January i, 1920] 



NATURE 



443 



cultural students will remember with pride his high 

 opinion of the work of the Rothamsted Experi- 

 mental Station, with which he was unusually well 

 acquainted. The Rothamsted data were constantly- 

 used by him in lectures and writings, and he main- 

 tained his personal interest in the work right up 

 to the time of starting for Greece. 



Two of Dr. Hopkins's books are well known in 

 this country. One — "The Story of the Soil" — 

 was written in the main during his long railway 

 journeys in the States ; it is an attempt to intro- 

 duce scientific facts about the soil into the dialogue 

 of a novel. It is not less attractive than other 

 novels written with a purpose, and it is light read- 

 ing. His more serious book is entitled "Soil Fer- 

 tility and Permanent Agriculture " ; it contains 

 valuable summaries of the results of the more 

 important field experiments, and an interesting 

 and illuminating discussion. His own view was 

 narrower than would be usually accepted by the 

 vounger generation of workers in America or in 

 this country ; he considered soil fertility to be 

 essentially a matter of nitrogen, phosphate, and 

 potash, and to be expressible in the terms of 

 the actual weights of these substances in the 

 soil. There are cases where this view would 

 suffice, and many appear to have come within 

 Dr. Hopkins's experience. These, however, 

 would now be regarded as limiting rather than 

 as normal cases, and more generally fertility 

 would be considered to be the outcome of 

 many factors, some chemical, some physical, 

 others, again, biological. But Dr. Hopkins 

 did much good work, training a splendid 

 body of students, and developing a department 

 which has added lustre to the great University of 

 Illinois. E. J. Rlsseli.. 



NOTES. 

 We announce with deepest regret the death on 

 Monday, December 29, at seventy years of age, of 

 .Sir William Osier, Bart., F.R.S., Regius professor 

 of medicine in the University of Oxford. 



Mr. R. N.\th.an, late Indian Civil Service and 

 author of works on the history of plague in India 

 and the progress of education in India, has been 

 promoted by the King to the rank of K. C.S.I. ; and 

 Mr. G. S. Sankey, Inspector-General of Forests to 

 the Government of India, has been given the honour 

 of K.B.E. 



Dr. F. Bkoili has been appointed professor of 

 geology and palaeontology in the University of Munich 

 in succession to the late Prof. .\. Rothpletz. Dr. 

 Broili was a pupil of the late Prof. K. \. von Zittel, 

 and is well known for his numerous contributions to 

 vrrtebrate palaeontology. 



We learn from Dr. Tolmatcheff, a Custos of the 

 Russian Academy of Sciences, who is now in London, 

 that when he left Petrograd early last summer the col- 

 lections and libraries of the Academy, the School of 

 Mines, and the Geological Survey were intact, and 

 scientific men were being sympathetically treated by 

 NO. 2'6l8, VOL. 104] 



the Bolshevik Government. The most important 

 specimens of the Permian reptiles collected by the late 

 Prof. Amalitsky in northern Russia had been removed 

 from Warsaw to the museum of the Academy of 

 Sciences at Petrograd. 



The death is announced, in his sixtieth year, of 

 Dr. Louis Valentine Pirsson, who had been professor 

 of physical geology since 1897 at the Sheffield 

 .Scientific -School at Yale, where for several years 

 previously he had held various minor posts. Prof. 

 Pirsson was a geologist on the staff of the U.S. 

 Geological Survey and an associate editor of the 

 \merxcan Journal of Science. He was the author of 

 numerous scientific memoirs, text-books, and papers 

 on geological and mineralogical subjects. 



The Photographic Arts and Crafts Exhibition, 

 which was held annually until the war intervened,, 

 is to be resumed in the coming spring. It is re- 

 named the Photographic Fair, and will be held at 

 the Horticultural Hall, Westminster, on April 16 to 24. 

 As usual, the Professional Photographers' .\ssociation 

 will hold a congress at the same time in connection 

 with the exhibition, while the Photographic Dealers' 

 .Association will, for the first time, organise a con- 

 gress of photographic dealers. It is intended to afford 

 dealers special facilities for examining the exhibits. 

 The organising secretary of the fair is Mr. Arthur C. 

 Brookes, .Sicilian House, Southampton Row, ^^'.C.I. 



TiiK death of Mr. J. Hartley Wicksteed on Decem- 

 ber 16, at seventy-seven years of age, is announced. 

 Engineering for December 19 gives some particulars 

 of his career. Probably his inventions which have 

 had most bearing on engineering progress are his 

 vertical single-lever testing machine and his horizontal 

 universal testing machine. Mr. Wicksteed was con- 

 nected with the Institution of Mechanical Engineers 

 for more than fifty years, and was president in 1903-4. 

 He was one of the first members of council of the 

 Yorkshire College, Leeds, afterwards becoming a life 

 governor of the University ; and through this and 

 other local activities he exercised a wide influence. 

 He became a member of the Institution of Civil 

 Engineers in 1889. 



By the death of Dr. Harold Cecil Greenwood a few 

 weeks ago, at thirty-two years of age, British en- 

 gineering chemistry has lost one of its most promising 

 younger members. Dr. Greenwood was always a 

 careful and accurate worker, and applied that charac- 

 teristic to even the smallest detail in every problem 

 which he took up. As a result his work was exact ; 

 his data on the boiling points of metals, published in 

 1909, are generally accepted as the most accurate 

 existing upon the subject. During the last three years 

 of his life Dr. Greenwood was engaged on behalf of 

 the Government on an extremely laborious under- 

 taking : the construction of an experimental synthetic 

 ammonia plant for the preparation of ammonia from 

 its elements. In this work his training with Prof. 

 Haber at Karlsruhe stood him in good stead, but it 

 was no easy matter to translate laboratory experi- 

 mental work to the semi-technical working-plant 



