DISCOVERY 



273 



to realise the " fullness " of life. Less attention should 

 l>e paid in education to what has become almost the sole 

 idea during the decades following Darwin's teachings 

 which looked upon all biological phenomena " as incidents 

 in a perpetual struggle wherein the prizes to be won or 

 lost were the survival of the individual and the continu- 

 ance of his species." That idea — the doctrine of " effi- 

 ciency " — should be put in its right place and not raised 

 above the ecjually needed teaching of the " creative " 

 activities. 



Taking the " emergent " view of life and nature, Pro- 

 fessor Nunn advocated the need for bringing up our 

 children as good Europeans, but also for shaping them 

 into " that particular brand of good Europeans who are 

 rightly to be called good Englishmen." English letters, 

 English traditions in the arts and crafts, a revival of 

 the old English dances, should form part of the budding 

 Englishman's education. This would not, of course, 

 exclude foreign traditions and art. 



Insufficient space precludes a fuller precis of Professor 

 Nunn's manv interesting remarks. We particularlv liked 

 his definition of a school as a " place where a child, with 

 his endowment of sensibilities and powers, comes to be 

 moulded by the traditions that have greatest significance 

 in the life of to-day," and the way in which he polished 

 off the fears existing in the minds of some persons, that a 

 liberal education will make people unwilling to work, by 

 a quotation from one of Dr, Johnson's sayings : " While 

 learning to read and write is a distinction, the few who 

 have that distinction may be the less inclined to work ; 

 but when everybody learns to read and wTite it is no 

 longer a distinction. A man who has a laced waistcoat 

 is too fine a man to work ; but if everybody had laced 

 waistcoats, we should ha\e people working in laced waist- 

 coats." 



Some Aspects of the Present Position of 

 Botany 



In contrast to the majority of the presidential addresses 

 was Mr. Tansley's account of recent tendencies in botanical 

 research, for its appeal was intentionallv directed to 

 specialists in this branch of botany and it bore little 

 on the wider problems of science. Botanical research has 

 become divided into a good many branches, one of the 

 two chief stems, the older, being concerned with mor- 

 phology (the study of the form of plants), and the more 

 recent with physiology (the study of the normal functions 

 and phenomena of plants). Mr. Tansley urged that danger 

 lay in the professional workers in botany specialising so 

 greatly in one branch that they took little heed of another, 

 and advocated closer co-operation between all branches 

 both in teaching and in study. 



Other Addresses and Discussions 



Among the other addresses Dr. Vaughan Cornish's 

 review of The Position and Opportunity of the British 

 Empire, Mr. Julian Huxley's paper on The Phvsiologv 

 of Development in the Frog, Professor Elliot Smith's lecture 

 on The Study of Man, Professor Newbury's address on 

 Egypt as a Field for A nthropological Research, and Sir W. H. 



Bsveridge's speech on Unsmployment and Population, 

 attracted great interest. 



The discussion between members of the Geographical 

 and Anthropological sections on The Methods of Anthro- 

 pology in Relation to the Social Sciences provoked some 

 lively speeches, as also that between members of the 

 Economic Science and Psychology sections on Psycho- 

 logical Assumptions underlying Economic Theory. 



E. L. 



Among the Stars 



A Monthly Commentary 



The Distances of Star-clusters and the Scale 

 of the Universe 



As is well known. Professor Harlow Shapley's important 

 conclusions concerning the extent of the stellar universe 

 are in great measure dependent on the reliability of the 

 distances of globular clusters which he has deduced by 

 various methods. Fundamental to Dr. Shapley's scale 

 of distanc2s is the assumption that the brightest stars 

 observed in star-clusters are comparable in absolute 

 brightness — or intense luminosity — with the giant stars 

 in the part of the stellar system comparatively close to 

 the Sun, and that the Cepheid and cluster-type variables 

 — stars which undergo changes in brightness visible in 

 star-clusters — are likewise giant stars. This assump- 

 tion has been questioned by Dr. Curtis, the American 

 astronomer, and more recently the late Professor Kap- 

 teyn and Dr. Van Rhijn have urged that the Cepheids 

 in clusters are probably dwarfs. The two Dutch astrono- 

 msrs argued that the large proper motions — i.e. real 

 motions independent of the apparent motion caused by 

 the Earth's changes of position — of certain cluster-type 

 variables in the stellar system indicate large parallaxes 

 and low luminosities. Hence they concluded that the 

 cluster-type variables in clusters are dwarfs, and that 

 Dr. Shapley's distances for the globular clusters are eight 

 times too large. Thus the great cluster in Hercules, 

 according to Dr. Shapley, is 36,000 light-years ' distant ; 

 while on the scale adopted by Kapteyn and Van Rhijn, 

 the distance is reduced to 4,500 light-years. 



In a recent Circular issued from Harvard College 

 Observatory, Professor Shapley discusses the crucial 

 question raised by Kapteyn and Van Rhijn. Does the 

 large proper motion of fourteen faint Cepheids of the 

 cluster type indicate that they are comparatively near, 

 and therefore of low luminosity, or are the space velocities 

 of these stars actually high ? Dr. Shapley points out 

 that several of these variables have large radial velocities, 

 that is to say, are moving rapidly in the line of sight to 

 or from our system ; and this fact alone affords strong 

 evidence that these stars have great absolute velocities 

 in space. In the case of the variable RR Lyra;, Mr. 

 Van Maanen has measured its parallax as well as its 



' A "light-year" is the distance travelled by light in a 

 year. It travels i86,coo miles in one second. 



