May 6, 1920] 



NATURE 



287 



his blundering- way. Gerris, as Mr. Belloc says, 

 would sink if he stopped to meditate about the sur- 

 face film, and he might get no nearer the truth 

 than Prof. Paton does when he affirms that phos- 

 gene yields chlorine in the lungs. Knowledge 

 helps practice truly enough, but to ask that prac- 

 tice shall stand still while a particular sort of 

 intolerant knowledge gropes to a rationale will 

 meet no national need whatever. 



Prof. Dendy's interesting account of the ravages 

 of weievils in stored grain and the means of pre- 

 venting them tells, on the other hand, an excellent 

 tale of practical empiricism. Prof. Dendy found, 

 as on general grounds he expected to find, that 

 the weevils soon perished if infested grain was 

 shut up in air-tight receptacles in which the meta- 

 bolism of the seeds soon replaced most of the 

 oxygen by carbon dioxide, and he shows with a 

 variety of experiments that air-tight storage is the 

 practical method which is wanted : which appears 

 to have been known from time immemorial and 

 is expressed in the habit of Indians, Maltese, and 

 others in storing their harvested grain closely in 

 covered underground pits in face of the opinion 

 that it was " absurd to hold that weevils require 

 a free play of air or that free access of air is 

 favourable to their existence," given by the ento- 

 mological expert — doubtless a mere morpho- 

 logist. 



Natural man, indeed, as Dr. Pembrey argues 

 in his breezy plea for the wild life, is apt to go 

 right : " A sturdy growth of children is not to be 

 obtained by the intelligent selection of the quality 

 or quantity of their diet, but by the natural pro- 

 cess of muscular activity in the open air, the 

 appetite with its likes and dislikes acting as the 

 guide in questions of food " (p. 158), which is not 

 quite what the editor seems to say (p. 23). But 

 the discrepancy is only on the surface : Sussex is 

 not the Marylebone Road, and it is when civilisa- 

 tion interferes that trouble comes. Western re- 

 finements in rice polishing gave the East beri- 

 beri ; a world trade in wheat gave the weevils 

 their chance; mean and restricted lives brought 

 in physical exercises instead of games. The truly 

 physiological procedure, says Dr. Pembrey, is to 

 put people where they can live a natural life by 

 accumulated experience and to let them live it. 

 " Bread and cheese " off the hedges is an older 

 rernedy than orange juice, and even scientific 

 opinion has been taught by Prof. Leonard Hill 

 that there is something to be said for our primi- 

 tive open fires. 



The book as a whole is extraordinarily interest- 

 ing- from many different aspects, as much perhaps 

 for the questions it asks as for those it answers. 

 NO. 2636, VOL. 105] 



" Physiology " is conceived in no narrow spirit; 

 it is hygiene, pathology, bacteriology, and phar- 

 macology, as well as itself. And in this generous 

 field everyone will find a good many things worth 

 thinking about. A. E. B. 



Service Chemistry. 



Service Chemistry : Being a Short Manual of 

 Chemistry and Metallurgy and their Applica^ 

 tion in the Naval and Military Services. By 

 the late Prof. Vivian B. Lewes and Prof. 

 J. S. S. Brame. Fifth edition. Pp. xvi + 5764- 

 vii plates. (London : Edward Arnold, 1920.) 

 Price 215. net. 



THE late Prof. Vivian Lewes, of the Royal 

 Naval College, Greenwich, an excellent 

 teacher and an admirable lecturer, conferred a 

 great benefit on the Service of which he was a 

 member by the compilation of this manual. In 

 the early days of the history of the college, the 

 relation and importance of physical science to the 

 business of the naval officer were but dimly appre- 

 ciated by the authorities at W^hitehall, and the 

 scheme of instruction at Greenwich went but little 

 beyond the standard of a public school which 

 sought to develop its modern side. Prof. Debus, 

 the first professor of chemistry, although a sound 

 and remarkably well-informed chemist, carried 

 with him to the college merely the traditions and 

 methods of Clifton. The scope of his instruction 

 of the naval lieutenant was practically that which 

 had served him for years past in the several public 

 schools to which he had been attached. He con- 

 tinued to teach chemistry simply as a branch of 

 a liberal education, with no very direct reference 

 to the life-work of those whom he addressed. It 

 may be that at the outset of the career of the 

 college no other course was open to him. The 

 preliminary education of a naval officer at that 

 period afforded no opportunity for him to acquire 

 even the most elementary knowledge of science, 

 and hence his teacher had of necessity to restrict 

 himself to the kind of instruction which a well- 

 ordered school system ought to have supplied. 



Prof. Debus exercised a very salutary influence 

 at the Royal Naval College. He was personally 

 popular, and, in spite of certain little mannerisms, 

 his quiet dignity and personal bearing enabled 

 him to keep an effective control over a class of 

 young men whose sense of humour is proverbially 

 always acute and occasionally irrepressible. But 

 to the budding Nelson, keen on his job, there must 

 have been much in the professor's teaching that 

 made no appeal. It probably seemed to him to 

 have no possible relevance to the work of his pro- 



