect; and that, in order that the increment 

 should be so adjusted as to meet the teachers' needs, 

 the value of the teachers' services should be 

 periodically recognised, so that good service may 

 be encouraged. With respect to the payment 

 of women teachers, the report states that in 

 the opinion of the Committee the scale of salaries 

 •adequate for women is inadequate for men, and that 

 in average circumstances the maximum for women 

 should be three-fourths that for men, and finally sug- 

 gests that the best method of recognising superior 

 merit in teachers is by advancement to positions of 

 greater responsibility and increased emolument, even if 

 it means a departure from the normal scale. 



The report is accompanied by a valuable memor- 

 andum, drawn up by its secretaries, giving a retrospect 

 of methods and scales of payment since the Act of 1870, 

 and a clear account, illustrated by elaborate compara- 

 tive tables, of the common ■ features of existing scales 

 in various parts of the country. 



■ METEOROLOGY AND EXACT 

 THERMOMETRY. 



IN the Monthly Weather Review for November, 19 17, 

 Prof. C. F' Marvin, Chief of the U.S. Weather 

 Bureau, asks for a short word and corresponding 

 symbol for the temperature on the hydrogen- or ad- 

 justed mercurv-scale of Centigrade degrees measured 

 from 273° C. below the normal freezing point of water 

 in place of the word absolute. As he rightly points 

 out, the use of the word in that sense is loose scien- 

 tific language, because, to tjiose who know, it means 

 not quite the same thing as the absolute thermo- 

 dynamic scale or true Kelvin scale. 



Prof. Marvin's own suggestions for a descriptive 

 name are quasi-absolute, approximate absolute, and 

 pseudo-absolute, not one of which is likely to appeal 

 to the general reader as the mot juste. The question 

 is one of practical importance, because our own 

 Meteorological Office uses the approximate absolute 

 scale in many of its publications for expressing tem- 

 peratures, together with the millibar scale for pressure, 

 notablv in its recent issue of data for the whole world 

 with "the title of Rdseau Mondial. It has discarded 

 the usp of the degree sign for te'mperature and uses a 

 small a immediately after the numeric, thus placing 

 temperature dm the same footing as an . ordinary 

 physical quantity like mass or length. 



The practice of using absolute c.g.s. units for pres- 

 sure and the approximate absolute scale for tempera- 

 ture dates from 1909 with the regular publication of 

 data of the upper air in the' Weekly Weather Report, 

 and afterwards in the Geophysical Journal, the only 

 change being the adoption of the millibar instead of 

 the megadyne per square centimetre in 1914, a prac- 

 tice against which Prof. McAdie. of Harvard Univer- 

 sity, has raised protests on the ground that chemists 

 had already assigned another meaning to the word bar. 

 In the same year the U.S. Weather Bureau commenced 

 the issue of a daily map of the northern hemisphere 

 in the same units". The millibar was adopted in 

 France for the Bulletin International in 1917. 



The history of scientific progress justifies some loose- 



NO. 2523, VOL. lOl] 



