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NATURE 



[February 5, 1920 



his appointment as Inspector-General of Irrig-'ition in 

 India. He retired in 1917 with a knighthood, having 

 been rreated C.S.I, in 1914. Retirement from public 

 service, however, was only followed by professional 

 •ictivity of another kind, and until his death Sir 

 Michael occupied the position of chief hydroelectric 

 engineer to the Tata Co. at Bombay, under the 

 auspices of which he recently completed the tunnelling 

 work for the Andhra Valley scheme of water-power. 



We regret to announce the death on February i, in 

 his seventy-ninth year, of Mr. C. E. Groves, F.R.S. 



Dr. W. McDouG.'ku., Wilde reader in mental philo- 

 sophy in the University of Oxford, has been elected 

 president of the Society for Psychical Research, in 

 succession to the late Lord Rayleigh. 



Sir Daniel Hall, K.C.B., F.R.S., Permanent 

 Secretary of the Board of .Xg^riculture, has been elected 

 a member of the Athenaeum Club under the rule which 

 empowers the annual election by the committee of a 

 certain number of persons "of distinguished eminence 

 in science, literature, the arts, or for public service." 



Sir Norman Moore, president of the Royal College 

 of Physicians, has appointed Dr. F. W. Andrewes to 

 be Harveian orator and Dr. R. C. Wall to be Brad- 

 shaw lecturer for this year. The council has ap- 

 pointed Dr. Martin Flack to be Milroy lecturer for 

 1921, and the Censors' Board has awarded the Oliver- 

 Sharpey prize for 1920 to Prof. Emil Roux, of the 

 Pasteur Institute, Paris. 



Prof. E. B. Titchener, Cornell University, Ithaca, 

 N.Y., informs us that the prize of 100 dollars offered 

 for the best paper on the availability of Pearson's 

 formulae for psychophysics (Nature, vol. xcii., p. 508, 

 January i, 1914) has been awarded to Dr. Godfrey H. 

 Thomson, of .Armstrong College, Newcastle-upon-Tvne, 

 for a paper entitled "On the Application of Pearson's 

 Methods of Curve-fitting to the Problems of Psycho- 

 physics." 



Symons's Meteorological Magazine came to an end 

 with the January number, which completed vol. liv. 

 This month it will appear as the Meteorological 

 Magazine, with which the Meteorological Office 

 Circular will be incorporated. In order to preserve 

 the continuity, the new magazine will be issued 

 as No. T, vol. Iv. The editors will be Mr. Carle 

 Salter and Mr. F. J. W. Whipple. The change is the 

 outcome of the British Rainfall Organisation becom- 

 ing part of the service of the Meteorological Oflfice. 



The death is announced, in his fifty-second year, of 

 Mr. Robert Hollister Chapman, who had been con- 

 nected with the U.S. Geological Survey since t88o, 

 with the exception of the period from 1909 to 1912, 

 during which he was engaged on topographical work 

 in Canada. Mr. Chapman made extensive explora- 

 tions in the principal Western and Southern States, 

 and was the author of maps of Death Vallev and 

 adjacent deserts and ot the high Sierras. He was 

 secretary of the American Alpine Club. His published 

 work includes many articles and bulletins on topo- 

 graphical subjects, and a book entitled " Personal 

 Explorations in the Northern Selkirks." 



NO. 2623, VOL. 104] 



The Elizabeth Thompson Science Fund has been 

 serviceable for many years in giving aid, by small 

 grants, to research which otherwise might not be 

 readily undertaken. The grants are made only for 

 scientific investigations, and must be applied to actual 

 expenses of the research, i.e. they are not made to 

 support an investigator or to meet the ordinary ex- 

 penses of publication. The trustees give preference 

 to researches involving international co-operation. The 

 grants are not made for researches of narrow or 

 merely local interest, nor are they available for the 

 equipment of private laboratories or for the purchase 

 of apparatus ordinarily to be found in scientific 

 institutions. Applications for grants from this fund 

 should be made to Prof. W. B. Cannon, secretary 

 of the trustees of the fund, Harvard Medical School, 

 Boston, Mass. 



The Secretary of State for the Colonies has ap- 

 pointed a Committee to consider whether the staffs 

 of the Veterinary Departments in the various Colonies 

 and Protectorates are adequate, and, if necessary, to 

 recommend increases of staff; to consider whether the 

 rates of salary offered to the veterinary staff are 

 adequate, and, if necessary, to suggest improvements; 

 and to make recommendations for improving the 

 arrangements for recruiting veterinary staffs for the 

 Colonies and Protectorates. The members of the 

 Committee are : — Sir Herbert Read, K.C.M.G., 

 .Vssistant Under-Secretary, Colonial Office ; Sir J. 

 M'Fadyean, Principal of the Royal Veterinary Col- 

 lege, London ; Sir S. Stockman, Chief Veterinary 

 Officer, Ministry of Agriculture ; the President of the 

 Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons ; Prof. O. C. 

 Bradley, Principal of the Royal (Dick) Veterinary Col- 

 lege, Edinburgh; Prof. J. Share-Jones, Director of 

 Veterinary Education and Professor of Veterinaiy 

 -Anatomy, University of Liverpool; and Major R. D. 

 Furse, .Assistant Private Secretary (.Appointments), 

 Colonial Oflfice. Mr. A. Cooke, of the Colonial Offico, 

 is secretary of the Committee. 



In Folk-lore for December last (vol. xxx.. No. 4) 

 Dr. W. Crooke discusses the cults of the mother 

 goddesses in India, in the hope that these may throw 

 some light on their somewhat obscure sister goddesses 

 in the West. The cult of Mother Earth prevails widely 

 in India. Beginning with the type of a local fertility 

 spirit of the village, she rapidly becomes anthropo- 

 morphised, and is supposed to enjoy a periodical rest 

 after her labours, and to be strengthened for her benign 

 offices by a sacred marriage with a male consort 

 and by animal sacrifice. But in the Vedas and in 

 the later Brahmanical Hinduism goddesses play only 

 a subordinate part. It is among the Dravidians of 

 Southern India that the goddess cult attains its highest 

 development. The Earth Mother is no doubt the 

 parent in India of many of the local goddesses, but 

 it is going too far to assume, as some writers on the 

 mythology of the West have done, that goddess- 

 worship in general originated in the Earth Mother 

 culture. Even in India many of the local goddesses 

 come from the pre-agrlcultural stage, the Jungle 

 Mothers, or they are the deified spirits of women who 

 died in some heroic wav. 



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