196 
NATURE 
[APRIL 23, 1914 
THE Journal of the Royal Society of Arts for March, 
1914 (vol. Ixii., No. 3199) contains a paper by Prof. 
Bottomley on the bacterial treatment of peat. The 
raw peat is treated in three stages—first, the raw peat 
is moistened with a culture solution of the special 
‘“humating ”’ bacteria, and the mass is kept at a con- 
stant temperature for a week or ten days; during this 
time the bacteria act on certain organic constituents 
of the peat, and gradually convert a large amount of 
the humic acid present into soluble humates; secondly, 
the “‘humating’”’ bacteria having done their work are 
destroyed by sterilising the peat by live steam; thirdly, 
the sterilised peat is treated with a mixed culture of 
nitrogen-fixing organisms—Azotobacter chroococcum 
and Bacillus radicicola—and after a few days’ incuba- 
tion at 26° C. is ready for use. The material so ob- 
tained possesses astonishing fertilising properties, and 
extensive trials with satisfactory results have been 
carried out at Kew. 
BuLtetins No. 1oA and 10B of the Eugenics Record 
Office contain a report cf ‘tthe committee to study 
and to report on the best practical means of cutting 
off the defective germ plasm in the American popula- 
tion.” The former of these discusses the scope of the 
committee’s work, which indeed covers the whole of 
‘“negative’”” eugenics and extends beyond it. The 
first problem is, of course, to decide what is defective 
germ plasm and how it manifests itself in the life and 
character of the individual who bears it. The com- 
mittee has gathered little fresh knowledge in this 
field, and their treatment of the questions involved 
is rather unsatisfactory. For example, the most con- 
spicuous feature of their discussion on criminality is 
an elaborate classification of crimes, which has not 
the merit of being logical, since qualities such as ‘ in- 
corrigibility ’ and conditions such as “prostitution” 
are included in it, whereas a crime must necessarily 
be an act. Bulletin 10B is a more useful work, as it 
contains an account of the American Sterilisation 
Laws, and of Bills which have been brought forward 
in State legislatures for this end without reaching the 
statute-books. An excellent summary of the laws was 
communicated to the last Eugenics Congress by Mr. 
Van Wagenen, in the form of a preliminary report of 
the committee, but the report now under notice is 
much fuller, and contains, in addition to the items 
mentioned, a record of the legal proceedings which 
have arisen out of the laws. 
THE Psychological Review for March contains an 
interesting paper by E. K. Strong, illustrating the 
application of psychological experiment to problems of 
commercial interest. The special problem under in- 
vestigation was the relative efficacy of the one-page 
advertisement in four months compared with two 
half-page advertisements every two months, and with 
four quarter-page advertisements every month. This 
problem involved the consideration of two distinct 
points: the effect of increase in the size of an adver- 
tisement and the effect of continued repetition of an 
advertisement on the reader’s memory. The advertise- 
ments for the experiment were carefully chosen so that 
they were not likely to be seen save in the test; other 
suitable precautions were also taken. The 288 adver- 
NO, 2321; VOL.) 
tisements selected were divided by the experimenter 
into four sets corresponding to the four monthly issues 
of a magazine. The four sets were shown to the 
subjects at intervals of a month. One month later the 
subjects were tested, by their ability to select from an 
equal number of advertisements previously seen and 
unseen, as to their remembrance of what had been 
shown them. The writer concludes (1) that the value 
of space in advertising as affecting permanent im- 
pressions increases approximately as the square-root 
of the increase in area, (2) that when the intervai of 
time between successive presentations is very long (a 
month), space used in advertising is more effective 
when used in a large advertisement than if presented 
in small advertisements repeated with greater 
frequency. 
THE twenty-seventh annual report of the Marine 
Biological Station at Port Erin records that the 
number of workers in 1913 was seventy-two, and that 
all the available work-places were fully utilised during 
the Easter vacation. Though some relief was obtained 
by converting part of a large apparatus-room into a 
laboratory for bio-chemistry, extension of the labora- 
tory accommodation will evidently be required in the 
near future. Besides the usual work in the laboratory 
and the shore-collecting, the students attending the 
course during the Easter vacation had the advantage 
of demonstrations of oceanographic work on Prof. 
Herdman’s S.Y. Runa. The work of the fish hatchery 
has proceeded as in previous years; more than seven 
and a half millions of plaice !arva were hatched, 
taken out to sea, and liberated, and the difficult work 
of rearing young lobsters has been carried on with 
some success. The report records the captures (many 
of which have already been noticed in the columns of 
Nature) made during the cruise of the Runa in the 
Hebridean Sea in 1913; these include 259 species of 
Foraminifera, several new to Great Britain, a pre- 
liminary list of which is given by Messrs. Heron-Allen 
and Earland. 
WE have received the report of the Rugby School 
Natural History Society for 1913, in which the secre- 
tary takes a thoroughly optimistic view of the present 
position and future prospects of that body. An article 
on the architectural works of Robert Adam and the 
“Adelphi”? affords much interesting reading. 
AccORDING to a statement issued by the Smithsonian 
Institution, the nearly complete skeleton of a dwarf 
horned dinosaur (Ceratopsia) has been discovered re- 
cently in the Montana Cretaceous. The skull measures 
only 22 in. in length, against from 6 to 8, or even 
9 ft., in the larger members of the group, the whole 
size of the new form being only about one-fourth that 
of the latter. 
THE most interesting item in vol. x., part 1, of the 
Records of the Indian Museum is the description by 
Dr. W. M. Tattersall, in an article on Indian 
brackish-water crustaceans of the family Mysidze, of 
a new genus and species from Bombay, for which the 
name Indomysis annandalei is suggested. So distinct 
is the genus that its inclusion in the subfamily to 
which it is most nearly related involves a modification 
