j 
: 
SEPTEMBER 18, 1913 | 
H H H 
OH. ClGO.H OH.C. Gogt) OH.C.CO,H 
| 
CO. Con H. 
| 
Clic  H.c. a 
H H CO,H 
laevo-acid, (not (Aberson’s acid, 
[a]o — 5-8° isolated) [a]p>+9.8° 
With the inactive asparagine it is supposed by Erlen- 
meyer that prolonged heating in aqueous solution 
produces a rotation of this type, possibly to an un- 
equal extent or in opposite directions in the dextro- 
and laevo-forms, whereby the products being no longer 
antipodes become separable by ordinary laboratory 
methods. It is too early yet to say whether, by ex- 
clusion of all asymmetric influences, the riddle has 
been solved, but it is easy to understand with what 
interest confirmation of Erlenmeyer’s results is 
awaited. 
Honours Students and Post-Graduate Scholarships. 
In bringing this address to a conclusion, it will not 
be an innovation if I refer—it shall be only briefly— 
to the training of those who will carry on and amplify 
the work which we in this generation have attempted 
to do. This section stands for the advancement of 
chemistry which includes, so closely are pure and 
applied chemistry intertwined, the advancement of 
chemistry as applied to industry. Once again the cry 
has been raised in the Press*’ that chemists trained 
in our universities are of little value in industrial 
pursuits; they are too academic; they are not worth 
their wage—little as that often is, whether judged by 
a labourer’s hire or the cost of a university training. 
It may be so. On the other hand, it is possible the 
employer obtains all that he pays for, and by paying 
more would receive in return much more by the 
inducement offered to more highly trained men to 
enter the field. Three years’ training for the ordinary 
degree cannot carry a student very far in chemistry, 
and this preliminary training—for it is little more— 
is insufficient to equip the young graduate for more 
than routine work. With the honours student it is 
otherwise. He must either enter on his three years’ 
residence at a university with a knowledge which does 
not fall below the requirements of the intermediate 
examination, and devote the greater part of his time 
to his honours subject, or he must be pre- 
pared to spend a fourth year to reach the 
necessary standard. More highly equipped in the 
academic sense than a man who has worked only for 
the ordinary degree, he undoubtedly is, yet there is 
seldom time to begin his training in research methods 
or in methods of commercial analysis where rapidity 
rather than extreme accuracy is the object in view. 
Two reforms, I venture to think, are needed: the 
first would avoid early specialisation, which is apt to 
be disastrous, the second would encourage post- 
graduate training in directions where the student’s 
inclinations or aptitude may be stimulated and de- 
veloped. If the civic universities, established in virtue 
of charters drafted mainly on similar lines and inspired 
by similar aims, could come to some agreement re- 
quiring three years’ residence, subsequent to the 
intermediate, for an honours degree in chemistry, the 
first reform would be effected—it is a measure for 
which a strong case can be made out. If, further, 
they could see their way to standardise their ordinances 
and regulations for the M.Sc. degree, cease to confer 
it on honours graduates of one or more years’ 
seniority in return for payment of a fee, and confine 
4 Cf. The Times, Engineering Suppl., 1913, May 7, 21, 28, June 4, tr, 
16. 
NO. 2290, VOL. 92] 
NATURE SL. 
it to graduates—not necessarily honours graduates— 
| who have carried out an approved piece of research 
during not less than one academic year, selection 
committees, boards of directors, or individual em- 
| ployers would have some clue to the type of man 
before them. I would go further and suggest that the 
| interchange of honours graduates between the civic 
' universities, or between them and other universities 
or colleges, if it could be arranged, would be of much 
benefit to the student himself. No university in this 
country is wealthy enough to attract to its service 
teachers who are pre-eminent in each branch of chem- 
istry. How great, then, would be the gain to an 
honours graduate working for the M.Sc. degree, if, 
instead of being associated with the same _ teacher 
during the whole of his academic career, he could 
migrate from the place which had trained him to 
spend part, or the whole, of his time in the laboratory 
of an Armstrong, a Donnan, a Perkin, or a Ramsay, 
during that most critical period when he is sorting out 
his own ideas and learning how to use his fingers and 
his wits. But whether enforcement of the longer 
training for the honours degree be possible; whether 
a research degree as a step to the doctorate be desir- 
able or practicable, there can be no doubt that the 
urgent need of the present time is the provision of 
scholarships and exhibitions, sufficient in value to 
secure at least a bare livelihood, for post-graduate 
work. He who is able to convert education com- 
mittees and private donors to the view that a far 
better return for the money could be assured if part 
of the large expenditure on scholarships for matricu- 
lated or non-matriculated students were diverted to 
post-graduate purposes, will have done a service to 
science and the State the value of which, in my 
opinion, cannot be overestimated. 
NOTES. 
WE announce, with deep regret, the death, on 
Thursday last, of Sir Walter Noel Hartley, F.R.S., 
formerly professor of chemistry at the Royal College 
of Science, Dublin. He was in the sixty-eighth year 
of his age. 
Pror. Arminius Vampéry, the Oriental scholar, 
died at Budapest on September 14, in his eighty- 
second year. The obituary article on him in The 
Times states that in 1861 the sum of rooo florins was 
voted to him by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences 
on condition that he went into the interior of Asia to 
investigate the affinities of the Magyar tongue. In 
the following year he left for Persia, joining a caravan 
of Tartar pilgrims returning from Mecca. In no 
way intimidated by predictions of privations and 
dangers or by the melancholy fate of Conolly, Stod- 
dart, Moorcroft, and others, he decided to maintain 
throughout the journey a strict disguise as a dervish. 
Leaving Teheran on March 28, 1863, Vambéry reached 
Khiva at the end of May, after intense sufferings 
from thirst in the trackless desert. In 1864 he visited 
London, gave an account of his travels at a meeting 
of the Royal Geographical Society, and did his best 
to convince public men in England of the necessity 
for the creation of a neutral zone or a geographical 
buffer State in Central Asia. 
Tue death is announced at Chatham, Ontario, of 
Dr. Alex. MacFarlane, in his sixty-third year. <A 
native of Blairgowrie, he graduated at Edinburgh in 
