204 



KNOWLEDGE & SCIENTIFIC NEWS. 



[Sept., 1904. 



In addressing the lingineering Section on the subject of 

 '_' Invention," the Hon. Charles Parsons considered the subject 

 inits evolutionary aspect, not as a phenomenon suddenly 

 arising out of some happy strol<e of fortune, but as the con- 

 sunmiation of the successive laljours of a number of workers. 

 From this point of view invention was discovery phis develop- 

 ment. Generally what was usually called an invention was 

 the work of many individuals, each one adding something to 

 the work of his predecessors, each one suggesting something to 

 overcome some difficulty, trying many things, testing them 

 when possible, rejecting the failures, retaining the best, and 

 by a process of gradual selection arriving at the best metliod 

 of accomplishing the end in \iew. For example, the first true 

 internal-combustion engine was the cannon. In 1(180 Hug- 

 gens, and ten years later Papin, tried to use gunpowder as a 

 means of obtaining power by exploding it in a large vessel with 

 escape valves. That was a mistake due to ignorance of 

 thermo-djnamic laws, which would have taught them that the 

 best results would be obtained by exploding under pressure. 

 A century later Street tried to use the vapour of turpentine as 

 an explosive mixture, but his machine failed from bad con- 

 struction, and Brown, a generation after that, tried Hnggens' 

 residual vacuum method and failed. Then came Wright in 

 1833 with a good gas engine, Barnett — who improved on this 

 design — Bansanti, and Matencci each adding something or 

 subtracting something, till Lenoir in 1866 made the first real 

 .•md practicable engine. F"rom the consideration of the inven- 

 tion the President passed on to the inventor, his difficulties and 

 the obstacles placed in his way by patent laws, and the small 

 reward for his services compared with the benefits he con- 

 ferred on his fellows. In the course of his address, the Pre- 

 sident mentioned two inventions, the undertaking of which 

 would be of great service to mankind, but the practical rewards 

 of which to the individual inventor were so small and so diffi- 

 cult to secure adequately to him that they could hardly be 

 undertaken by private eft'ort. One was the problem of aerial 

 navigation, which could only be successfullv solved by an 

 organised and adequately trained body of engineers, and the 

 expenditure of a large sum of money. ' The other was the ex- 

 ploration of the lower depths of the earth — the deepest borings 

 or shafts in which were at present little more than a mile. The 

 President described a hypothetical method of sinking ashaftto 

 great depths, and offered an interesting estimate of the cost. 

 For £500,000 a shaft two miles in depth could be sunk in ten 

 ye.ars ; for ;f 1,100,000 a shaft of four miles could be sunk in 

 twenty-five years; and so on. A shaft twelve miles in depth 

 could be sunk in 85 years, and would cost £5,000,000. The 

 temperature of the rock at that depth would be, he estimated, 

 2y2 degrees Centigrade. 



Section H,— Anthropology,— The Pitt 



R-ivers Collection. 



Mr. Hhnrv Balfour, M.A., was born in 1863. Educated at 

 Charterhouse School. Entered Oxford University in 1881 as a 

 commoner of Trinity College. After taking degree in the 

 Honour School of Comparative Anatomy, acted under Pro- 

 fessor H. N. Moseley as Assistant Curator of the Pitt Rivers 

 Ethnological Collection (presented to the University in 1884). 

 After Professor Moseley's death, became Curator of the Pitt 

 Rivers Museum, which had developed considerably. Elected a 

 member of the Council of the Anthropological Institute of 

 Great Britain in i8gi, and its President in 1903 and again in 

 ig04. Elected in 1903 to a Research Fellowship at Exeter 

 College, Oxford. Corresponding member of the Anthropo- 

 logical Societies of Paris, Rome and Florence. President of 

 the Oxford Fencing Club. 



The address of Mr. Henry Balfour to the Anthropological 

 Section was in the main a description of the ethnographical 

 collection of Colonel Lane Fox. which is better known as the 

 Pitt Rivers collection, from the name which Colonel Lane 

 Fox took in 1880. The President's avowed object in consider- 

 ing this subject was first to bear witness to the very great 

 importance of General Pitt Rivers' contribution to the 

 scientific study of mankind in general ; and to defend the 

 system of arrangement which has been adopted in respect of 

 his ethnographical collection. Its collector based his first 

 in()uiries on the theory that the weapons which man used were 



Photo, hn Hitls ,f- Saunrlers.j 



HENRY BALFOUR. 



built up by a process of evolution ; and he was led to believe 

 that the same principles must probably govern the develop- 

 ment of the other arts, appliances, and ideas of mankind. On 

 this belief and principle his collection was formed. 



Section I.— Physiology.— Correlation of 

 Nerve = Arcs. 



Professor Sherrington, M.D. and D.Sc, Cambridge; 

 LL.D. Toronto; made Fellow of Royal Society in 1893 ; and 

 Honorary Member of the Academy of Medicine in Vienna. 

 Has been given the Marshall Hall Prize and the Baily Medal- 

 His chief work has been on the nervous system. Eight years 

 Lecturer on Physiology at St. Thomas's Hospital, London, 

 and four years Professor Superintendent of the Brown Insti- 

 tute, London. 



Professor C. S. Sherrington began his address to the Phy- 

 siological Section with a definition of the points of view from 

 which physiology studies the nervous system. They were 

 three. One of them regarded its processes of nutrition. Such 

 processes could be followed in the nerve cell, as in other cells. 

 But the cells of the nervous system had certain functions which 

 were specialised ; and one of these was the power of the ner- 

 vous cell to transmit states of excitement — a power which was 

 called conductivity. The examination of this property was 

 the second problem. The third was the investigation of the 

 way in which by this conductivity the separate cells and units 

 of an animal body were welded into a single whole, and how 

 from a mere collection of organs there was made a single 

 animal. It was one of the general problems of this third 

 branch of inquiry to which Professor Sherrington invited the 

 attention of his hearers ; and the problem was concerned witli 

 the chain of conduction, and with the ways in which the nerve 

 arcs, from a sense organ to a limb muscle, for example, are 

 connected. 



