May 3» 1917J 



NATURE 



199 



greater as repetition work and automatic machinery 

 replace varied jobs and manual skill. Unless an anti- 

 dote be provided, the monotony of this kind of work 

 win crush initiative and mental vijjour, and instead of 

 skilful craftsmen we sh^U breed incompetent 

 machines." The address insists that either the school- 

 leaving age must be raised or a system of part-time 

 instruction during working hours of engineering ap- 

 prentices must be introduced. 



The April issue of the Proceedings of the Institute 

 of Chemistry contains the presidential address delivered 

 by Sir James J. Dobbie on March i. In it is dis- 

 cussed at length the question of the general education 

 of chemists. Sir James defines the aim of education 

 on its intellectual side as the evenly balanced training 

 of all the faculties of the mind, and claims that this 

 aim can never be attained by the study of science 

 exclusively on one hand, or of the subjects commonly 

 classed as the humanities on the other. At the same 

 time, science must form party of every person's educa- 

 tion. Dealing with the question what science subjects 

 should be taught in schools, he lavs it down that the 

 one way to obtain satisfactory results is to concentrate 

 on a limited number of subjects, carefully selected with 

 reference to the pupil's age and stage of mental 

 development and to their suitability to serve as an 

 introduction to further science studies. He selects as 

 most suitable subjects for study the facts and princi- 

 ples of biology and those of physics and chemistrv as 

 lying at the root of all the other sciences. The study 

 of the properties of matter and of mechanics should, the 

 address maintains, precede the study of the special 

 branches of physics and the study of chemistry^ Any 

 scheme of science teaching would be unsatisfactory 

 which does not make some provision for cheniistry, and 

 the study of chemistr>' should be taken next after 

 mechanics. Work such as this should. Sir James 

 Dobbie thinks, be supplemented by wide reading in 

 other branches of science so as to widen the interests 

 of the pupils and to extend their knowledge. 



SOCIETIES AND ACADEMIES. 

 London. 

 Zoological Society, April 17.— Dr. A. Smith Wood- 

 ward, vice-president, in the chair. — ii. fieron-AUen : 

 The mussel-fishery and Foraminifera of Esnandes (La 

 Rochelle), and the early work of Alcide d'Orbigny. 

 .\ series of slides was exhibited illustrative of the 

 early studies of .^Icide d'Orbigny at Esnandes (near 

 La Rochelle), and the mussel-fisheries established there 

 since the year 1035 The experiments of Prof. W. A. 

 Herdman on the west coast of England were referred 

 to, and those of Prof. A. Meek at Holy Island on the 

 east coast. A further series was sho'wn illustrating 

 some of the notable d'Orbignyan species found in the 

 neighbourhood, not recorded from there by d'Orbigny 

 in 1826, but recorded from other localities at that date, 

 and from distant seas between 1839 and 1846. A third 

 series of slides illustrated well-known species from 

 the locality which had been recorded and described by 

 earlier authors, but were not apparentlv identified by 

 d'Orbigny from the neighbourhood of' La Rochelle. 



Linnean Society, April ig.— Sir David Prain, presi- 

 dent, in the chair.— Dr. D. H. Scott : The Heter- 

 angiums of the British Coal Measures. Heterangium, 

 Corda, is a genus of Carboniferous plants, based on 

 specimens with the structure preser\-ed, and now 

 classed with the Pteridosperms. It is proposed to 

 group H. sJiorense. H. tiliaeoides, and H. Lomaxii 

 (of which H. cyUtidricum is only A form) in a new 

 subgenus, Polyangium. It is probable thiat the Upper 



NO. 2479, VOL. 99] 



Coal Measure species from Autun described by Renault 

 also fall under this subgenus, while most of the very 

 interesting Silesian species, of Millstone Grit age^ 

 recently discovered by Dr. Kubart, appear to bek)ng 

 to the simpler type which may be called Eu- 

 heterangium. — E. S. Goodrich : The development of 

 Hatschek's pit and the ciliated organ on the roof of 

 the buccal cavity in .Amphioxus from the left anterior 

 coelomic sac and from an ectodermal preoral pit in 

 the embr\-o and larva. Following Bateson, the author 

 compared the opening of Hatschek's pit with the 

 proboscis-pore of Balanoglossus and water-pore of 

 Echinoderms. — Miss Nina F. Layard : Wooden 

 scratching-tools made by an African parrot. Notes 

 have been taken by the author of the behaviour of a 

 grey African parrot, first in choosing out natural 

 tools, such as pointed seeds and quills, for. use as 

 poll-scratchers, later in pointing up a match for the 

 same purpose, and finally shaping up wood in such 

 a way as to appear to warrant the bird's claim to be 

 described as a tool-maker. The contention is that if 

 it can be proved that the parrot, requiring an imple- 

 ment that would penetrate the feathers to the scalp, 

 purposely produced a point with this object, then the 

 border-line between the mere tool-user and the tool- 

 maker has been crossed. 



Paris. 



Academy of Sciences, April 10. — M. A. dArsonval in 

 the chair. — H. Le Chatelier : The National Research 

 Council in the United States. — P. Puiseux and B. Jckhow- 

 sky : Study on the general form of the lunar globe. 

 The moon appears to be slightly elongated in the 

 direction of its axis of rotation. A tetrahedral deforma- 

 tion cannot be regarded as definitelv proved. — J. 

 Bergonie : The superiority, of agricultural work medi- 

 cally prescribed and cory;rolled to the physical thera- 

 peutic treatment of the hospitals in the treatment of 

 after effects of war wounds. The results of a prac- 

 tical comparison of the two methods taken over a 

 period of thirty months prove the superiority of the 

 open-air natural treatment to combinations of elec. 

 trotherapy, mechanotherapy,' thermotherapy, kinesi- 

 therapy, mechanical and manual massage, hydro- 

 therapy, etc. The superiority is especially marked in 

 the case of men employed on the land previous to the 

 war. Even in non-agricultural workers the supe- 

 riority, although less marked, is still considerable. — -G. 

 Jnlia : The reduction of forms to indeterminate, con- 

 jugated non-quadratic forms. — G. Arnaud : The family 

 of the Microthyriaceae. — A. F. Legendre : The structure 

 of the Sino-Tibetan massif. 



April 16. — M. A. d 'Arson val in the chair. — A. 

 Lacroix : The haiiyne lavas of the .Auvergne .^nd their 

 homogeneous enclosures. — H. Le Chatelier : The syn- 

 thesis of ammonia. The author gives extracts from 

 his patent of September, 1901, for the synthetical pre- 

 paration of ammonia from its elements, work taken 

 up seven years later bv Haber and now made use of 

 on the large scale in Germany. — .\. Gantier : Increase 

 in the curative properties of quinine and of mercur\- 

 bv the oreanometallic compounds of arsenic. The 

 ioint administration of arrhenal and quinine chloro- 

 hvdrate cures cases of malarial fever which have re- 

 sisted larg^e doses of quinine alone. The association 

 ot arsenical compounds with salts of mercurv enables 

 effective cures to be produced with miich reduced doses 

 of mercur\-, and cases of svohilis respond rapidly to 

 this treatment. — E. Ari6« : The coefficients of thermo- 

 elasticitv at low temperatures and Nernst's hvoothesis. 

 — M. Riquier : A property of the analytical functions 

 of anv number whatever of imagrinary variables. — M'. 

 Mesnager : The representation of concentrated charges 

 by trigonometrical series. — C. E. Gnye nnd C. 



