422 
A RECENT article distributed by the Decimal Association 
again directs attention to the advantages to a country of 
the introduction of the metric system of weights, measures, 
and coinage. Not the least of these advantages would be 
the saving of time to business men and workers of all 
kinds. To children at school the saving of time would be 
still greater, and this has been estimated with some exact- 
and others. 
The association states that the saving in educational time 
ness from figures provided by schoolmasters 
by the. exclusive adoption of metric measures would be 
about 200 child. 
malised, the saving would be increased to about 350 hours. 
That is, the about 
year for ever of school-children’s time could be saved by 
hours per If coinage also were deci- 
association says, 200 million hours a 
a reform which, it is estimated, would cost adults on the 
average about the equivalent of a day’s work (adding the 
needed mental exertion to the cost of new weights, metre- 
sticks, and gauges). The Decimal for 
legislation to bring about the improvement advocated; but 
in the meantime good work is being done, and an in- 
creasing amount of attention is paid to teaching children 
at school the simplicity of the inter-relation of the various 
metric measures. It is interesting in this connection to 
notice that one of the earliest Parliamentary Bills on the 
list this session is Mr. B. S. Straus’s Weights and 
Measures (Metric System) Bill, which is receiving strong 
support. The Bill proposes that from April 1, 1910, all the 
present British weights and measures shall be replaced by 
those of the metric system, and that Parliament shall order 
the Imperial standards to be altered and issued officially 
as metric standards. The Bill will make it compulsory 
that every contract or sale shall be by the new standard 
kilogram and metre. In order to introduce the new system 
easily, the Bill arranges that local authorities shall provide 
local standards at least a year before the Act comes into 
operation. The metric system is one of the subjects to 
be discussed at the Colonial held in 
London in April. 
Association asks 
Conference to be 
Aw obituary notice of Colonel Mannheim is contributed 
by Dr. J. Reveille to the Revue générale des Sciences for 
January 30, and may be read with interest side by side 
with a similar notice of Lieut.-General De Tilly in the 
Brussels Bulletin de la Classe des Sciences, 1906, p- 10, 
byvieea ie Mansion. Colonel Mannheim, who was pro- 
fessor in the Ecole Polytechnique, devoted his attention, 
in the first place, to theories of transformation in geo- 
metry, and his work is noticeable for the prominence 
given to metric as opposed to projective methods. Under 
the title of “* kinematical geometry,’’ he developed a large 
and interesting field of study in connection with the dis- 
placements of bodies possessing two degrees of freedom. 
In this case the trajectory of any point of the system 
consists, not of a straight line, but of a surface, and the 
properties of these surfaces were studied by Mannheim 
up to the third order of infinitesimals. They lead to proper- 
ties analogous to those relating to focal lines in optics, an 
application which Mannheim was not tardy in using, and 
his work also contains interesting applications to the 
properties of deformable surfaces, theories of contact of 
the third order, and other problems in infinitesimal geo- 
metry. Lieut.-General De Tiily, who for some time was 
professor, and later director, of the Belgian Military 
College, was author of a large number of works on 
geometry and mechanics. At the age of twenty-three he 
published his “‘ Recherches sur les Eléments de Géométrie,”’ 
and eight years later he published an the 
mechanics of non-Euclidean space. 
NO. 1948, VOL. 75] 
essay on 
IN ATMEL: 
| FEBRUARY 28, 1907 
been attracted by metric rather than projective geometry, 
for in his ‘* Essai de Géométrie analytique générale ’’ of 
1892, he showed that all geometry ultimately reduced to 
a single relation between n+2 points for space of n 
dimensions. He also wrote papers on ballistics, and was 
an authority on educational matters. 
OwinG to inquiries regarding the cultivation of ramie in 
Jamaica, information on the subject, extracted from several 
sources, was reprinted in the December (1906) number of 
the Bulletin of the Department of Agriculture. Mention 
is also made of a new decorticating machine, manufactured 
in Germany by Boeken and Co., of Duren, that is portable 
and low priced. 
Ix the first number of this year’s volume of the Kew 
Bulletin, Mr. T. A. Sprague discusses the synonymy of 
the Chilian genus Tricuspidaria, defining two species, and 
Mr. C. H. Wright furnishes a clavis for the identification 
of the Chinese Mr. G. Massee 
contributes an account of the heteraecious uredine fungus, 
Calyptospora Goeppertiana, that grows on species of 
Vaccinium and transfers to fir trees, constituting a pest 
more particularly of the fir, Abies pectinata. A 
respecting the experience of an association 
species of _Eriocaulon. 
silver 
note on ramie 
for producing the fibre in Tirhut, Bengal, is useful as 
indicating that there are considerable difficulties in the 
matter of doing so at a remunerative cost. A list of 
plants suitable for gardens in the warmer parts of the 
United Kingdom is supplied in the miscellaneous notes. 
the summaries of recent research contained in 
Progress, not any more useful than those 
which collate allied facts obtained by workers in different 
Prof. J. R. Green contributes an article of this 
nature on protein hydrolysis to the current number 
(January), in which he indicates how Cohnheim discovered 
AMONG 
Science are 
sciences. 
in animals an enzyme, or more correctly a group of 
enzymes. that he called erepsin as distinguished from 
trypsin, while independently Vines had arrived at the 
conclusion that the so-called trypsin in plants is composed 
of two enzymes acting at different stages. As to the 
identity of the proteases in animals and plants, it can only 
be said that arguments tending in this direction may be 
adduced. Another botanical summary concerned’ with 
recent investigations on the fungi is written by Miss A. 
Lorrain-Smith, and a note on double fertilisation in plants 
is communicated by Miss E. N. Thomas. 
Tue growth in the North Andaman Island of the timber 
tree Pterocarpus dalbergioides, known as padauk, is the 
subject of an article in the Indian Forester: (December, 
1906) by Mr. F. H. Todd. The vegetative formations of 
the island consist of a belt of mangrove or littoral ever- 
green forest, above which the padauk forest rises to an 
elevation of 300 feet, when dense evergreen forest takes 
its place. It is probable that a sheltered aspect is the 
chief factor regulating the limits of the padauk zone. 
With regard to the rich red colour that characterises the 
most valuable timber, as it has been observed in trees 
of large girth and in dead or dying trees the author 
suggests that probably the colour deepens as the tree 
approaches maturity or decay. In the same number Sir 
Dietrich Brandis, referring to the identification of certain 
spruces growing in Sikkim, Chumbi, and Bhutan, re- 
marks upon the anatomy of the leaves as a distinguishing 
feature, while leaving the determination to foresters on 
He too seems to have | the spot. 
