40" 



NATURE 



[June 2, 1910 



The Board of Education has been informed through the 

 Foreign Office that the second session of the seventeenth 

 International Congress of Americanists will be held at 

 Mexico City on September 8-14. The sessions will be held 

 in the lecture hall of the National Museum in Mexico City. 

 An organising committee has been formed, the president of 

 which is Sr. Lie. D. Justo Sierra, Secretary of Public 

 Instiuction and Fine Arts for the Government of Mexico. 

 Communications to the congress, which may be either oral 

 or written, may be made in English, French, German, 

 Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish. The congress will deal 

 with questions relating to the ethnology, archaeology, and 

 history of the New World. For further information appli- 

 cation should be made to the general secretary of the 

 organising committee, Sr. Lie. D. Genaro Garcia, Museo 

 Nacional, Mexico, D.F. 



We regret to see the announcement that Prof. Emil 

 Zuckerkandl died on May 28, in his sixty-first year, at 

 Vienna, where he had occupied the chair of anatomy 

 for nearl}' thirty 3'ears. He was well known to anatomists 

 for his many and varied contributions to human and mam- 

 malian morpholog}'. He was trained under Hyrtl and 

 Carl Langer, and acted as prosector in the University of 

 Vienna until he was called to fill the chair of anatomy 

 at Gratz in 1887. His best known work, on the anatomy 

 and diseases of the nasal cavities (1882-92), is one which 

 will remain an authoritative memoir for many years to 

 come. His numerous monographs on the arterial system 

 and on the morphology of the brain, especially of the 

 ape and marsupial, are based on elaborate and patient 

 observation, but somewhat prolix, and unrelieved by wide 

 and happy generalisations. It is rather his contributions 

 to the more medical and practical side of human anatomy 

 that will prove of permanent value. He was successful 

 in maintaining the world-wide reputation which Hyrtl and 

 Langer and other previous occupants of his chair had won 

 for the Anatomical School of Vienna. 



Mr. Michael Carteighe, whose death occurred at 

 Goring-on-Thames on May 30, was for fourteen years 

 president of the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain. 

 He received his pharmaceutical education at the School of 

 Pharmacy, and also studied at University College, London, 

 where he became demonstrator in chemistry under Prof. 

 Williamson. While at University College he took part in 

 some important chemical and physical researches, one of 

 the most notable being an investigation of the electrical 

 conductivity of alloys, wherein he was associated with Drs. 

 Matthiessen and Holzmann ; the results of the work were 

 embodied in a paper which was read before the Royal 

 Society. Circumstances decided him not to pursue a 

 scientific career, and he joined his brother, who was a 

 partner in the pharmaceutical business of Messrs. Dinne- 

 ford and Co., and on the death of his brother he became 

 sole proprietor. He first became a member of the council 

 of the Pharmaceutical Society in 1866, and assisted in the 

 drafting of the Pharmacy Act of 1868, by which the sale 

 of poisons was restricted to registered chemists and 

 druggists, and the practice of pharmacy placed on a more 

 or less regular basis. For many \'ears he was a member 

 of the society's board of examiners. From 1882 to 1896 

 he held the office of president, and his endeavour through- 

 out that period was to place the educational standard of 

 pharmacists on a higher plane, for he realised the force 

 and wisdom of the policy of the founders of the society, 

 namely, that the foundation of effective organisation was 

 education in its widest sense ; his efforts were largely 

 devoted to securing for the society a position among the 

 NO. 2 II 8, VOL. 83] 



recognised technical and scientific institutions of the 

 country. With his period of office are associated radical 

 improvements in the society's school, the development of 

 the librarj' and museum, and the foundation of the research 

 laboratory. Notwithstanding the amount of time he 

 devoted to the Pharmaceutical Society, Mr. Carteighe found 

 opportunities for work in other directions ; he was one of 

 the founders of the Institute of Chemistry, of which he 

 was for many years a vice-president. He was also a vice- 

 president of the Society of Arts during several years, was 

 one of the most prominent members of the British Pharma- 

 ceutical Conference, and was for forty years a member of 

 the Royal Institution. Mr. Carteighe was in his sixty- 

 ninth year. 



A description of the Mitsu-Bishi Dockyard and Engine 

 Works appears in Engineering for May 20. These works 

 are among the oldest and largest in Japan, and are situated 

 at Nagasaki and at Kobe. The completeness of the equip- 

 ment will be understood from the fact that the company 

 is capable of producing, without subcontracting, not only 

 every type of ship, machinery, and boilers for land and 

 marine use, but also of steel girders, steel buildings, 

 electrical machinery. Parsons marine steam turbines and 

 turbo-generators. Stone's manganese-bronze castings, and 

 Morison's " Contraflo " condensers. The company is one 

 of the most important exhibitors at the Japan-British 

 Exhibition at Shepherd's Bush. It is of interest to note 

 that, both in the Nagasaki and Kobe works, the specifi- 

 cation and wording in drawings, books, forms, orders, 

 &c., in fact, every writing in the establishment, are in 

 English, besides a greater portion of the correspondence. 

 It is curious to notice a workman carrying out the work 

 to the letter with a drawing worded entirely in English, 

 although he is not able to quote a simple intelligible 

 sentence. 



In a paper on steel testing read at the Institution of 

 Mechanical Engineers on Friday, May 27, by Mr. B. 

 Blount, Mr. W. G. Kirkaldy, and Captain H. Riall 

 Sankey, comparisons are made of the tensile, impact- - 

 tensile, and repeated bending methods of testing. In the ^ 

 impact-tensile method the specimens were not notched, as 

 is more usual in other impact tests, and were attached i 

 to a tup arranged to fall freely through a height of 30 to 

 40 feet. The tup was of adjustable weight, and was 

 attached to the lower end of the specimen, a cross-head 

 being fixed to its upper end. After falling a measured 

 height the cross-head is arrested by coming into contact 

 with the top faces of a split anvil ; the specimen is broken, 

 and the tup continues its fall between the two parts of the 

 anvil. The breaking of electrical contacts during ths fill 

 enables the energies at impact and after impact to ,ie 

 deduced, and hence the energy utilised in breaking the 

 specimen. In this method the whole of the material in the 

 cross-section under observation is brought simultaneously 

 under the influence of the impact stress. Three test-pieces 

 of each type of steel were broken by this method, and the 

 readings agree fairly well as regards the energy absorbed 

 by the rupture. The average disparity from the mean is 

 about 6 per cent. The readings of elongation and contrac- 

 tion of area are also in good agreement. 



The old myth of the occurrence of live frogs and toads 

 enclosed in blocks of stone or of coal is not yet dead, but -. 

 ever and again shows signs of life in the way of vigorous ''. 

 assertion of supposed cases of the phenomenon. We have 

 received a communication from a resident in Leicestershire 

 in which the writer states that, while recently breaking a 

 lump of coal, " from the centre a live half-grown toad fell 





