248 



DISCOVERY 



A Manual oj Seismology. By Charles Davison, 

 Sc.D. Cambridge Geological Scries. (Cambridge 

 I'liiwrsity Press, 2is.) 

 A book which may be heartily rccommendctl to students 

 of Earthquake Phenomena. 



Electrons and Ether Waves. By Sir William Bragg, 

 F.R.S. (Oxford University Press, is.) 

 See first article in this number. 



The Ether Stream. An Explanation oj the Cause oJ 

 Gravitation. By J. S. Millar. (Watts & Co., 

 2S. 6d.) 

 Unscientific and untrustworthy. 



Ameboid Movement. By Prof. Asa A. Schoeffer. 



(Princeton University Press and O.xford University 



Press, IDS. 6d.) 

 A monograph by the Professor of Zoology in the 

 University of Tennessee. 



Insects and Human Welfare. By Charles Thomas 

 Brues. (Cambridge : Harvard University Press. 

 London : Oxford University Press. los. 6d.) 

 This is an account, by an Assistant Professor of Economic 

 Entomology at Harvard, of the more important relations 

 of insects to the health of man, to agriculture, and to 

 forestry. The chapters deal with insects and the public 

 health, insects and the food supply, forest insects, house- 

 hold insects, and the outlook for the future. The past 

 few decades have witnessed great changes whereby the 

 field of the entomologist has been greatly extended, and 

 here in a form neither too technical nor too " popular " is 

 an account of the progress made. The book is well illus- 

 trated and may be heartily recommended to readers. 



The Control oJ Life. By Prof. J. Arthur Thomson, 



M.A. LL.D. (.\ndrew Melrose, ys. 6d.) 

 The Electric Furnace. By J. N. Pring, M.B.E., D.Sc. 



(Longmans, Green & Co., 32s.) 

 Thermionic Tubes in Radio Telegraphy and Telephony. 



By John Scott Taggart. (The \\'ireless Press, 



25s.) 



Correspondence 



1 the Editor oJ Uiscovf.rv 

 Dear Sir, 



Have you not been less than fair to the reputation 

 of Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) in your article entitled 

 " Revolutionary Movements in Modern Painting " in the 

 current number of Discovery ? Gauguin gave up his 

 occupation and means of subsistence late in life, in order 

 to devote himself exclusively to his art. Finding that he 

 could not free himself from the trammels of artistic and 

 other conventions in France, he forsook all, went alone 



to Tahiti, and subsequently to the less frequented Isles 

 Marquises, where he died alone. By the studied sim- 

 plicity of his work and its avoidance of all unnecessary 

 detail and definition, he tried to point the way to a greater 

 freedom of expression and to make painting a universal 

 language, wliich no one with an artist's vision need be 

 afraid to use for lack of ' training. He would have 

 endorsed a saying attributed to Degas that it is only the 

 bad painters who are not artists. There can be no doubt 

 that Gauguin's fame continues to increase as his work 

 and its meaning become more widely known . 



No one accustomed to look at such things could fail 

 to be struck by the beauty of design and decorative quali- 

 ties of this master's work, as seen in black-and-white in 

 the well-illustrated French monograph. To come un- 

 expectedly upon the original of one of these illustrations, 

 as the present writer did recently in an art dealers shop 

 window in Paris, is an astounding revelation of how such 

 beauty of design can be enhanced by brilliancy of light 

 and colour. A superficial observer of this picture might 

 easily have supposed that the whole effect was produced 

 by these latter qualities, though the subject was an early 

 portrait group of a brother painter and his family in his 

 studio, and not one of Gauguin's later gorgeous tropical 

 scenes. 



Yours faithfully, 

 Henry L. P. Hulbert. 



The Cottage, Bri.kworth, 



Northampton. 

 August 10, 1921. 



To the Editor of Discovery 



Dear Sir, 



After reading Dr. Russell's very interesting article 

 on Isotopes, I am emboldened to ask him a question 

 which has been in my mind to put to him since Mr. Dar- 

 win's article in February 1920. Mr. Darwin gave a list 

 of the chemical elements based on Moseley's atomic 

 numbers from 1 to 92, and evidently he and Mr. Russell 

 are of opinion that, once we have found the few undis- 

 covered elements between those numbers, science will 

 be more or less satisfied. 



Now, I have read in my very discursive readings that 

 there are two elements which have been actually dis- 

 covered external to the Earth, namely, Coronium in 

 the sun, and Nebulium in the stars, but somehow it 

 seems to me that neither of these elements will fit in 

 with those undiscovered elements in Moseley's list. Will 

 you be kind enough to ask either of these gentlemen if 

 it is a fact that these two elements do exist, and that 

 being so, what do they imagine their atomic numbers 

 to be ? 



Yours faithfully, 

 Geo. C. Williams. 



99 Mercers Road, N.iq. 

 July 31, 192 1. 



