August i8, 1904] 



NA TURE 



2>^7 



thing- like an adequate staff, it is inevitable that some- 

 thing- must be left undone. It is certainly the first duty 

 of a curator to take care of his specimens, and thus it 

 naturally happens that what is left to a more con- 

 venient season is the educational arrangement and 

 de-;criptive labelling of the specimens ; as it is these 

 deficiencies that cause museums to be condemned as 

 uninteresting or uninstructive, so it is difficult to get 

 out of that vicious circle which is so v;e\\ described 

 by the proverb, " the destruction of the f>oor is their 

 poverty." 



.\ circular, signed by the Disney professor of 

 archaeology and the curator of the Museum of 

 Archaeology and Ethnology at Cambridge, has been 

 issued directing attention to the congested state of the 

 museum and the inability even to store the existing 

 specimens; the nineteenth annual report of the anti- 

 quarian committee, which accompanies the appeal, 

 gives a long list of additions to the museum for the 

 year 1903, which proves that it is rapidly and 

 svmmetricallv growing. Valuable collections have to 

 be stored out of sight, and so are unavailable for 

 purposes of study. The university has assigned a fine 

 site for the proposed new museum, but as the sub- 

 scriptions hitherto raised only amount to about 3300^., 

 no steps can be taken towards erecting the building. 



Not only do the collections require space and cases 

 for them to be seen by the public, and to enable them 

 to be used for purposes of instruction and research, 

 but rooms are required for the teaching staff, and 

 where research and demonstrations can be carried on. 

 The present teaching staff, of subjects connected with 

 the museum, consists of one professor and a lecturer, 

 both with absurdly small stipends. The circular 

 estimates that for the proper development of the de- 

 partment a new museum must be provided, at a cost 

 of 25,000^, in addition to an adequate annual income 

 for maintenance and for the increase of the stipends 

 of the curatorial and teaching staff. 



The circular concludes by pointing out that no better 

 centre than the University of Cambridge can be found 

 for the study of anthropology or for the development 

 of a museum of the best kind; many of her students 

 are led for purposes of research, or in the discharge 

 of professional duties, or for pleasure, to divers 

 quarters of the globe, and not a few among these have 

 enriched the museum with valuable collections. The 

 opportunities for the study of primitive society, and 

 for the formation of collections illustrative of its various 

 phases, are rapidly vanishing before the advance of 

 European civilisation. The funds of the university 

 have been strained to their utmost of late years to keep 

 even the older scientific departments abreast of the 

 times. It is therefore necessary to appeal for outside 

 help in order to raise the funds required for the 

 erection, equipment, and endowment of a museum of 

 anthropology which shall be worthy of the university. 



BRITISH ASSOCIATION MEETING AT 

 CAMBRIDGE. 



T X the issues of N.WURE for July 21 and August 4, 

 •'■ articles giving general accounts of the local 

 arrangements and of the main items in the sectional 

 programmes were published. At the time of 

 writing this article the sectional committees had not 

 met, so that the programme of technical papers to be 

 read before the sections cannot be fully announced. 

 The meetings begin to-day, but already the reception 

 room at the Guildhall has been opened, and a very 

 large number of members have applied for reserved 

 scats at the first general meeting, when the president 

 will deliver his address. An exceptionally large num- 



NO. 18 I 6, VOL. 70] 



ber of tickets have already been sold, so that there is 

 every probability that the Cambridge meeting will 

 see one of the largest attendances the .Association has 

 known during recent years. The unusual number of foreign 

 guests who will be present, and the many leading men 

 of science of Great Britain who have accepted invi- 

 tations W'iU make the meeting a thoroughly repre- 

 sentative one in all branches of science. An in- 

 teresting memento of the meeting is a book of 

 lithographed signatures of the members of the 

 Association who were present at the first meeting in 

 Cambridge in 1S33. There are only a few of these 

 books, and they will be on sale in the reception room 

 during the present meeting. 



The arrangements of the reception room and general 

 rooms at the Guildhall are very complete, and now 

 that the somewhat unexpected rush at opening is over 

 the attendants will be able to cope easily with the 

 large amount of business that is to be done. A word 

 should be said about the postal arrangements. A 

 temporary post office has been established in the 

 general reception room, where all postal business can 

 be transacted. For the convenience of members a 

 special box has been provided in which notes for 

 members of the .-Association may be placed unstamped ; 

 these will be sorted and delivered with ordinary letters 

 at the post office in the reception room. One of the 

 new features of the general arrangements is the 

 establishment of a Press Bureau. At this office infor- 

 mation will be collected from sectional secretaries and 

 will be available for the Press, so that full information 

 can be obtained without the difficulty of finding the 

 sectional secretaries. It is hoped that this arrange- 

 ment will facilitate reports of sectional and other 

 meetings, and lead to a more satisfactory account of 

 the Association's proceedings in the Press. 



A weather forecast will be supplied by Dr. Shaw 

 from the Meteorological Office twice a day during the 

 meeting. This will be posted in the general reception 

 room. 



At present we can only give the titles of a few of 

 the papers which have not appeared in earlier articles. 

 In Section A it is expected that there will be a dis- 

 cussion on )i-rays. Prof. Lummer and probably Prof. 

 Rubens will take part in the discussion of this most 

 debated question. Mr. Burke, who is one of the few 

 Englishmen who have made experiments on these rays, 

 is also expected to contribute to the discussion. Dr. 

 Rotch, the director of the Blue Hill Observatory, is 

 to read a paper on the temperature of air in cyclones 

 and anticyclones as shown by kite-flights at Blue Hill 

 Observatory, U.S.A. Prof. W. Wien will read a 

 paper on experiments to determine whether the ether 

 moves with the earth or not. 



In Section A this year is included as a subsection 

 the department of cosmical physics. Under this sub- 

 section is the committee appointed by the International 

 Meteorological Committee at Southport in 1903 to 

 combine and discuss meteorological observations from 

 the point of view of their relations with solar physics. 

 The members of this committee who will attend are, so 

 far as is known at present. Sir J. Eliot, Sir Norman 

 Lockyer, M. A. Angot, Prof. Ricco, Prof. Knut 

 Angstrom, Prof. Birkeland, Dr. W. J. S. Lockver, Dr. 

 W. N. Shaw, Mr. Axsel S. Steen, and Prof. S. P. 

 Langley. 



In Section B twenty-nine papers are to be com- 

 municated. Eleven of these papers are by 

 Cambridge chemists, and a most interesting meet- 

 ing is looked forward to. The greatest interest per- 

 haps centres round the paper by Dr. Lowry on 

 dynamic isomerism, and the discussion of the report 

 to be presented by Mr. H. O. Jones on the stereo- 



