OcTOBER 30, 1913| 
in receipt of grants from the Board of Education 
was little more than 600,000l., of which amount 
the total State grant was roughly one half. The 
State grants to universities in Prussia alone are 
more than twice as much as are contributed to our 
universities from the national exchequer. 
Lord Haldane may therefore safely say that the 
United States and Germany have made far greater 
strides in university education than have been 
undertaken in this country. When he wrote the 
introduction to Sir Norman Lockyer’s collection 
of addresses on education and national progress 
(1906), he suggested that the private donor should 
be encouraged, but that the motto of the Chan- 
cellor of the Exchequer as regards expenditure 
upon matters connected with higher education 
and research should be Festina lente. “I do not 
mean,” he wrote, “that the Government ought not 
to spend public money generously upon the uni- 
versities. I mean that it should not be spent 
unless and until a case for the necessity of such 
expenditure has been clearly made out.” 
We may be permitted to conclude from the 
address at Sheffield that Lord Haldane is now of 
the opinion that a case has been made out for 
increased national provision for our educational 
forces. He knows as well as anyone that the 
great advances being made in education in other 
countries constitute a formidable menace to our- 
selves, and that the State can wait no longer for 
like developments if it desires to maintain a lead- 
ing position among progressive peoples. He has 
now stated authoritatively that the Cabinet realises 
_ our weakness, and accepts the only policy which 
will remedy it. We have read this pronounce- 
ment with lively satisfaction, and shall welcome 
any measure which will put the policy into effect. 
DR. LUCAS-CHAMPIONNIERE. 
ihe sudden death of Dr. Just Lucas-Champion- 
niére has brought regret to many surgeons 
in this country, who knew the excellence of his 
character and of his work. He was seventy years 
old, surgeon to the Hétel Dieu (the great hospital 
in Paris, founded by Saint Louis)\—Commander of 
the Legion of Honour, and member of the French 
Academy. His father was the first editor of one 
of the chief medical journals of France; his grand- 
father had been a leader in the heroic war of La 
Vendée. From the Collége Rollin, Lucas-Cham- 
pionniére went to the Hétel Dieu as a student, 
and was interne there in 1865. He became one of 
the most eminent of all French surgeons of his 
time, and received honours from many countries, 
including the Fellowship of the Royal Colleges 
of Surgeons of London and of Edinburgh. He 
was a great “all-round” surgeon; but he gave 
especial study to the operative treatment of hernia, 
and to the management of fractures. His best 
recreation—so far as he had time for it—he found 
in music. 
To us over here—some of us may remember 
his genial presence in London during the 1881 
International Medical Congress—he stands for the 
NO, 2296, VOL. 92] 
NATURE 271 
introduction into France of Lister’s antiseptic 
method. He in France, and Saxtorph in Den- 
mark, were the teachers of the new learning. He 
came to Glasgow in 1868, and Edinburgh in 1875, 
that he might learn for himself, watching Lister 
himself, every detail of the method. He so wor- 
shipped the work of Lister that, in the later years 
of his life, he resented the changes of method, 
the preference for things “aseptic” over things 
“antiseptic ”; he hoped that surgery would return 
to ‘Lister’s own method.” There are few 
surgical books more pleasant to handle than his 
“Pratique de la Chirurgie Antiseptique ”—with 
its portrait of Lister for a frontispiece, and the 
loyalty and devotion of the writing. It is pitiful 
to think how slow was the spread of the new learn- 
ing; what misery was. added, for want of the anti- 
septic method, to the misery of the Franco-German 
War; what unbelief, and worse than unbelief, 
delayed the universal recognition of Lister even in 
our own country. 
NOTES. 
A Royat Commission has been appointed to inquire 
into the subject of venereal diseases in the United 
Kingdom. The terms of reference are :—To inquire 
into the prevalence of venereal diseases in the United 
Kingdom, their effects upon the health of the com- 
munity, and the means by which those effects can be 
alleviated or prevented, it being understood that no 
return to the policy or provisions of the Contagious 
Diseases Acts of 1864,. 1866, 1869 is to be regarded 
as falling within the scope of the inquiry. The mem- 
bers of the Commission are:—Lord Sydenham of 
Combe, G.C.S.I., F.R.S. (chairman), the Right Hon. 
Sir David Brynmor Jones, K.C., M.P., Mr. Philip 
Snowden, Sir Kenelm E. Digby, G.C.B., K.Caya ae 
Almeric FitzRoy, K.C.B., Sir Malcolm Morris, 
K.C.V.O., Sir John Collie, Dr. A. Newsholme, Canon 
J. W. Horsley, the Rev. J. Scott Lidgett, Dr. F. W. 
Mott, Mr. J. E. Lane, Mrs. Scharlieb, Mrs. Creighton, 
and Mrs. Burgwin. The secretary to the Commission 
is Mr. E. R. Forber, of the Local Government Board, 
to whom any communications on the subject may be 
addressed. 
By Order in Council dated October 14 new de- 
nominations of standards of the metric carat 
of 200 milligrams and its multiples and sub- 
multiples have been legalised for use in trade 
in the United Kingdom on and after April 
1, 1914. The permissible abbreviation of the 
denomination “ metric carat” is ‘‘C.M.’”’ The weights 
legalised range from 500 C.M. to 0-005 C.M., the 
series being 5, 2, 1 throughout. The legalisation of 
the metric carat has been undertaken by the Board 
of Trade after consulting representatives of the trade 
in diamonds and precious stones, and is the outcome 
of a resolution passed at the General Conference on 
Weights and Measures, held in Paris in 1907, advo- 
cating the adoption of an international standard carat. 
Diamond dealers in this country were at first opposed 
to any change, and it is only quite recently that they 
have found it necessary to reconsider their views on 
