234 



NATURE 



[May II, 1916 



mittee on condition that the new grants will be 

 applied, pending the reconstitution of the University, 

 to meet existing liabilities and not for new develop- 

 ments. The allocation of the existing annual grants 

 of 31,000/., as well as of the new grants, will be 

 liable to reconsideration after the reorganisation of 

 the University. The Treasury has decided to include 

 in the 1916-17 Estimates an additional sum of 5500Z. 

 for the first year of the new grants, provided the local 

 authorities continue their contribution of 2000Z. to the 

 University College at Cardiff. The raising of a 

 further sum of 3500Z. out of rates, in accordance with 

 the recommendation of the Advisory Committee, is 

 waived until after the war. The Treasury will, how- 

 ever, feel bound to attach such a condition after the 

 war. If that condition is complied with in future 

 years, it will be prepared in addition to pay 500Z. for 

 each further 500L raised by local authorities over and 

 above 5500Z. until the total additional grant from the 

 Exchequer to the University and the colleges reaches 

 the figure of ii,oooZ. per annum. The minute also 

 states that the Treasury will be prepared in due course 

 to give effect to the recommendation of the Depart- 

 mental Committee that half the additional annual cost 

 of maintaining the National Medical School at Cardiff, 

 up to a maximum grant of e^oool. a year, should be 

 paid by the Exchequer, on the conditions set out in 

 the reports of the Departmental Committee. 



The plea for increased attention to science put 

 forward in the memorandum, signed by thirty-six men 

 of science, issued last February, referred particularly 

 to the position of scientific subjects in the public 

 schools and at Oxford and Cambridge, and to the 

 marks obtainable, in comparison with classics, in the 

 examinations for the highest posts of the public ser- 

 vice. It appears to have been the deliberate purpose 

 of the promoters of the memorandum to limit con- 

 sideration to these points, which they believe to be of 

 fundamental importance. In any case, a reform of 

 the present attitude towards science shown by adminis- 

 trative officials and legislators might be started by 

 making scientific subjects of capital importance in the 

 examinations for appointments in Class I. of the Civil 

 Services ; and it is possible that there is practical 

 wisdom in limiting attention to these aspects instead 

 of surveying the whole field of education. As the 

 object of the memorandum was to assert the claims 

 of science to fuller recognition in the school and the 

 State, it was not necessary to acknowledge the com- 

 plementary part played by literary studies in a com- 

 plete education ; yet it is scarcely too much to say that 

 none of the men of science who signed the memorial 

 was unmindful of it. A letter which appeared in the 

 Times of May 4, signed by several leading repre- 

 sentatives of science, as well as of the humanities, 

 suggests that the value of literary studies is being 

 overlooked, while the claims of science are being 

 urged. Science is tacitly classified as technical know- 

 ledge and necessary for national prosperity, but it is 

 held that in the education "which will develop human 

 faculty and the power of thinking clearly to the 

 highest possible degree . . . the study of Greece and 

 Rome must always have a large part." In other 

 words, "early specialisation is injurious" if it means 

 elementary science teaching, but not when, as at pre- 

 sent, it signifies classical languages and literature. 

 We do not believe for a moment that the best interests 

 of classical and literary studies would suffer if science 

 were given the place In the curriculum now occupied 

 by Greek and Latin; for few pupils ever reach the 

 stage of intelligent appreciation of works in these 

 languages, and for the majority of them good trans- 

 lations in English would serve as useful a purpose as 

 vague interpretations of classical texts. 



NO. 2428, VOL. 97] 



SOCIETIES AND ACADEMIES. 

 London. 



Challenger Society, April 12. — Dr. G. H. Fowler in 

 the chair. — E. T. Browne : The geographical distribu- 

 tion of Siphonophores. Nearly all the species are 

 tropical, and only one {Diphyes arctica) has perma- 

 nently established itself in cold water. Of ninety 

 species recognised, seventy are common to the Atlantic 

 and Indo-Pacific, and most of the remainder have 

 been found in the Atlantic only. — C. Tate Regan : 

 The distribution of the clupeoid fishes of the genus 

 Sardina. The species inhabit the zones between the 

 mean annual surface isotherms of 12° C. and 20° C. 

 rhey are S. pilchardus, of Europe, S. neopilchardus , 

 of Australia and New Zealand, and S. sagax, of 

 South Africa, Japan, California, 'and Chile. 



Royal Meteorological Society, April 19. — Major H. G. 

 Lyons, president, in the chair. — E. V. Newnham : The 

 persistence of wet and dry weather. The rainfall 

 records of Greenwich, Kew, Aberdeen, and Valencia 

 have been examined in order to find out how often 

 rain falls on the day following successive runs of 

 one, two, three, etc., wet or fine days. The common 

 notion seems to be that after a long run of wet days 

 the chance of a fine day becomes greater, but statistics 

 do not support this conclusion. Generally speaking, 

 the expectation of rain on any day has been found to 

 increase rapidly as the number of previous successive 

 wet days increases, and to diminish with the number 

 of successive fine days in the past. After very long 

 spells of either kind the expectation of further rain 

 reaches a practically steady value. The same conclu- 

 sion holds for the expectation of rain in a given hour 

 after different runs of wet and dry hours. In illus- 

 tration, some of the results may be quoted. At 

 Valencia, after seven days of drought, rain falls on the 

 eighth day twenty-four times out of one hundred, but 

 after seven rainy days eighty-six times. For Kew the 

 corresponding increase is rather less, namely, from 

 twenty-seven to seventy-three. — Prof. H. H. Turner : 

 Discontinuities in meteorological phenomena. In a 

 former paper certain critical dates, about six years 

 apart (and formed according to a specified law, appar- 

 ently related to the movements of the earth's axis), 

 were specified for 200 years back ; and It was shown that 

 a number of meteorological data changed abruptly in 

 character at these dates. In simple cases the inter- 

 mediate chapters are alternately hot and cold, or wet 

 and dry, though other changes are more complex. In 

 the present paper various new data are submitted to 

 the same test and give confirmatory results. The 

 most noteworthy case Is that of the mean tempera- 

 tures at Paris, which confirm the dates for the past 

 century. The changes at the critical dates are shown 

 to be abrupt; the alternation Is consistent for seven- 

 teen chapters out of eighteen ; and it is shown to vary 

 In amount according to a law which suggests the 

 regular action of two disturbing causes, one of which 

 has already been shown to play an important part 

 in these phenomena, and has a period of about forty 

 years ; the other, of about fifty years, appearing clearly 

 In Mr. Douglass's measures of Calif ornian tree-rings. 



Mathematical Society, April 27. — Sir J. Larmor, presi- 

 dent, in the chair. — Major MacMahon : Some problems 

 of combinatory analysis.— Dr. S. Chapman : The 

 uniformity of gaseous density, according to the kinetic 

 theory. — G. N. Watson : Bessel functions and Kapteyn 

 series.— T. C. Lewis : Four Tucker circles. — Prof. 

 H. S. Carslaw : The Green's function for the equation 

 ^''u + K^t/=o (II.). — J. Hodgkinson : The nodal points 

 of a plane sextic. — S. Pollard : The deduction of criteria 

 for the convergence of Fourier's series from Fejer's 

 theorem concerning their summability. — Prof. W. H. 



