July 20, 1916] 



NATURE 



435 



part of their school career to learn science, and any 

 boy with special scientific abilit\- was encouraged to 

 develop it. A wrong use may be made of many good 

 gifts, and because modern research may be directed 

 to destructive ends is no reason why our boys should 

 leave school ignorant of subjects which will be essen- 

 tial in the coming economic struggle, and without a 

 knowledge of which efficiency in the various depart- 

 ments of a modern State is impossible. 



The terrible conflict in which we, together with 

 the chief civilised nations of Europe, are now engaged 

 has served to awaken in this country a deep unrest 

 as to educational results and methods, especially in 

 respect of the place of science in education. This 

 question formed the subject of a significant article 

 by Prof. J. A. Fleming, F.R.S., in the Journal of 

 the Royal Society of Arts for June 23. In this article 

 Prof. Fleming seeks to lay the true foundations of 

 national education for all classes of the people, and 

 he demands that a careful and searching analysis 

 shall be instituted into the causes which have led to 

 our failure to cultivate sufficiently scientific knowledge 

 and to estimate its proper place and function in 

 general education. The true philosophy of education 

 is to enable the child to educate himself, for he is 

 naturally a philosopher, an experiinentalist, and an 

 artist, and the best we can do is to direct his activities 

 into right channels, to teach him how to do things, 

 and especially to bring the town-born child into closer 

 touch with Nature. As to the secondary and public 

 schools a complete change is demanded in the curri- 

 culum, even to the extent of the abolition in the 

 latter of the present division into classical and modern 

 sides, so that the various great groups of educational 

 subjects — languages and literature ; science, or a 

 knowledge of the facts and laws of the universe; 

 mathematics and graphics ; religious and ethical in- 

 struction ; history ; economics ; the duties of citizen- 

 ship ; and physical care — may be put upon a footing 

 of strict equality in the school course. The right 

 methods of scientific teaching applied to all branches 

 of study, the importance of experimentation on the 

 part of the pupil rather than that of much lecturing, 

 the value of re-discovery, under due guidance, of the 

 elementary laws and facts of science, are strongly in- 

 sisted upon. So in the universities their function 

 should be not so much the dissemination of scientific 

 knowledge as the due training and instruction of 

 men who can create new knowledge, it being the 

 main duty of the university to increase by means of 

 research the sum of knowledge based upon that 

 already gained, opening up for the first time some 

 novel and rich mine of scientific truth. Everv . en- 

 couragement should be given to men of ori_Q:inal 

 powers of mind, and we need to search diligently for 

 such men in the firm belief that "there are revolution- 

 ising discoveries and inventions vet to be made which 

 will affect human life in everv wav." 



SOCIETIES AND ACADEMIES. 

 Edinblrgh. 

 Royal Society, Tulv 3. — Dr. Home, president, in the 

 chair.— Dr. R. Kidrton and Prof. W. H. Lang: On 



Old Red Sandstone fossil plants showing structure, 

 from Rhynie Chert Bed, .Aberdeenshire. Well-preserved 

 silicified plant remains have been found in a chert 

 band not younger than the Middle Old Red Sandstone. 

 There are two vascular plants. Rhvnia gwynne- 

 vaughatii, n.sp. and n.g., and Asteroxylou mackiei, 

 n.sp. and n.g. The olants of Rhvnia grew closely 

 crowded together, and their remains formed a peat. 

 The plant was rootless and leafless, consisting en- 

 NO. 2438, VOL. 97I 



tirely of a system of cylindrical stems. Rhizomes were 

 fixed in the peat by rhizoids, and tapering aerial stems 

 grew up from them. These stems bore small hemi- 

 spherical projections, and branched dichotomously and 

 laterally. They had a thick-walled epidermis with 

 stomata, and a simple central cylinder consisting of a 

 strand of tracheides surrounded by phloem. Large 

 cylindrical sporangia, containing numerous spores, 

 were borne terminally on some of the leafless aerial 

 stems. The plant is compared with some of the speci- 

 mens of Psilophyton princeps, figured by Dawson ; and 

 a new class of vascular cryptogams, the Psilophytales, 

 is founded for their reception. This is characterised 

 by the sporangia being borne at the ends of branches 

 of the stem without any relation to leaves or leaf-like 

 organs. A comparison is made between Psilophytales 

 and the existing class of Psilotales. — Dr. R. Kidston : 

 Contributions to our knowledge of British Palaeozoic 

 plants. Part L : Fossil plants from the Scottish coal 

 measures. The paper contains descriptions of new or 

 little-known species. — Dr. W. B. Blaikie : Exhibition 

 of a universal sun-dial giving any standard mean time 

 and of a diagram giving sunrise and sunset in mean 

 time for all longitudes and latitudes. The dial was 

 mounted equatorially, and was translucent, so that a 

 shadow could be cast whether the sun shone from above 

 or from below. A simple rotation set the instrument to 

 the mean time for any longitude, and a tangent screw 

 adjustment applied the equation of time with great 

 simplicity. The diagram consisted of two ruled sur- 

 faces, of which the upper was transparent. When 

 the graduation representing latitude on the one was 

 made to coincide with the graduation representing 

 declination on the other, certain radial lines gave the 

 times of sunrise and sunset. — Prof. M. Maclean 

 and D. J. Mackellar : On the heating of field coils of 

 dynamo-electric machinery. Temperatures were 

 measured by thermometers, by resistance measure- 

 ment, and by thermo-couples placed at different points 

 in the coil. Results were obtained for various condi- 

 tions of load and for various speeds, and were dis- 

 cussed under the two heads: (i) the effect of the 

 armature current, (2) the effect of armature peripheral 

 speed.^Dr. M. Kojima : Preliminar\' communication 

 on the effects of thyroid feeding upon the pancreas. 

 The work had been carried out in the physiological 

 laboratory of the University of Edinburgh. It was 

 found that the addition of a certain amount of thyroid 

 to the food of animals (rats) produced pronounced 

 morphogenetic changes in the pancreas, .\fter a few- 

 days' feeding, the gland cells multiply, their nuclei 

 exhibiting marked evidence of kar\-okinesis. .Accom- 

 panving this change there is a decided diminution in 

 the amount of zymogen contained in the cells, which 

 are now much smaller than normal, .\fter two or 

 three weeks the cell-multiplication ceases and zymogen 

 again accumulates, so that the cells increase in size, 

 a general enlargement of the gland being ultimately 

 effected. — J. Littlejohn : The application of operators to 

 the solution of the algebraic equation. The operators 

 were differentiations and integrations with respect to 

 the coeflficients, and it was shown how the roots could 

 be evaluated in the case of numerical equations. — Dr. 

 H. Bateman : On systems of partial differential equa- 

 tions and the transformation of spherical harmonics. 

 The paper showed how the general equation of wave- 

 motion associated with Maxwell's electromagnetic 

 theorv could be transformed into the Laplacian form of 

 equation in three variables. Thus the electrostatic 

 vector E can be expressed in the form Grad V, where 

 V is a solution of the Laplacian equation in terms of 

 the variables X, Y, Z, which are functions of the 

 original variables x, y, z, t. The result is that a 

 solution of Laplace's equation in X, V, Z is a solution 

 of the wave equation in .\-. y. z. t. 



