NovEMBER 20, 191 3] 
NATURE 
393 
Street Polytechnic, was elected president, Mr. J. Paley 
Yorke honorary secretary, and Mr. C. Harrap 
honorary treasurer. 
On November 15 Dr. David Starr Jordan, president 
of the Leland Stanford Junior University, delivered a 
lecture at Birkbeck College on the American univer- 
sity. He said that the words of Emerson, ‘‘ America 
' means opportunity,’’* supplies the basal idea of the 
American university. American university institutions 
are not intended to maintain any kind of tradition 
or system; they are intended to meet the people’s 
needs. What is best for one may not be best for 
another, and it is not for any educational board to 
say that this study is more valuable than that. It is 
for the student to find out which things are worth 
most to him. Scholarship, he said, depends on the 
thoroughness of our knowledge in its relation to the 
affairs of human life. In tracing the development of 
the universities in the United States, Dr. Jordan said 
that about 1868 the Act was passed which allowed for 
the gift to every State of a large amount of land on 
condition that a university was established, which was 
to teach, among other subjects, agriculture and the 
mechanic arts, and that brought engineering and 
agriculture into the very centre of their university 
system. The work of the university is to bring 
scholars together, and if he were to offer a word to 
London upon the university question he would say : 
“Above everything bring together all the fragments 
that are scattered over the City.’’ The university is 
not the place for men who neglect work, and in the 
United States they are moving more and more to- 
wards testing a man’s work as he goes on and 
sending him home to think about it if it was un- 
satisfactory. Dr. Jordan himself once sent away 
131 men in one day. American authorities have 
generally agreed that prizes do not help scholarship, 
and most American institutions have discarded 
honours for the same reason. He thought, he said, 
that the abuse of fellowships and scholarships has 
been greater on the whole than the good results. In 
most American universities, if those under the old 
influences are excepted, men and women are admitted 
on the same terms, and nothing will induce the 
Western institutions to change that system. One 
result of reaching out for all kinds of talent is an 
enormous increase of students. In California, where 
the population numbers 2,000,000, there are 8000 
university students. 
SOCIETIES AND ACADEMIES. 
LONDON 
Royal Society, November 13.—Sir Archibald Geikie, 
K.C.B., president, in the chair.—Sir William Crookes : 
The preparation of eye-preserving glass for spectacles 
(see p. 356).—Prof. A. W. Porter: An inversion point 
for liquid carbon dioxide in regard to the Joule- 
Thomson effect.—Prof. A. W. Porter and Dr. F. W. 
Edridge-Green. Negative after-images and successive 
contrast with pure spectral colours. This paper is a 
rejoinder to the criticisms made by Prof. Burch to a 
previous paper. The authors have repeated their ex- 
periments, taking the most minute precautions to 
avoid all stray light, with the same results as before. 
The most important result is that a negative after- 
image of an approximately complementary colour is 
obtained in the total absence of stimuli which would 
cause such colour.—Prof. O. W. Richardson: The 
positive ions from hot metals.—G. W. Walker: The 
diurnal variation of terrestrial magnetism. The 
paper deals with observational data with regard to 
the diurnal variation of terrestrial magnetism col- 
lected from nine observatories. The data are pre- 
NO. 2299, VOL. 92] 
sented in terms of the Fourier coefficients of the 
24-hour and 12-hour terms for the geographical com- 
ponents to north, west, and vertical (downwards). 
It is noted that the data give strong support to Dr. 
Schuster’s formulz (Phil. Trans., 1go8) for the mag- 
netic potential of diurnal variation as derived from 
the west component; but the magnetic potential so 
determined does not give the proper numerical values 
for the north component as observed. The data for 
vertical force are shown to be in general agreement 
with Schuster’s conclusion that the primary source 
of variation is of epigene origin.—G. W. Walker: A 
suggestion as to the origin of black-body radiation. 
The paper first shows that a function of dynamical 
form can represent the data with regard to radiation 
quite as well as the formula proposed by Planck. 
Royal Anthropological Institute, November 4.—Prof. 
Arthur Keith, F.R.S., in the chair.—J. Reid Moir : 
The striation of flint surfaces. The paper dealt with 
the scratches to be observed upon flints found upon 
the present land surface. Flint was shown to be a 
material of variable hardness, the black unchanged 
variety being the most resistant. Specimens from the 
surface which had been “patinated’’ were much 
softer, and it was shown how these can be scratched 
by passing a flint point over their surfaces under 
pressure. It was also demonstrated that a hardened 
steel point will also have this effect. The depth and 
nature of a scratch depend largely upon the hardness 
of the surface to be scratched. Examples of scratched 
glass found upon the surface of the fields were 
exhibited, and the scratches upon them shown to be 
of various kinds and similar to those developed upon 
surface flints. The specimens of scratched glass 
demonstrated that certain movements, such as would 
be brought into play by agricultural operations on 
the present land surface, were sufficient to imprint 
scratches upon scratchable objects lying on that sur- 
face, and as it has been demonstrated that some 
flints can be scratched by steel it seems probable that 
certain of the scratches seen upon surface flints can 
be assigned to the same cause. The ‘ weathering 
out’’ of scratches upon flints was next dealt with. 
It was shown that when a moving point passed over 
a flint under pressure the area upon which the point 
impinged was shattered, and small plates of flint 
formed along the line of movement. 
flint in time weather out and leave a clean-cut groove 
behind. If the theory of the weathering out of 
scratches Was correct, then what in many cases had 
been looked upon as deep glacial stria might pos- 
sibly be simply weathered-out “shattered” scratches, 
the initial stage of which would not require any very 
great pressure to produce. 
Geological Society, November 5.—Dr. Aubrey 
Strahan, F.R.S., president, in the chair.—J. A. 
Douglas: Geological sections through the Andes of 
Peru and Bolivia. The geological structure is dealt 
with of the South American Andes, as illustrated by 
a horizontal section from the port of Arica in the 
north of Chile across the ‘Cordilleras’’ to 
the forested region of the Amazon slopes, following 
the route of the Arica-La Paz railway. The general 
physiography of the Peruvian Andes and the topo- 
graphical features of the country traversed by the 
railway are discussed. Its geological structure is 
described under three headings :—(1) The Mesozoic 
sediments of the coastal region with their contem- 
poraneous igneous, rocks; (2) the volcanic rocks of the 
Mauri River, the Mesozoic and Palzeozoic sediments 
of the “Altaplanicie’’ and the Titicaca district; (3) 
The Paleozoic rocks and granitic core of the eastern 
Cordillera and the Amazon slopes. The Mesozoic 
stratified rocks are well exposed in the ‘Morro de 
These plates of 
