JANUARY 3, 1907] 
NWA TORE 
227 
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NOTES. 
Tue prevalence and treatment of insanity have been 
the subject of much consideration recently; but it appears 
from a letter by Prof. Clifford Allbutt in Wednesday’s 
Times that though our system of public asylums is honour- 
able and humane in intention, it is, in a scientific sense, 
a gigantic muddle. In fact, our management of insanity 
is, scientifically, a chaos. ‘‘ Muddle! In England, and in 
England alone, we muddle with complacency. Now to 
muddle is to labour with effects without regard to causes. 
Thus it is that we strive with the ‘unemployed’; thus 
that we strive with commercial incapacity; thus that we 
strive with educational failures, and so forth; ‘ com- 
promise’ being with us not the word for adaptations, but 
for supineness. ... We pile up hospitals, sanatoriums, 
sick asylums, homes for incurables, colonies for epileptics 
and idiots, at vast cost direct and indirect, and wealthy 
persons make bequests, sometimes even liberal bequests, 
to such purposes; but what testator leaves money to an 
organisation of research by physicians and pathologists into 
the sources from which this frightful and manifold de- 
struction pours forth with an absolutely, and perhaps with 
a relatively, augmenting volume? (I must not seem to 
forget the Lister Institute or recent gifts to the Cancer 
Fund; but of the general truth of my statement your own 
reports of bequests from day to day are sufficient testi- 
mony.) No wonder that, thus ignorant but beginning to | 
“wake up,’ we run to the nearest plausible short cuts— 
to quackery and to hand-to-mouth remedies which are no 
remedies—rather than to the laborious investigation of 
origins and accelerations. If fifty years ago a tithe of the 
money expended upon the charities which are fighting at 
heavy odds with consequences had been spent upon know- 
ledge, and this knowledge had been applied to preven- 
tion by a Ministry of Health instead of, as in its present 
imperfection, by a secondary department of some other 
office, by this time half of our expenditure on these melan- 
choly results of our ignorance would have been saved, and 
the saving would be rapidly multiplying itself.’’ Prof. 
Allbutt urges that hospitals should be established for re- 
search into diseases of the nervous system, certain wards 
or wings being provided for the insane. The staff of a 
hospital of this kind should consist of young physicians, 
intellectually mature and highly and variously trained. 
‘Only when continuous and critical observations have been 
made under scientific conditions will it be possible to begin 
to create a classification of diseases of the nervous system 
by pathological affinity to displace the classifications which 
now are admirable only or chiefly for logical and meta- 
physical ingenuity. 
Dr. N. L. Britton, director of the New York Botanical 
‘Garden, has been elected president of the New York 
Academy of Sciences. 
A PAPER by the Duke of the Abruzzi upon his expedition 
to Mount Ruwenzori will be read at a special meeting of 
the Royal Geographical Society on Saturday, January 12. 
Mr. Sypney S. HouGu, F.R.S., chief assistant in the 
Royal Observatory, Cape of Good Hope, has been appointed 
His Majesty’s astronomer at that observatory on the 
retirement of Sir David Gill, K.C.B., F.R.S. 
Tue honorary treasurer of the Imperial Cancer Research 
Fund has received from Mr. and Mrs. Bischoffsheim the 
munificent donation of 40,0001. on the occasion of the 
celebration of their golden wedding. 
NO. 1940, VOL. 75] 
Ar the annual banquet of the Institute of Chemistry of 
France a few days ago, it was announced in the name of 
the Minister of Public Instruction that the French Govern- 
ment has drawn up a decree giving academic recognition 
to the profession of chemical engineer. 
Tue Kew Bulletin announces that Captain A. T. Gage 
has been appointed superintendent of the Royal Botanic 
Gardens, Calcutta, and director of the Botanical Survey 
of India. We learn from the same source that Dr. D. H. 
Scott, F.R.S., has relinquished his post of honorary director 
of the Jodrell Laboratory, Kew, which he has filled with 
great distinction during the past fourteen years. 
A MOVEMENT has been inaugurated by the professors of 
the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, with 
the approval of the Minister of Public Instruction, for the 
erection of a statue of Lamarck in the Jardin des Plantes. 
Subscriptions to the fund which is being raised may be 
sent to M. Joubin, secretary to the committee, 55 rue de 
Buffon, Paris. 
Tue Aéro Club has arranged for an exhibition in con- 
nection with the International Motor-car Exhibition to be 
held at the Royal Agricultural Hall, London, from April 
6-13 next. Prizes to the value of 25o0l. are offered by the 
proprietors of the Daily Mail for model flying machines, 
and full particulars as to the conditions of the competition 
may be obtained from Mr. Harold E. Perrin, Aéro Club, 
166 Piceadilly, London, W. 
Ir is stated in Engineering of December 28, 1906, that 
the German Railway Union has presented to the Science 
Museum at Munich an exact reproduction of “ Puffing 
Billy,’ the oldest locomotive in existence, now preserved 
in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The Munich engine 
is an exact counterpart of the original, and has been tested 
under steam, when a train load of 383 tons was hauled at 
upwards of six miles per hour. The work was carried 
out at the central shops of the Royal Bavarian State Rail- 
ways at Munich. 
WE learn from Science that Prof. H. F. Osborn has 
declined the secretaryship of the Smithsonian Institution, 
to which he was elected by the regents on December 4, 
1906. In a letter to the Chancellor of the institution, Prof. 
Osborn explains why he is unable to accept the post of 
secretary. Chief among these reasons is the fact that he 
is nearing the completion of several monographs and books, 
the prosecution of which is dependent upon the collections 
which he has brought together in New York and the staff 
of trained assistants who are working with him. 
A SPECIAL report from Berlin in the Pall Mall Gazette 
of December 28, 1906, described some wireless telephony 
experiments which have been made by Prof. Slaby, who 
claims to have solved successfully the problem of wireless 
telephony, which has been so often attempted. The trials 
took place over a distance of forty kilometres between the 
headquarters of the Wireless Telegraph Co. in Berlin 
and the wireless station at Nauen. The microphone was 
connected to a wire rising about six metres above the 
roof, and both figures and a sentence of extreme phonetic 
difficulty were received and repeated back without error, 
and very clearly heard. Prof. Slaby claims that no 
approach to forty kilometres has ever been tried before, 
and that his success is due to the isolation of the micro- 
phones and the ‘‘ damping’ of, all foreign vibrations. We 
do not know the greatest distance over which Mr. Paulsen 
has successfully conducted his wireless telephony, and we 
shall wait with interest to see what developments may 
