96 



NATURE 



[March 29, 19 17 



entitled " Obliviscence and Reminiscence," for which 

 he obtained the degiec of D.Lit. in 1914. 



The annual report on tlje work of University Col- 

 lege has just been issued. The total number of 

 students on the college books for the academic year 

 1915-16 was 1 133 (including 51 refugee students), 

 whereas the normal number is about 2200. Of the 

 1133 there were 535 men (including 36 refugee 

 students) ; of the 535 men, only 222 were in attend- 

 ance throughout the session, the remainder taking up 

 military or naval service or some special form of war- 

 work. The normal fee revenue is upwards of 29,000^. ; 

 the fee revenue for 1915-16 was 14,983/. By means 

 of drastic economies and postponement of expenditure, 

 and with the help of generous donations from members 

 and friends of the college, supplemented by the special 

 Treasury grant, expenditure was kept within income. 

 The financial outlook for the current session (1916-17) 

 causes anxiety, the fee revenue having further declined. 

 The chairman and the acting treasurer are asking for 

 help to meet the threatened deficiency, and also to cover 

 the expenditure on the new chemistry buildings that 

 has not yet been provided ; this amounts to 15,000/. 

 The third issue of the Tro Patria list, with the supple- 

 ment recently prepared, contains 1554 names of 

 members of the college, 15 16 of whom are on active 

 service. Of these, 122 have fallen in the war. 



Oxford. — The Departments of Geography and 

 Anthropology have published their arrangements for 

 next term. In geography, lectures will be given on 

 map projections, the historical geography of Europe, 

 the West Indies, and British lands round the Indian 

 Ocean. Practical classes, field work, and informal 

 instruction are also announced. The list of lectures 

 in anthropology includes human anatomy, ethnology, 

 the distribution of man, comparative technology, 

 stages of human culture, the Bronze and early Iron 

 ages, and questions relating to ancient Egypt. Lec- 

 tures and informal instruction are also announced on 

 various topics of social anthropolog-v and on primitive 

 language in its relation to thought 



The presidential address delivered by Prof. A. N. 

 Whitehead to the Mathematical Society last January 

 is printed in the current issue of the Technical Journal. 

 The subject of the address was the relation of technical 

 education to science and literature, and Prof. White- 

 head's ideas deserve wide and careful consideration. 

 The immediate need of the nation, he maintains, is 

 a large supply of skilled workmen, of men with 

 inventive genius, and of employers alert in the 

 development of new ideas ; and there is only one way 

 to obtain these, namely, by producing workmen, men 

 •of science, and employers who enjoy their work. The 

 basis of the growth of modern invention is science, 

 and science is almost wholly the outgrowth of pleasur- 

 able intellectual curiosity. A technical education 

 which is to have any chance of satisfying the practical 

 needs of the nation must be conceived in a liberal 

 spirit as a real intellectual enlightenment as to prin- 

 • ciples applied and services rendered. There can be 

 no adequate technical education which is not liberal, 

 and no liberal education which is not technical ; that 

 is, no education which does not impart both technique 

 and intellectual vision. In any system of technical 

 education, training should be broader than the ulti- 

 mate specialisation, for the resulting power of adapta- 

 tion to varying demands is advantageous to the 

 workers, to the employers, and to the nation. Prof. 

 Whitehead applies his generalisations to the specific 

 cases of pupils of thirteen who have completed their 

 elementary education, and those of seventeen whose 

 technical education, so far as it is compressed within 

 a school curriculum. Is ended. 

 NO. 2474, VOL. 99] 



SOCIETIES AND ACADEMIES. 

 London. 

 Royal Society, March 15.— Sir J. J. Thomson, presi- 

 dent, in the chair. — Prof, T. H. Havelock : The 

 initial wave-resistance of a moving surface pressure. 

 Hitherto the wave-resistance associated with the 

 motion of an assigned pressure system over the sur- 

 face of water has been studied only in the steady 

 state for uniform motion. The present work is an 

 attempt to calculate this quantity at any time for a 

 system which has been suddenly established and set 

 in uniform motion at a certain instant. — Prof. 

 S. W. J. Smith and H. Moss: Experiments with 

 mercury jets, (i) The relation between the jet- 

 length and the velocity of etBux. (ii) A comparison 

 with jets of other liquids. It has probably been 

 noticed by those who have worked with mercury 

 "dropping electrodes " — in which the mercury issues 

 in a narrow stream from the drawn-out end of a 

 vertical tube — that the length of the jet alters in a 

 peculiar way with the length of the mercury column 

 producing it. The results of a study of this pheno- 

 menon are given. — Prof. W. H. Young ; The mode of 

 approach to zero of the coefficients of a Fourier series. 

 — R. O. Street : The dissipation of energy in the tides 

 in connection with the acceleration of the moon's 

 mean motion. On the hypothesis of non-turbulent 

 motion harmonic with respect to the time with a period 

 of twelve hours, an expression is obtained for the mean 

 rate of dissipation of energy by viscosity in a portion 

 of the ocean in the form of a surface integral over 

 that area of a function of the surface current- 

 velocities only. This integral has been evaluated over 

 the greater part of the Irish Sea, the mean rate of 

 dissipation obtained being 5 x 10' foot-poundals per 

 second. In the absence of external forces, this rate of 

 dissipation would cause the energy to be reduced in 

 the ratio e to i in about two hours. If the rate of 

 dissipation per unit area for the whole ocean were 

 the same as in the Irish Sea, the total frlctional loss 

 of energy by the tides would be at the mean rate 

 6x10'^ foot-poundals |>er second. If the apparent 

 lunar acceleration is attributed to a slowing of the 

 earth's axial rotation, a retardation of the order four 

 minutes of arc per century per century is necessary 

 for its explanation. This retardation implies a decay 

 of the earth's kinetic energy of rotation at the rate 

 of 1-6 X 10'^ foot-poundals per second, which is about 

 a quarter the mean rate of dissipation of tidal energy 

 on the above hypothesis. A maximum surface current 

 velocity of 2 ft. per second over the whole ocean 

 would give rise to sufficient dissipation to account for 

 this retardation of the earth. 



Optical Society, March 8. — C. L. Redding : A simple, 

 method of determining the size of the tool required 

 for a given block of lenses. When a new system of 

 lenses has to be worked, it is desirable to select the 

 best method of blocking, and to make the diameter 

 of the tool equal to the diameter of the complete 

 block. The size of the tool may be determined by 

 calculation or by previous experience, but the author 

 described how this may also be done by making use 

 of any concave tool of known radius. — T. F. Connolly : 

 A variable angle collimator. The instrument described 

 differs from an ordinary collimator in having a bi- 

 prism introduced between the diaphragm and the 

 object-glass. The effect of this is to produce two 

 separate images of the central wire, which images 

 are collimated by the object-glass as though they 

 were real wires. The bi-prism is mounted in a short 

 tube sliding within the collimator body, and its posi- 

 tion is indicated on the outside of the collimator on 

 a longitudinal scale. A movement of the bi-prism 



