208 



NATURE 



[April 15, 1920 



retaining the best features of our present arable and 

 grass systems, it allows of considerable further 

 development. 



I shall not venture any opinion as to how far we 

 could go in feeding ourselves. The accompanying table 

 shows what we did before the war, and what, on our 

 present technical knowledge, we could do now, assum- 

 ing that the insurance problem of covering the extra } 

 risks of arable farming were solved, and assuming 

 also a reasonable increase in the efcciency of labour. 



In this country we can certainly hope to find the 

 solution of the insurance problem, and I hope and 

 believe of the labour problem also. Our output per 

 acre of the arable crops is distinctly above that of 

 many other countries, though we no longer lead as 

 we did in the 'sixties. Our output per man, however, 

 is not particularly good, and is open to considerable 

 improvement. Those who know the agricultural 

 labourer best have the fullest faith that his sterling 

 qualities will enable him to rise to the new levels of 

 industrial capacity which the man of science and the 

 engineer have opened out for British agriculture. 

 There are anxious days ahead, but with wise and 

 sympathetic treatment the difficulties can be solved 

 and our future assured. 



Consumption and Production of Human Food in the 

 United Kingdom. Million Tons per Annum. 



' Home production 



Consumption 



Wheat, barley, and 



Other cereals ... 



Potatoes 



Dairy produce ... 



Meat 



(190Q-13) Pre- 

 war 



I3'4 6-5 



5-5 4-8 

 S-2 47 

 39 1-8 



7-0 

 6-3 



Estimated 

 attainable 

 lO'O 



7-0 

 so 

 2-5 



•» Mr. McCurdy gives the following details for igig (see Times, 

 February i8, 1920): — 



Consumption and Production 0/ Food in the United Kingdom, 1919. 

 Proportion of home-grown and 

 Estimated total imported produce included 



Notes. — Cereals: The quantities are given after deduction for seed, and 

 in the cases of wheat for tailings also. Bacon : The quantities given are for 

 bacon as smoked or dried. 



Obit 



THE death of M. Lucien Poincar6, Vice-Rec- 

 tor of the University of Paris, on. March 9, 

 at fifty-eight years of age, will be felt as a great 

 loss, not only to higher education in France, but 

 also to the entente between the universities of that 

 country and those of Great Britain. Only a fort- 

 night before M. Poincare came to England, 

 accompanied by Mme. Poincare, to open the 

 British branch of the Office National des Uni- 

 versites et Ecoles fran^aises, housed with our own 

 Universities of the Empire Bureau in Russell 

 Square. His speeches on February 23, at the 

 Bureau, and on February 24, at the University of 

 London, where he was given a special reception, 

 and at the Lyceum Club, left on his hearers a 

 deep impression of charm, of width of knowledge, 

 of sound judgment, and of sympathy. M. Lucien 

 Poincare, like his brother Raymond, former Presi- 

 dent of the French Republic, and his cousin 

 Henri, the great mathematician, came from 

 Lorraine. He was a physicist by training, and took 

 his doctor's degree with a thesis on the resistance 

 of fused electrolytes. Like most French physicists, 

 he began his teaching career in secondary educa- 

 tion, and was a master first at the LyctiC of Mar- 

 seilles, and then at the Lycee Louis-le-Grand in 

 Paris. For a time he was charge-de-cours at the 

 Paris Faculty of Sciences ; later he entered on an 

 administrative career and held successively the 

 posts of Rector of the Academic of Chamb^ry, of 

 Inspector-General and then Director of Secondary 

 Education, and of Director of Higher Education at 

 the Ministry of Public Instruction. In October, 

 1917, M. Poincare was appointed official head of 

 the University of Paris (the most distinguished 

 post in French university administration) in succes- 

 sion to the veteran M. Liard. 

 NO. 2633, VOL. 105] 



uary. 



I The death is announced, at sixty-four years of 

 ^age, of Prof. Hector Treub, the eminent pro- 

 fessor of gynaecology in the University of Am- 

 sterdam. 



The death of Mr. H. S. B. Brindlev is re- 

 corded in Engineering for April 9 as having 

 occurred on March 28, only three days before his 

 name appeared on the list of newly created 

 Knights Commanders of the British Empire. Mr. 

 Brindley was born in 1867, and educated at 

 the Tokio Engineering College, where his father 

 was an instructor. He had wide experience with 

 several engineering firms, and will be remembered 

 chiefly by his energetic development during the 

 war of a disused artificial stone factory at Pon- 

 ders End into a shell and gun factory employing 

 more than five thousand hands, a task which could 

 have been accomplished only by a very exceptional 

 man. 



By the death, lately announced, of Mr. W. J. 

 Rainbow, the Australian Museum of Sydney, 

 New South Wales, has lost the services of an 

 entomologist who for twenty-four years laboured 

 with assiduity and success to make the collection 

 of insects and Arachnida in that institution worthy 

 of a great colony, and has thereby laid all students 

 of those classes under a lasting obligation. Mr. 

 Rainbow's published works include treatises on 

 certain groups of Lepidoptera and Diptera ; but his 

 main attention was given to the study, and especi- 

 ally the life-history, of spiders and scorpions. His 

 papers on Arachnida are sixty-seven in number, 

 one of the latest being devoted to a description 

 and classification of the Araneidae brought from 

 Macquarie Island by the expedition under Sir 

 Douglas Mawson. 



