68 



NATURE 



[March 28, 1918 



beds of the Greensand formation contributed to 

 the Philosophical Transactions in 1885. 



Hinde continued to pay much attention to 

 cherts in later years, and showed that many of 

 them were rich in the skeletons of radiolaria, 

 which he described in detail. His skill' in making 

 preparations was indeed matched only by the 

 patience with which he studied them; and it would 

 be difficult to find more conscientious plodding- 

 work than that he accomplished when he examined 

 jiud described the core from the boring in the 

 coral-atoll of Funafuti for the report of the Royal 

 Society's committee in 1904. 



From 1882 onwards Hinde resided near Lon- 

 don, and until 1900 he took a very active share in 

 the administration of the Geological Society, serv- 

 ing three terms on the council and being a vice- 

 president from 1892 to 1895. From 1897 until 

 1915 he was also an active member of council of 

 the Palaeontographical Society, and held the office 

 of treasurer from 1904 to 1914. Whatever he 

 undertook he carried out with intense thorough- 

 ness, and whenever he formed a judgment as to 

 the right course to pursue, neither argument nor 

 persuasion could alter his determination. He 

 sometimes therefore found himself at variance with 

 his colleagues, but his honesty of purpose was 

 always so evident that he never lost their highest 

 respect and esteem. His scientific worth led the 

 Geological Society to award him the WoUaston 

 fund in 1882, the Lyell medal in 1897, and he 

 was elected a fellow of the Royal Societv in 

 1896. 



NOTES. 



It was stated in the Times of March 21 that Dr. 

 Addison, Minister of Reconstruction, had informed a 

 deputation of Welsh members that a Government Bill 

 for the establishment of a Ministry of HealtTi would 

 probably be introduced in the House of Commons 

 immediately after the Easter recess. Agreement" has 

 been reached on the main principles of the measure as 

 the result of conferences with the various departments 

 and parties affected. 



A WELL-ILLUSTRATED article by M. H. Volta on the 

 relation of inventors to the problem of dealing with 

 hostile submarines appears in La Nature for February 

 23. It seems that the French authorities have been 

 overwhelmed with suggestions which as a general rule 

 show a lamentable want of consideration of the con- 

 ditions under which the search for submarines and the 

 attacks on them, when found, have to be carried out. 

 Half a dozen ingenious arrangements* for netting them 

 and either communicating the fact to the shore or to 

 an attendant destroyer, from which the submarine is 

 then bombed, or providing automatically for the ex- 

 plosion of a bomb when the net is touched, are de- 

 scribed. Almost any of them would act in still water 

 not used by surface boats, but none of them are of the 

 least use in water constantly in tidal motion, often 

 tempest-tossed, and "with craft of all kinds on its sur- 

 face. In the same way many of the suggestions 

 for dealing with the problem by the help of aero- 

 planes display an extraordinary amount of ingenuity, 

 but at the same time a candid ignorance of the condi- 

 tions of flight and of stability of an aeroplane. 



NO. 2526, VOL. lOl] 



The House of Lords, by a majority, has recently 

 dismissed an appeal from a decision of the Court of 

 Appeal aflirming a judgment of Mr. Justice Astbury. 

 The action was brought by the British Thomson- 

 Houston Company to restrain " Duram," Ltd., from. 

 ' infringing a patent granted to the appellants for a 

 process for the treatment of tungsten. The respondents 

 disputed the validity of the patent. The appellants 

 claimed that their invention consisted in the discovery 

 that a mere built-up body of particles of tungsten 

 which had hitherto been known only as a powder could, 

 be sufficiently consolidated together by prolonged heat- 

 ing below the melting point, and could then, if worked 

 hot, be treated as though it were a solid piece of 

 metal, that continuous lengths of wire of filament 

 size could be produced therefrom, and that these par- 

 ticles of tungsten could be made so coherent that if 

 hot they could be hammered, rolled, or drawn. Mr. 

 Justice Astbury held upon the construction of the 

 specification that the patent was void for lack of sub- 

 ject-matter in that it covered the working of tungsten 

 while hot, and that the working of a hot metal was 

 merely the utilisation of the tools and routine of the 

 metal-worker, and was not the subject of invention. 

 His judgrnent has been upheld, both in the Court of 

 Appeal arid in the House of Lords. 



It is sincerely to be hoped that the very timely ap- 

 peal of the Duke of Rutland, in the Times of March 

 21, will not fall upon deaf or apathetic ears. His 

 Grace directs attention to the very serious diminution 

 of our truly insectivorous wild birds, and appeals to 

 the authorities at Whitehall, when sending out their 

 commands respecting the destruction of grain-eating 

 wild birds, to urge strongly the advisability of sparing 

 the truly insectivorous species. In May of last year 

 Dr. W. E. Collinge pointed out in these columns- 

 the need for the Board of Agriculture to compel the 

 preservation of such birds, and had the suggestion 

 that this Board should establish a Bureau of Ornitho- 

 logy (c/. Nature, October 15, 1915) been acted upon, 

 the authorities would have been in possession of evi- 

 dence which would have shown the real state of affairs 

 as regards such birds, and would ere now have been 

 ready to act. Since the commencement of the war up 

 to the present time tens of thousands of acres of woods 

 and forests have been destroyed in the British Isles. 

 What the effect of this drastic change will be upon 

 wild bird life it is difficult to foretell, but it seems 

 very likely that it will mean a large decrease in the 

 number of insectivorous birds, and as the stumps of 

 recently felled trees in many cases provide an ideal 

 breeding ground for insects, we shall probably, for 

 some years to come, be troubled with plagues of vari- 

 ous kinds of insects, in particular those that are in- 

 jurious to forests. The unusually trying winters of 

 the past two years have taken an enormous toll of 

 tits, flycatchers, warblers, etc., and every protection 

 should be afforded them at once. 



' The meeting of the Institution of Mechanical En- 

 gineers on March 15 was eventful in that a paper was 

 read by a lady — Miss O. E. Monkhouse — on the em- 

 ployment of women in munition factories. Roughly 

 speaking, there are now close on one million women 

 engaged on munitions; these inay be divided into three 

 types : (i) The educated type ; (2) the domestic type; (3) 

 the ordinary factory type. The first type are already 

 half-educated for the better class of engineering work, 

 and are taught easily; the second train readily 

 into good charge hands and forewomen ; and the last- 

 mentioned type are best employed on purely unskilled 

 work of a repetition nature. There are many cases 

 where women have acquired a knowledge of engineer- 



