I90 



NATURE 



[May 



j> 



1917 



wmberland, K.G., president, in the cliair. The annual 

 iteport of the Committee of Visitors for the year 1916, 

 testifying to the continued prosperity and efficient 

 management of the institution, was read and adopted. 

 Sixtj-two lectures and nineteen . evening discourses 

 were delivered in 1916. The following gentlemen 

 were unanimously elected as officers for the ensuing 

 ye&r : — President, the Duke of Northumberland; 

 Treasurer, Sir James Crichton-Browne ; Secretary, 

 Col. E. H. Hills; Managers, H. E. Armstrong, Sir 

 ,W. Phipson Beale, Bart, C. V. Boys, J. H. Balfour 

 Browne,, J. Y. Buchanan, W. A. B. Burdett-Coutts, 

 Sir J. Mackenzie Davidson, D. W. C. Hood, the Rt. 

 Hon. Viscount Iveagh, Sir Charles Nichols'on, Bart., 

 the Hon. R. C. Parsons, Sir James Reid, Bart., Alex. 

 Siemens, S. West, and the- Rt. Hon. Lord Wrenbury ; 

 Visitors, Ernest Clarke, T- F. Deacon, E. Dent, 

 Lt.-Col. H. E. Gaulter, j. Dundas Grant, W. B. 

 Gibbs, W. A. T. Hallowes, H. E. Jones. H. R. 

 Kempe, F. Legge, J. Love, R. Pearce, Sir Alex. 

 Pedler, H. M. Ross, and J. Shaw. 



The British Medical Journal announces the death on 

 March 30, at sixty-two years of age, of Count Karl 

 A. H. Morner, professor and rector of the Royal Karo- 

 linska Medico-Chirurgical Institute, Stockholm. We 

 learn that Count Morner matriculated in 1872, and, 

 after studying at Uppsala and Stockholm, qualified as a 

 practitioner of medicine in 1S84. Two years later his 

 thesis on the pigments of melanotic tumours gained 

 him the doctorate of medicine, and at the same time 

 he was appointed professor of chemistry and pharmacy 

 at the Karolinska Institute. In 1892 he was appointed 

 rector of the institute in succession to Keys, and it 

 was as the central figure of the institute that he was 

 best known to the Swedish public. As rector he par- 

 ticipated in drawing up regulations for the Nobel Prize 

 Committees, and he was president of the Nobel Medi- 

 cal Committee. 



We regret to learn that Major Alasdair C. B. 

 Geddes, R.F.C., a young naturalist of great promise, 

 •eldest son of Prof. Patrick Geddes, of Dundee, was 

 killed inaction in France on April 19. Mr, Geddes was 

 commissioned in 1915, and gained very rapid advance- 

 ment. He was recently awarded the Military Cross. 

 His naturally fine powers of observation, cultivated by 

 a singularly varied and active education, stood him 

 ill good stead in the discharge of his military duties. 

 Alasdair Geddes kept up the tradition of the wander- 

 ing student, learning at Montpelier and Paris, as well 

 as at Dundee and Edinburgh, accompanying Dr. 

 W. S. Bruce to Spitsbergen and his father's town- 

 planning exhibition to India. He was keenly inter- 

 ested in botany and zoology, but perhaps geography 

 held his heart. He graduated B.Sc. in Edinburgh in 

 1914, and was awarded the Vans Dunlop scholarship 

 as the most distinguished science graduate of his year. 

 He was passionately fond of music and the open 

 country, and had an extraordinary power of compelling 

 affection. All sympathy will go to his parents, who 

 are in India, where Prof. Geddes has been doing 

 Government' work for three years in connection with 

 town-planning. Major Geddes was only twenty-five 

 ji^ears of age. 



Dr. S. Tolver Preston, whose death took place 

 in March at the hospital at Altona, near which town 

 he had resided for many years, was educated at the 

 University of Aberdeen, and while serving his articles 

 with a Lx>ndon firm of engineers was employed on 

 one of the Atlantic cable ships. He soon after retirea 

 from thct profession, and in 1875 published his 

 ' ' Theory of thev Ether," . in which he attributed the' 



NO. 2479, VOL. 99] 



gravitational attraction lx?t\veen two bodies to the 

 oscillations of their molecules, which interact witfi 

 the ether and set it in oscillation in turn. From about 

 this jx-riod he appears to liave lived abroad, chiefly in 

 (iermany, and in- 1894 took- his doctor's degree at 

 •Munich with a dissertation on the theories of gravi- 

 tation. During this i^eriod he wrote . several paperfe 

 dealing with the kinetic theory of gases. He was the 

 first to }X)int out the possibility of obtaining work 

 firom a porous piston, separating hydrogen and oxygep 

 at the same pressure from each other in a cylinder, 

 by the more rapid diffusion of the hydrogen through 

 the piston. Later papers dealt with cosmical physics. 

 In one he pointed out that a rotating plastic solid 

 would take a planetary form, and that it is not neces- 

 sary to assume that the planets have at any time been 

 liquid or gaseous. 



Dr. George Christia.n Hofiwiann, formerly assis- 

 tant director, chemist, and mineralogist of the Geo- 

 logical Survey of Canada, died in Ottawa on March 8. 

 From an obituary notice contributed to Science by 

 Dr. H. M. Ami, -we learn that Dr. Hoflmann was 

 born on June 7, 1837, i" London, and studied at the 

 Royal School of Mines. He spent several years as 

 chemist in research laboratories of England, and later, 

 worked in Natal, Mauritius, and Australia. In 1872 

 he joined the technical staff of the Geological Survey 

 of Canada, Montreal, under Dr. Alfred R. C. Selwyn. 

 He was a fellow of the Institute of Chemistry, 

 of the Royal Society of Canada, and of many 

 other distinguished bodies. While in Australia he 

 devoted considerable time in the phy to-chemical labora- 

 tory attached to the Melbourne Botanic Garden in 

 Victoria ; inquiries into the tanning properties of the 

 barks of native trees; investigation into the amount 

 of potash in various indigenous trees, besides experi- 

 ments in reference to various acids, tar, and other 

 products. His bibliography contains valuable reports 

 and papers of analyses and determinations of Canadian 

 ores, minerals, and economic products characterising 

 the rock formations of Canada and elsewhere, in- 

 cluding rare and new species. 



We regret to learn from the Revue gendrale des 

 Sciences oi the death of M. Henri Bazin. Born at Nancy 

 in 1829, M. Bazin was among the earliest of modern 

 investigators into the phenomena of hydraulics, and 

 his name is inseparably associated with the mathe- 

 matical enunciation of the laws of fluid flow. In 

 collaboration, at Dijon, with his chief and colleague, 

 M. Darcy, and later, on the premature death of the 

 latter, alone, he engaged in the preparation of a monu- 

 mental memoir dealing with the fjow of water in open 

 channels and with the movement of waves. This was 

 completed after seven years' labour, submitted 

 to the Academic des Sciences, and published in 1865. 

 It was his best and most prized work, and he returned 

 to the subject again and again. In 1886, whilst still 

 engaged at Dijon, he commenced experimental observa- 

 tions in connection with weirs, which lasted over a 

 period of ten years. The results appeared in a series 

 of communications to the Annales des Fonts et 

 Chaussdes. Nor did he content himself with applied 

 science alone; in 1868 he found time to translate 

 Salmon's treatise on algebra. Bazin enjoyed a great 

 and well-deser\'ed reputation as an experimentalist of 

 the first rank; he was patient, indefatigable, and 

 thorough. The science of hydraulics, in the note- 

 worthy development which it has undergone during 

 the past fifty years, is indebted to him for careful and 

 painstaking explanations of many of those contra- 

 dictory features in hydraulic phenomena which are 

 the despair of the engineer, and render it so difficult 



