November 23, 1899] 



NATURE 



93 



Speaking at the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce last week, 

 Mr. Neville Chamberlain said they were on the eve of a new 

 departure in the educational life of Birmingham. They were 

 looking forward to the rise of a University which would take up 

 new and special lines, including commercial education. That 

 was a great experiment, and it seemed to him to be the duty of 

 that chamber, as representing the commercial life of Birmingham, 

 to do what it could to ensure the success of the experiment. 



SCIENTIFIC SERIALS. 

 Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, October. — 

 The number opens with a partial analysis of the papers com- 

 municated at the sixth summer meeting of the Society, held at 

 Columbus, Ohio, in August last, by Prof. Holgate. — The 

 President, Prof. Woodward, congratulated the Society on the 

 manifest interest in mathematical study and investigation as 

 evidenced by the large number (twenty-three) of communications 

 presented. — A report on the recent progress in the theory of 

 linear groups is an interesting and thorough report by Dr. L. E. 

 Dickson, which was made before Section A of the American 

 Association for the Advancement of Science at its meeting at 

 Columbus, previous to the above gathering of the Society. It is 

 a supplement to the pre\ious report, drawn up by Dr. G. A. 

 Miller, which appeared in the February (1899) number of the 

 Bulletin. The author restricts himself to finite linear groups, 

 and of these he considers first the finite collineation groups and 

 afterwards the linear congruence groups and the more general 

 groups in Galois fields. These reports are very useful to 

 students of the subject. — A few shorter notices (small reviews) 

 follow. — The "Notes" contain many items of interest, but two 

 of them are not quite accurate. For instance, the London 

 Mathematical Society has not decided to issue its Proceedittgs in 

 two volumes per annum. The resolution, as stated in the 

 apperdix to Volume xxx , says " in future the volumes of Pro- 

 ceedings shall contain as nearly four hundred pages as may be 

 found convenient, provided that each volume shall begin with 

 the report of proceedings at a meeting, not necessarily an 

 annual general meeting." This may sometimes result as in the 

 " Notes," but not necessarily so. A statement on p. 40 would 

 lead one to infer that Dr. Graves was professor at Trinity 

 College, Dublin, at the time of his death, and had been so ever 

 since 1843. 



American Journal of Science, November. — March weather in 

 the United States, by O. L. Fassig. If the earth's surface 

 were uniform, the normal circulation of air would produce two 

 belts of high pressure at a latitude of about 30° north and south. 

 The presence of continents breaks up these areas. The author 

 shows that the ' ' permanent " high pressure areas have a great 

 determining influence upon weather in its general aspects, and 

 that a considerable advance in forecasting work may be expected 

 to result from their study. The March weather of the United 

 States is determined by the relative extent of three such areas, 

 and the course of the March storms lies along the gap between 

 them. — Some new minerals from the zinc mines at P'ranklin, 

 N.J., by S. L. Penfield and C. H. Warren. The minerals 

 include "hancockite," which has the general formula of 

 epidote, but having lead and strontium isomorphous with 

 calcium; "glaucochroite," CaMnSiOj, closely allied to monti- 

 cellite, CaMgSi04; and its matrix " nasonite," the empirical 

 formula of which is PbgCa4Cl2(Si207).i. The authors also in- 

 vestigate the chemical composition of ganomalite, and show 

 that the acid, HfiSi.207, of which nasonite and ganomalite are 

 salts, is intermediate between orthosilicic acid, H4Si04, and 

 metasilicic acid, H^SiOs, and may be regarded as their alge- 

 braic sum, or as derived trom two molecules of the former by 

 abstraction of water. — Action of acetylene on the oxides of 

 copper, by F. A. Gooch and D. Baldwin. While metallic 

 copper may at comparatively high temperatures induce the 

 pxjlymerisation of acetylene, it is an oxidising action which 

 starts at moderately low temperatures the formation of the 

 peculiar " acetylides." Thus it is found that ferric oxide heated 

 in acetylene at temperatures varying from 150° to 360^ ac- 

 cording to circumstances, darkens, glows, and gathers with 

 evolution of heat a dark carbonaceous deposit. In the products 

 of such action the content of iron varies from 2*8 to 5 8 per 

 cent. Silver oxide also acts upon acetylene. — A new mode of 

 occurrence of ruby in North Carolina, by J. W. Judd and W. 

 E. Hidden. Corundum occurs in North Carolina in three 



NO. 1569, VOL. 61] 



different forms. In the ordinary schists of the district, long 

 prismatic crystals, usually of grey, pink and blue tints, occur. 

 In the peridotites, crystals a?e found, some of very great size 

 and of great variety of colour, but seldom or never "clear and 

 translucent. In certain garnet-bearing basic rocks at Cowee 

 Creek, small tabular and short prismatic crystals are abundant, 

 and these very frequently exhibit the transparency and colour of 

 true ruby. 



Wiedemann' s Annalen der Physik und Cheinie, No. 10, — 

 Explosions in air, by W. Wolff. The effect of an explosion in 

 air is propagated by a process analogous to the propagation of 

 sound, except in the immediate neighbourhood of the source, 

 where a bodily translation of the air is superadded. But that 

 translation does not extend further than about 25 m. Up to 

 that point the propagation of the wave is more rapid than the 

 propagation of sound. — Glow-light phenomena with high- 

 frequency alternate currents, by H. Ebert. There is a residual 

 effect of the positive charge in the glow-light, which persists for 

 a short time after the glow has ceased. This produces a repul- 

 sion between the two electrodes. — Influence of impurities upon 

 a gaseous spectrum, by P. Lewis. The addition of very small 

 quantities of mercury vapour to hydrogen gives rise to the green 

 mercury line, which only disappears at - 20 degrees. When 

 oxygen is added to hydrogen in increasing quantities, the maxi- 

 mum of emission is shifted towards lower pressures. — Resistance 

 to projectiles in air, by R. Emden. The resistance offered by 

 air is jointly proportioned to the square of the velocity, v-, and 

 to another function of the velocity, f(v). The latter quantity 

 is constant up to the point where v becomes the velocity of 

 sound. Then it abruptly increases to about three times its 

 former value, remaining constant at high velocities. The in- 

 crease is due to the energy expended in producing and maintain- 

 ing the head wave. — Electric pictures, by L. Fomm. The 

 author produces pictures of sections of different kinds of wood 

 by covering them on one side with tinfoil and on the other with 

 bromide paper, with the film in contact with the wood. A 

 metallic point negatively charged by an influence machine, 

 mounted at 5 cm. from the paper surface, produces a good im- 

 pression in about half a minute. — The Macfarlane- Moore vacuum 

 vibrator, by J. Elster and H. Geitel. To avoid the sticking of 

 the vacuum interrupter the authors keep it vibrating by a separate 

 interrupter outside the vacuum tube, in unison with the one 

 inside. — A fault in Lippmann's photography, by O. Wiener. 

 There is always a difference of phase between the wave reflected 

 by the gelatine surface and that reflected by the first elementary 

 stratum. The remedy consists either in eliminating the surface 

 reflection altogether, as by immersing the plate in benzol, or in 

 producing a large difference of path, by coating the gelatine with 

 a film of collodion. With a suitable thickness of the latter, very 

 brilliant and true effects are obtained. 



SOCIETIES AND ACADEMIES. 



London. 



Royal Society, June 15. — "On the Resistance to Torsion 

 of certain forms of Shafting, with special reference to the Effect 

 of Key ways," by L. N. G. Filon, M.A., King's College, Cam- 

 bridge, Fellow of University College, London. 



In this paper solutions of the torsion problem are obtained 

 for cylinders whose cross-sections are bounded by confocai 

 ellipses and hyperbolas. The method employed is that of 

 conjugate functions, suggested by Saint-Venant, Thomson and 

 Tait, Clebsch, Boussinesq and MacDonald, and applied by then* 

 to other cases. 



The strains and stresses are obtained in the form of infinite 

 series of circular and hyperbolic functions. There are two 

 types of sections specially studied. 



The first is bounded by an ellipse and by the two branches of 

 a confocai hyperbola. The solution is worked out numerically 

 for various values of the eccentricity of the ellipse and of the 

 angle between the asymptotes of the hyperbola. 



The position of the fail-points, or points of maximum strain 

 and stress, is investigated at length. 



It is shown that the maximum stress does not always occur, 

 as is usually assumed, at the point of the boundary nearest to 

 the centre of the section, but that in some cases there are four 

 fail-points symmetrically distributed round the contour, on the 

 broad sides of the section. 



