view that the university should be to enable the youth 
of the country to develop their faculties to their full 
capacity, and to permit them to compete on even 
terms in the practical business of life with those out- 
side as well as inside Australia. Dr. Hill, in a valu- 
able contribution to the discussion, advocated the 
utilisation of existing institutions, the training college 
for teachers, the magnificent observatory, the museum, 
zoological gardens, law courts, and hospital, for the 
teaching purposes of the university, and suggested 
that many of the gentlemen holding Government 
appointments, the geologist, electrician, bacterio- 
fosist! &c., were eminently fitted to occupy university 
chaits in addition to their official duties. They did 
not require a palace for a start, but the men. In 
these days of change a great stone building was a 
disadvantage. His idea was to forget finance, and to 
coordinate the existing material. Ultimately a reso- 
lution in favour of the establishment of a university 
was carried with practical unanimity. 
At present the higher education of Western 
Australia is in the hands of the University of 
Adelaide, which conducts the examinations and gives 
courses of extension lectures, and this system has 
worked well in the past, but naturally is only pro- 
visional. In addition, the Gilchrist trustees, through 
Dr. R. D. Roberts, of the London University Ex- 
tension Board, have for the past three years con- 
tributed to the expense of sending an annual lecturer 
from this country to give a course of lectures in 
some branch of science. These lectures are eagerly 
attended, and now form quite a feature in the intel- 
lectual life of the State, periodically stimulating the 
movement in favour of an independent university. 
Audiences of from 1000 to 1500 are sometimes drawn. 
It is difficult to say whether the lecturer or his 
audience derive the greater benefit. Certainly a trip 
round the world with a course of lectures, taking 
one over a large part of a new continent, among the 
goldfields of Kalgurli, the jarrah and karri forests of 
the south-w est, the orchards and vineyards of Arma- 
dale, is an experience fitted to make a lecturer return 
to his homely desk with ‘‘ renewed vinegar.” 
The present writer recalls many a strange impres- 
sion from his lecturing experience in Western 
Australia; a wine neither a hock, a claret, nor a 
madeira, something of each, but better than all; a 
third-class sleeping carriage on a narrow-gauge, 
single-line railway, not yet to be found on our boasted 
Scotch expresses; gold in sight in the wall-face of one 
working not yet worked, estimated of the value of 
half a million sterling; a water scheme for supplying 
the mines, pumping a million and a half gallons daily 
over a watershed of 1500 feet a distance of 300 miles, 
in which the water spends six weeks in the pipes 
before reaching its destination ; a camel, the only 
need of which in the desert is a weekly drink of water 
costing, maybe, 30s.; a criticism of the last night’s 
lecture scribbled in pencil at the bottom of one mine, 
and delivered to the lecturer in the next without 
coming nearer the surface than 1200 feet; a rabbit 
which survived two summers of drought without 
water; and a clergyman who took for his text 
“* Radium.’”’ 
In wishing the university movement well in 
Western Australia, one may express the hope that it 
will still continue its policy of inviting outside lecturers 
to come and learn as well as to teach, and that many 
professors without portfolios may be induced to visit 
its shores in the future, to carry back with them 
an idea of a developing outside world which in the 
cloistered seclusion of a university is in danger of 
slipping from the memory. 
IDs Sh 
Oy ICRP Wolves 7/5) | 
NATO LEE 
| NovEMBER 8, 1906 
NOTES. 
list of fellows who have been re- 
the president and council of the Royal 
Tue following is a 
commended by 
Society for election into the council for the ensuing 
year :—president, Lord Rayleigh; treasurer, Mr. A. B. 
Kempe; secretaries, Prof. J. Larmor, Sir Archibald 
Geikie; foreign secretary, Mr. Francis Darwin; other 
members of the council (the fellows whose names are 
printed in italics are not members of the existing council), 
Lord Avebury, Sir Benjamin Baker, K.C.B., Dr. H. F. 
Baker, Prof. J. Norman Collie, Prof. Wyndham R. 
Dunstan, Prof. David Ferrier, Prof. Sydney J. Hickson, 
Sir William Huggins, K.C.B., Prof. E. Ray Lankester, 
Mr. H. F. Newall, Dr. Alexander Scott, Prof. A. C- 
Seward, Prof. W. J. Sollas, Prof. E. H. Starling, Prof. 
Silvanus P. Thompson, and Dr. A. D. Waller. 
Tue Royal Society’s medals have this year been 
adjudicated by the president and council as follows :—the 
Copley medal to Prof. Elias Metchnikoff, for the import- 
ance of his work in zoology and in pathology; the Rum- 
ford medal to Prof. Hugh Longbourne Callendar, for his 
experimental work on heat; a Royal medal to Prof. 
Alfred George Greenhill, for his contributions to mathe- 
matics, especially the elliptic functions and their appli- 
cations; a Royal medal to Dr. Dukinfield Henry Scott, 
for his investigations and discoveries in connection with 
the structure and relationships of fossil plants; the Davy 
medal to Prof. Rudolf Fittig, for his investigations in 
chemistry, and especially for his work in lactones and 
acids; the Darwin medal to Prof. Hugh de Vries, on the 
ground of the significance and extent of his experimental 
investigations in heredity and variation; the Hughes medal 
to Mrs. W. E. Ayrton, for her experimental investigations 
on the electric arc, and also upon sand ripples. The King 
has approved of the award of the Royal medals. The 
medals will, as usual, be presented at the anniversary 
meeting on St. Andrew’s Day (November 30). The society 
will dine together at the Whitehall Rooms on the evening 
of the same day. 
Two events during the past few days have shown that 
men of science recognise the ability of women to originate 
and carry out scientific research and inspire others with 
their spirit. One is that on Thursday last the Royal 
Society awarded the Hughes medal to Mrs. W. E. 
Ayrton, for her experimental investigations on the electric 
are and also upon sand ripples; and the other event is 
the first lecture delivered at the Sorbonne on Monday by 
Mme. Curie, who has succeeded the late Prof. Curie in 
the chair of general physics of the University of Paris. 
Both Mrs. Ayrton and Mme. Curie originated and carried 
out their scientific investigations unaided, and the tacit 
acknowledgment just made of their creative capacity— 
essential to work of this kind—is interesting and signifi- 
cant. Though some of Mrs. Ayrton’s experiments on the 
electric arc were made in the laboratories under Prof. 
Ayrton’s charge at the Central Technical College, it was 
to her alone that the conception and carrying out of the 
experiments were due, as well as the original speculations 
deduced from the results. The Royal Society, by placing 
Mrs. Ayrton’s name alone, and not bracketed with that 
of a man, in the list of medallists for this year has mani- 
fested its recognition of individual work by a woman. 
The Davy medal was awarded by the society in 1903 to 
Prof. Curie and Mme. Curie jointly, for their researches 
on radium, though the published work on the subject 
shows that the discovery of radium was due to Mme. 
