June 5, 1919] 



NATURE 



279 



Lord Durham was installed Chancellor of 

 Durham University on May 31. The following 

 lionorary degrees were conferred :—D.C.L. ; Lord 

 Crewe, the Right Hon. J. R. Clynes, Sir George 

 Newman, the Rev. Prof. G. Milligan, Prof. Arthur 

 Thomson, and Prof. J. R. Morrison. D.Litt. : Lady 

 Frances Balfour, Sir Martin Conway, and Prof. 

 W. P. Ker. D.Sc: Sir E. Rutherford, Sir G. T. 

 Beilby, Prof. A. A. Herdman, and Prof. J. J. Welsh. 



The Manchester City Council has approved a new- 

 method for the selection of elementary-school pupils 

 who are to continue their education in secondary 

 schools. Hitherto the only candidates for admission 

 to secondary schools have been the children of parents 

 who have made an application for the privilege. In 

 future all elementary-school children between eleven 

 and thirteen years of age will be examined by their 

 head teachers with the definite purpose of selecting 

 those best qualified to benefit by secondary education. 

 The examination will be partly written and partlv 

 oral. The written portion will consist of general 

 papers in arithmetic and English, and will be the 

 same in all schools. The parents of all selected 

 children will be approached with the object of gaining 

 their co-operation in sending forward the children's 

 names as candidates for admission to secondary 

 schools. A further examination will follow, upon the 

 result of which scholarships will be awarded. There 

 will be some 60,000 pupils to take the preliminary 

 examination, and all who get 50 per cent, of the 

 maximum marks will be judged fit for extended 

 education. 



The number of employers who are interested in 

 the education of their employees has been increasing 

 gradually for a number of years, and has received a 

 considerable impetus from the development of wel- 

 fare work during the war and from the Education 

 Act of 1918. Conferences were held in June, 1918, 

 and February, 1919, and at a larger and more repre- 

 sentative meeting held in London on May 28-30 an 

 Association for the Advancement of Education in 

 Industry and Commerce was established. The first 

 president is Lord Leverhulme, with Sir Woodman 

 Burbidge as vice-president, Mr. J. Knox (of Lever 

 Brothers) as chairman of the executive committee, 

 and Mr. R. W. Ferguson (of Cadbury Brothers) as 

 secretary. The association includes in its member- 

 ship many of the largest and most enterprising firms 

 in the country. The objects are to encourage the 

 provision of education in industrial and commercial 

 ufldertakings, and to aid in the general advancement 

 of education by conferences, the printing and circula- 

 ion of information, and co-operation with other 

 ducational bodies. Many of the firms have already 

 nticipated to some extent the Act of 1918 by the 

 stablishment of schools on their own premises, while 

 ihers have already utilised, or propose to utilise, the 

 facilities which local education authorities are willing 

 to provide. The papers read at the conference and the 

 subsequent discussion indicated that the training of 

 voung people in works, factories, offices, and business 

 houses alreadv instituted or desired was in no sense 

 to be narrowed down to the special requirements of 

 vocation. As one of the speakers put it: "A better 

 workman was a secondary aim, but a logical con- 

 clusion " ; and another remarked that " the problems 

 of to-day were not so much those of industry as those 

 of leisure." The clever boy or girl was to be en- 

 couraged ; the less fortunate ones had equal rights 

 and greater needs. On the second day the members 

 of the conference were entertained at a garden-partv 

 by Lord Leverhulme at The Hill, Hampstead Heath, 

 and were afterwards addressed by Mr. H. A. L. 

 Fisher and .Sir Robert Blair. 



NO. 2588, VOL.. 103] 



SOCIETIES AND ACADEMIES. 



London. 

 Royal Society, May 22.— Sir J. J. Thomson, presi- 

 dent, in the chair. — Prof. W. J. Sollas : The structure 

 of Lysorophus as exposed by serial sections. As the 

 precise position of Lysorophus, regarded by Broom 

 as the most interesting vertebrate fossil discovered for 

 many years past, still remained open to discussion, 

 some nodules containing its remains were placed in 

 the author's hands for investigation by serial sections. 

 This work is now complete, and all the facts of the 

 anatomy of the skull and vertebrae and the main 

 features of the shoulder-girdle and fore-limbs are ex- 

 posed with a precision and wealth of detail only other- 

 wise to be looked for in a recent skeleton. It is now 

 placed beyond question that Lysorophus belongs to an 

 ancestral group of amphibians closely related to the 

 Urodela. Among the striking primitive characters it 

 retains may be mentioned the presence of a basi- 

 occipital and a supra-occipital bone, with a foramen 

 in the former for the twelfth nerve, and possibly con- 

 nected with this the presence of a large paired proatlas. 

 — O. Rosenheim : A preliminary study of the energy 

 expenditure and food requirements of women workers. 

 Direct determinations (by the Douglas-Haldane 

 method) of the energy expenditure of women were 

 made during periods of rest, recreation, and work, 

 the last referring to work on the lathe. By means 

 of the data obtained an approximate estimate of the 

 daily food requirements, expressed in Calories, was 

 arrived at on the basis of certain considerations set 

 forth in the communication. The results agree with 

 those of previous workers obtained by indirect statis- 

 tical methods. — M. Greenwood, C. Hodson, and A. E. 

 Tebb : Report on the metabolism of female munition- 

 workers. Observations were made upon forty-three 

 women engaged upon twelve different processes in the 

 manufacture of projectiles, the rate of metabolism 

 being determined by the method of indirect calori- 

 metry. Makint^ the allowance for metabolic needs 

 during non-working hours recommended by the Royal 

 Society Food (War) Committee, the workers were 

 found to fall into four classes, for each of which the 

 daily net requirements per average woman were 

 2530 Calories, 2810 Calories, 3200 Calories, and 

 3425 Calories. The results were concordant with the 

 inferences drawn from a study of food consumption 

 in a large explosives supply factory during the war. 

 The figures obtained in this experimental work were 

 somewhat larger than those reached by Becker and 

 Hamalainen. 



Royal Anthropological Institute, May 20. — Sir Everard 

 im Thurn, president, in the chair. — Capt. A. M. 

 Hocart : Early Fijians. Layers of culture have 

 generally been distinguished and dated in a rather 

 arbitrary manner. It is too often taken for granted 

 that the rudest culture is the earliest. Fiji is an 

 instance in point ; it is usuallv assumed that its 

 rudest tribes are its earliest inhabitants. The evidence 

 is rather against that. Titles that once existed in 

 eastern Fiji are now to be found in the more easterly 

 groups of Samoa and Tonga. Samoan legends are 

 full of references to Fijian immigrants. Fiiian tribal 

 traditions agree, being almost unanimous in placing 

 their own original home in the northern hills of the 

 main island in the west. Evidently there has been a 

 general displacement from west to east. Linguistic 

 remains show that Polynesian was once spoken in the 

 east. Society was feudal and the chiefs divine. There 

 was a dual chieftainship similar to the Japanese, and 

 certainly a dual organisation, and so on. If we look 

 outside Fiji we shall find the proper name of those 

 islands, namely, Viti, occurring in Polynesian tradi- 



