March ii, 1920] 



NATURE 



39. 



i^ivc due attention from the Meteorological Office to 

 the requirements of the Board of Trade and of the 

 Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, even though 

 lor simplicity, and possibly for financial reasons, it is 

 housed in the Air Ministry and its separate expenses 

 included in the account of that Department. 

 Walter VV. Bryant, 



Hon. Secretary. 

 ^L Royal Meteorological Society. 



W ^' 

 ■ ^ 



m v; 

 i ^' 



Organisation of Scientific Work. 



The fostering and development of the resources of 

 India by means of scientific research is not a mere 

 question of academic interest, but one on which the 

 very economic existence of the country depends. For- 

 tunately the Government of India has realised the 

 danger of the situation, and is anxious to develop the 

 vast potentialities of the country through the applica- 

 tion of science, as Japan has already done with her 

 iax more limited resources. It is obvious that the 

 success of the proposed scheme will largely depend 

 on the encouragement of investigation among the 

 Indian students and workers, who will necessarily be 

 the principal recruits for the work of the utilisation 

 of indigenous talent in the services of their own 

 country. A quarter of a century ago, when science 

 teaching was in its infancy in India, I ventured to 

 predict that, through an ever-increasing ingenuity of 

 devices necessary for extending the boundaries of 

 knowledge, there would in the near future be seen 

 in India an advance of skill and of invention among 

 our workers, and that, if this skill could be. assured, 

 practical applications would not fail to follow" in many 

 fields of human activity. 



My anticipations have since been fully realised ; 

 for example, the extremely delicate instruments which 

 have enabled me to carry out all my investigations 

 have been constructed entirely by Indian mechanicians, 

 and I have been assured that the most skilled Ameri- 

 can instrument-makers could not have produced ap- 

 paratus more delicate. As regards scientific advance 

 In its various departments, it is generally recognised 

 that the present period in India may truly be described 

 as a renaissance. 



With reference to the practical scheme now under the 

 consideration of the Government of India, the leading 

 article in Nature of February 19 states very fairly 

 the comparative merits of the two alternatives, namely, 

 that of centralisation under a proposed Imperial 

 Department, and that of decentralisation, under which 

 research workers will be given as free a hand as 

 possible. Under the centralisation scheme the work 

 of an investigator would depend on the previous sanc- 

 tion of the head of the Service, who would probably 

 not be of any scientific eminence, or might even be 

 without scientific qualification ; and, most serious of 

 all, he would not be able to publish his results with- 

 out the consent of the official head of his special 

 department. The possible abuses of such conditions 

 are sufficiently obvious to all. 



Every real investigator is making a great adventure 

 into the unknown, and all the initiative and all the 

 risk must therefore be his own. Nothing could be so 

 disastrous for the growth of knowledge as to place 

 competent men under an incompetent machine. 



Finally, who should be the judge of the value of the 

 work accomplished? Such judgment should not be 

 departmental or secret; the verdict should come from 

 the open court of the scientific world itself, and this 

 would efFectively put an end to official or non-official 

 incompetence. T. C. BosE. 



;,; Bloomsbury Square, London. March 6. 



NO. 2628, VOL. 105] 



Photographs of Seven Vocal Notes. 



Dr. A. O. Ranki>je, by means of the invention 

 described by him in Nature of February 5, has placed 

 me under a great obligation in furnishing ocular con- 

 firmation, desirable for those whose hearing is un- 

 disciplined or poor, of observations made by the 

 unassisted ear on the inherent pitches of vowel 

 sounds. No one who can hear harmonics of a 

 sustained note from the larynx reinforced suc- 

 cessively by a continuous change in the pitch 

 of the mouth-cavity acting as a resonator should 

 remain in doubt as to their place in the tablature, 

 for, the pitch of the voice being known, if a harmonic 

 sequence is heard, such as 4:5:6:7, the vibration 

 number of any one of these overtones is the product 

 of a simple multiplication. The well-known spherical 

 resonators, applied in turn to the ear, cannot be 

 changed instantaneously, destroy the all-important con- 

 trast, and have failed. The late Lord Rayleigh's com- 

 pound resonator (Fhil. Mag., 1907, p. 321) would do 

 better service, but I do not know that anyone has 

 used it for this purpose. The table in text-books of 

 physics, physiology, etc., shows an extreme error of 

 two octaves. The inherent pitches of the vowels of 

 ordinary speech from 00 to ee range from about /" to 

 div. Taking two octaves as the extreme compass of 

 the mouth shaped for vowels, this supplies such "real 

 characters " for vowel sounds as Bishop Wilkins and 

 his friends looked for in vain, and the use of an 

 alphabet thus rectified will make it unnecessafy for 

 English-speaking children to learn to spell, while the 

 re-formed print writing will obviate spelling reform. 

 I have explained this seeming paradox in a book now 

 in the press. 



The films were marked before exposure. 



(i) "128 not, ?6." This means that a note c 

 physical pitch is to be sung in which the singer hears 

 the sixth harmonic intensified in the mouth, the vowel- 

 qualitv more or less resembling the vowel in not pro- 

 longed. When the negative was changed back into 

 sound by Dr. Rankine, the harmonic no longer in 

 question (6, g") was clearly heard by him, and after- 

 wards by mvself. The octave comes out in the photo- 

 graph surprisingly strong. I suspect that it may be 

 largely a self-combination tone. I do not with cer- 

 tainty distinguish the octave in any quality of my 

 voice unless it is strengthened in the mouth, as when 

 the vowel 00 is sung to a top note of chest register. 



Six more films were exposed on February 16. Brief 

 samples of all six are here shown. 



(2) "192 not, ?4." The voice being raised a fifth, 

 to g, the mouth-tone g" is now harmonic 4. The four 

 light bands and four dark lines in each period are 

 evident. The inequality of the spacing reminds us that 

 the thing photographed is not a simple tone with the 

 double octave imposed upon it, but a voice in which 

 the fourth harmonic component is made especially 

 prominent. 



(3) "256 not, ?3." The voice at middle C, c' phy- 

 sical pitch, the overtone g" is now harmonic 3. 



(4) "128 book, ?5." The pitch of the resonator is 

 lowered to e" bv an unusual protrusion and rounding 

 of the lips. The pitch of the vowel in book as spoken 

 in southern England is considerably higher than e'. 

 One vibration in each periodic group is of the fre- 

 quency 128x5. The rest appear displaced by the 

 octave or the double' octave. 



(5) "256 book, ? high." The qualitv of the vowel 

 is not affected, but now the pitch of the resonator is 

 too remote from the nearest of the lower harmonics 

 of c',-2 and 3, c' and g" ; and the only tone audible 

 from the mouth is a very high, thin sound, noted 

 more than once as undouhtedlv a sharn F, harmonic 



