January 29, 1920] 



NATURE 



579 



the lessons of the war and offers some illuminating 

 personally collected information. 



Mr. Gibb Maitland begins his address with the un- 

 expected claim that geology has nothing to do with 

 war, ignoring the many millions that might have 

 been saved had geologists been employed earlier on 

 our side; the Germans, of course, had a large geo- 

 logical staff at the beginning. Mr. Maitland 's address 

 is devoted to the problems connected with the Nul- 

 lagine formation, and his most generally interesting 

 conclusion is that the scratched stones found in it 

 are not, as has been claimed by some Australian 

 geologists, evidence of an tarly glaciation, but are 

 due to friction during earth-movements. Mr. Mont- 

 gomery's address is a new statement of his view 

 that the level surface of the plateau of Western 

 Australia is a plain of marine denudation, and that 

 the escarpments, locally known as "break-aways," 

 are sea-cut cliffs. Mr. Montgomery's arguments are, 

 as usual, interesting, ingenious, and fair. It is im- 

 portant to remember that a geologist who knows the 

 arid regions of Australia so intimately as Mr. Mont- 

 gomery should have arrived at conclusions as to 

 wind-action so different from those adopted in .Africa.' 

 The view that in recent times nearly all Western Aus- 

 tralia was covered by the sea does not explain the 

 restriction of the marine deposits to a relatively 

 narrow band or the change in the topography above 

 their margin. These deposits have a wide extension 

 in the zone seaward of Norseman ; the limestones 

 there he accepts as Miocene. 



The paper by Messrs. Jutson and Simpson in 

 vol. ii. on the geology of Albany gives further evi- 

 dence of these marine deposits, as their " Plantagenet 

 beds " are a narrow coastal series ending inland on 

 the slope of the ancient plateau. The marine origin 

 of the "break-aways" is rejected by Messrs. Talbot 

 and Clarke (vol. iii., p. 79) in their valuable contribu- 

 tion to the geology of the little-known country toward 

 the eastern frontier. These authors claim ' the dis- 

 covery of an upper Cretaceous or early Kainozoic 

 glaciation in the Wilkinson Range (lat. 26° S.) on the 

 basis of a bed with striated boulders, which, as they 

 recognise, must have been formed by icebergs in 

 shallow water. The evidence for the age of this 

 boulder bed seems, however, quite inadequate. The 

 chief contribution to anthropology is bv Mr. W. D. 

 Campbell on the natives of Sunday Island, who make 

 their boomerangs of tank-iron and obtain their fire- 

 wood from the mainland, although the author 

 describes the wide intervening channel, owing to its 

 tierce currents, as "dangerous to small craft." 



The treasurer of the society, Mr. Allum, of the 

 Royal Mint, Perth, discusses the decimalisation of 

 currency in a pape- which conveys a warning how 

 strongly some authorities feel against it. He quotes 

 the view of the Engineering and Mining Journal of 

 New York that the compulsory adoption of the metric 

 system would be a "calamity of the first order." 

 Mr. Allum is less emphatic, but he is opposed to the 

 decimal system, as its advantages may not be equalled 

 by its drawbacks, and holds that if it be adopted the 

 sovereign should be the standard of value, and the 

 shilling should be retained and divided into ten pence. 

 J. W. G . 



A NEW DEVELOPMENT IN AGRI- 

 CULTURAL RESEARCH. 

 H LL interested in agricultural progress will welcome 

 -^*- as one of the most significant events in the his- 

 tory of British agriculture the establishment of a 

 research department by the Olympia Agricultural Co., 

 Ltd. 



The company, under the chairmanship of Mr. 

 Joseph Watson, is farming on a scale probably un- 

 precedented in this country, having purchased for its 

 operations agricultural estates totalling practically 

 20,000 acres in the counties of Yorkshire, Northamp- 

 tonshire, Cambridgeshire, Suffolk, Warwickshire, and 

 Wiltshire. The research department will exercise 

 advisory functions in connection with the farming 

 operations of the company, but its primary object is 

 to conduct research in various branches of agricul- 

 tural science and practice for the general welfare of 

 British agriculture, to which end liberal financial pro- 

 vision for its activities has been made. 



The direction of the department has been assumed 

 by Dr. Charles Crowther, lately professor of agricul- 

 tural chemistry in the University of Leeds and 

 director of the institute for research in animal nutri- 

 tion in that University, who will continue and extend 

 his experimental work in that subject. 



Plant-breeding research will be a further prominent 

 feature of the department's activities, under the direc- 

 tion of Capt. Hunter, lately in charge of the plant- 

 breeding work carried out in Ireland under the 

 Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction ; 

 whilst provision has also been made for research on 

 soil problems and plant nutrition under the direction 

 of Capt. C. T. Gimingham, late chemist to the agri- 

 cultural research institute of the University of Bristol. 



The headquarters of the department have been 

 located on the company's estate of some 2700 acres at 

 Offchurch, near Leamington, where the ancient man- 

 sion of Offchurch Bury is being adapted to provide 

 the necessary laboratories, etc., which are now ap- 

 proaching completion. From this centre experimental 

 work with crops and stock on all the company's 

 estates will be carried out under the general super- 

 vision of Capt. F. H. Billington, late of the staff of 

 the Irish Department of Agriculture. 



It is the desire and intention of Mr. Watson and 

 his co-directors that the department shall be an 

 "agricultural research station" in the fullest sense of 

 the term, and that the results of its work, in so far 

 as they may be of general interest, shall be made 

 fully available to the general body of British agri- 

 culturists. 



For some time the activities of the department 

 must necessarily be directed to the experimental work 

 essential to the establishment of a sound basis for 

 its advisory work, but this is bound to produce much 

 information of general interest. 



The enhanced appreciation of the importance of 

 research to British industries is one of the most 

 significant effects of the war, and it is gratifying to 

 find that British agriculture, despite its traditional 

 conservatism and suspicion of academic "theory," is 

 not to lag behind other industries, and a good omen 

 that it should contain in its ranks men so alive to 

 the value of research as to provide for it within the 

 industry without the stimulus of subvention from the 

 public purse. 



NO. 2622, VOL. 104] 



MATHEMATICAL STATISTICS.'^ 

 pARTS III. and IV. of the twelfth volume of 

 ■■■ " Biometrika " contain papers of interest to all 

 classes of statistician. Those especially attracted by 

 work on the general mathematical theory of proba- 

 bility will welcome the continuation of Prof. Tchou- 

 prolT's paper on the " Expectation of the Moments of 

 Frequency Distributions." It will be agreed that the 

 notation of mathematical expectation offers certain ad- 



> ''Biometrika." A Journal for th; Statistical Study of Biological 

 Problems. Vol x,i., Parts iii. and iv. Pp. ,8s-376+iv+yiii plates. 

 (London . Cambridge Univtriity Press, November, 1919.) Price soj. 



