December 20, 1917] 



NATURE 



3«9 



London Dav Training College, Southampton Row, 

 W.C.I, and at King's College, Strand, VV.C.2. At 11.30 

 a.m. on the first day Mr. Henry Wilson will lecture on 

 the crafts of Britain, past and future, and at 3 p.m. 

 Mr. W. E. Whitehouse will read a paper on map study 

 in geography and military education. A discussion on 

 geography in advanced courses will be held on January 

 7 at 10.30 a.m. ; and at 5 p.m. on the same day Sir 

 W. M. Ramsay will deliver his presidential address on 

 "The Great Goddess, Mother Earth," at King's Col- 

 lege. 



The annual meeting of the Mathematical Associa- 

 tion will be held at the London Day Training College, 

 Southampton Row, London, on January 9, at 5.30, and 

 January 10, at 2.30. On the first day, Dr. W. P. 

 Milne will deal with the graphical treatment of power 

 series. On the second day the following subjects will 

 be considered :— Dr. W. P. Milne, the uses and func- 

 tions of a school mathematical library; Dr. S. Brodet- 

 sky, nomographv ; and Mr. G. Goodwill, some sug- 

 gestions for a presentation of mathematics in closer 

 touch with reality. Prof. T. P. Nunn will give his 

 presidential address at 2.30, on mathematics and indi- 

 vidualitv, and this will be followed by a discussion on 

 the position of mathematics in the new scheme of the 

 Board of Education for secondary schools. 



The Education Bill introduced by Mr. Fisher in the 

 House of Commons last August has been withdrawn, 

 but a revised Bill, in which certain amendments have 

 been included, is to be brought forward at an early date 

 during the present session of Parliament. "The new 

 Bill," Mr. Bonar Law, Chancellor of the Exchequer, 

 announced on December 13, " will be taken at the earliest 

 possible moment next session, and I have every reason 

 ID hope that it may be possible to pass it into law 

 without delay." The educational clauses of the Bill 

 that has now been allowed to lapse have received the 

 "approval of most of the associations concerned with the 

 professional work of education in England, as well as of 

 other representative bodies, and the country looks to the 

 Government to beg^in national reconstruction on the 

 lines laid down by them. The Bill was, however, 

 heavily weighted with certain administrative proposals 

 dealing with the relations between the Board of Educa- 

 tion and local education authorities, and it is these 

 which have met with opposition. Mr. Fisher has intro- 

 duced substantial changes in the new Bill to meet the 

 objections raised to the administrative clauses of the 

 old one. This encourages us to believe that we are 

 within sight of the dav when a long-deferred and much- 

 needed measure of reform of our educational system will 

 find a place in the Statute-book. The importance of 

 making provision for tho future by strengthening and 

 extending our educational foundations is acknowledged 

 on all sides, and we are glad to be assured bv Mr. 

 Bonar Law that the Government intends to facilitate 

 the progress of this measure of reform through the 

 House of Commons. 



The Education (Scotland) Bill was introduced in the 

 House of Commons on December 17, and was read a 

 first time. The main object of the measure is to effect 

 a further improvement in the provision of education 

 for all classes of the population and to make that 

 ;)i.)\iv;,;n nvnilnhlo to residents in remote and isolated 

 I'-'i :i *-• 1( is proposed to raise the age for full-time 

 sl IukjI attendance from fourteen to fifteen, and to make 

 attendance at continuation classes obligatory upon 

 pupils between the ages of fifteen and eighteen who 

 were not in full-time attendance in school ; to restrict 

 emplovment both before and after school hours of chil- 

 dren attending school, and to regulate still further the 

 emplovment of children or young persons under the 

 .ige of fifteen in factories and in "mines. The local 

 NO. 2512, VOL. too] 



authorities are empowered to provide books not only 

 for children and young persons who are attending 

 school, but also for adult readers, and provision is 

 further made to ensure that so far as is practicable 

 no child or young person who has promise or ability 

 shall be debarred by reason of difficulty of access or 

 want of means from full opportunity for the develop- 

 ment of his faculties by attendance at secondary schools 

 or universities. As there is a large volume of opinion 

 in Scotland which favours the setting up of a body 

 representative of universities, local authorities, teachers, 

 and other classes of persons specially interested in edu- 

 cation, as a forum for the discussion of educational 

 questions, provision is made for the constitution of an 

 advisory council, designed to assist the Minister of 

 Education and the Education Department in framing 

 educational proposals. 



SOCIETIES AND ACADEMIES. 

 London. 

 Linnean Society, November 29. — Sir David Prain, 

 president, in the chair.— Dr. H. Wager : (i) Intensity 

 and direction of light as factors in phototropism. In 

 this communication an account is given of experiments 

 made to determine the influence of the intensity and 

 the direction of light in effecting- phototropic responses 

 in foliage leaves. The distribution of the physico- 

 chemical activities in the photo-sensitive tissues is de- 

 pendent upon both intensity and direction of light, and 

 since the direction of movement may be determined as 

 the resultant of the varying physico-chemical activities 

 in the whole of the sensitive region, it must 

 be concluded that both intensity and direction 

 of light are necessary factors in the photo- 

 tropic response. (2) Spore-coloration in the Agari- 

 cacese. The use of spore-coloration as a basis 

 for the classification of the Agaricaceae is arti- 

 ficial and imperfect. There is no clear line of demarca- 

 tion between the various colours, and the designation 

 of the colours in the text-books is very indefinite and 

 unsatisfactory. A beginning has, however, been made 

 by members of the Mycological Committee of the York- 

 shire Naturalists' Union to obtain more accurate re- 

 cords of spore-coloration in terms of a standard series 

 of tints. It has been found — and this may be a fact 

 of some considerable physiological interest — that, with 

 one or two doubtful exceptions, all the spore colours 

 so far standardised, whether pink, rusty, or purple, fall 

 within the region of the less refrangible half of the 

 spectrum. Spectroscopic examination also shows this. 

 It has been suggested by Buller that these colouring 

 matters may serve a useful purpose by screening off 

 certain of the sun's rays from the living- protoplasm. 

 Spore-coloration may, however, depend, partly at least, 

 upon the kind of substratum on which the fungi grow. 



Manchester. 

 Literary and Philosopliical Society, November 27. — Mr. 

 W. Thomson, president, in the chair. — Prof. W. Boyd 

 Dawliins : Examples of pre-Roman bronze-plated iron 

 from the Pilgrim's Way. The examples were an iron 

 snaffle-bit, an iron harness-ring, and an iron hub of a 

 wheel, covered with a thin layer of bronze, discovered 

 in 1895, on the site of a village in Bigbury Wood, about 

 two miles due west of Canterbury. The village is of 

 prehistoric Iron age, and is traversed by the Pilgrim's 

 Way, and has yielded a considerable number of imple- 

 ments to be seen in the Manchester Museum. Of these 

 the three above mentioned are of peculiar interest, be- 

 cause they show that the art of plating iron with 

 bronze was known at that remote period, ranging in- 

 definitely backward from the Roman conquest. The 



