_ FEBRUARY 19, 1914] 
NATURE 
of spirit-levelling in England and Wales, and in 
Scotland, for which Clarke was mainly respon- 
sible. During this year he was appointed, with 
two others, to meet certain French officers and 
draw up a scheme for connecting the triangula- 
tions of England and France. In 1862 he 
observed at several of the English stations of the 
connection, and in 1863 published the account of 
the completed work. 
In 1860 the Russian Government invited the co- 
operation of the Governments of Prussia, Belgium, 
France, and England to cooperate in the measure- 
ment of the European longitudinal arc from Orsk 
to Valencia. A necessary preliminary was the 
intercomparison of the standards of length of the 
various countries affected. At the instigation of 
the English Government these standards were 
sent to Southampton, where they were compared 
by Clarke in a specially designed and built bar 
room. The result of this undertaking was pub- 
lished in 1866, and included in the series were 
1o-ft. bars for India and Australia. At the end 
of this volume is the second investigation which 
Clarke made as to the shape of the earth. In 
1867 he published a pamphlet on the positions 
of the Feaghmain and Haverfordwest observa- 
tories, also in connection with the longitudinal arc. 
_ In 1874 two standard yards were made for the 
United States of America by Messrs. Troughton 
and Simms, and at the express desire of the United 
States Government, Clarke carried out the deter- 
mination of their lengths. In 1880 appeared his 
“Geodesy,” a subject on which he had already con- 
tributed an article for the ‘Encyclopedia Brit- 
annica.” This work has been translated into 
several languages. 
In 1881 he retired as Lieut.-Colonel, after thirty- 
four years’ service. Clarke’s retirement was 
brought about by a sudden and unexpected order 
from the War Office to hold himself in readiness 
to proceed at short notice to Mauritius, and sever 
his connection with the Ordnance Survey. The 
national survey never suffered'a severer loss. It 
took many years to recover. 
' The extent of the work done during those thirty- 
four years can only be appreciated by a study of 
the books he published, for they contain a mass 
of calculation which evidence great mathematical 
ability as well as great energy. 
In 1883 Colonel Clarke was appointed delegate 
to the International Geodetic Congress in Rome in 
conjunction with the Astronomer Royal. In 1870 
he was made a Companion of the Order of the 
Bath, and in 1887 he received the Royal Medal 
of the Royal Society, of which he was a Fellow. 
He was also a Fellow of the Royal Society of 
Edinburgh, of the Royal Astronomical Society, 
honorary member of the Cambridge Philosophical 
Society, and corresponding member of the 
Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg. 
Although he had for many years ceased to take 
_an active part in the prosecution of his. favourite 
subject, his name still remains, and will remain, 
a constant stimulus to a younger generation. 
H. S. L. WInTERBOTHAM, 
NO. 2312, VOL. 92] 
693 
NOTES. 
WE regret to announce the death on February 13, 
in the sixty-first year of his age, of M. Alphonse Ber- 
tillon, director of the anthropological department of 
the Prefecture of Police in Paris. M. Bertillon, fol- 
lowing the custom of his family, devoted himself to 
the study of human races. At the beginning of his 
career he paid particular attention to those characters 
of the body which might be used for the purposes of 
identification. In 1885, when he was in his thirty- 
second year, he published the first draft of his famous 
system of identification and registration of criminals 
under the name of “Instructions signalétiques.”’ The 
principle on which his system rests is that no two 
individuals are alike in all their bodily measurements 
and proportions. In 1893 Bertillon’s system was in- 
troduced to British prisons. The system which, in the 
hands of Bertillon himself and of his pupils, worked 
satisfactorily, proved to be untrustworthy when applied 
by a heterogeneous body of observers. Even in the 
hands of experts, exact measurement of the living 
body is difficult of attainment. Hence in 1901 Ber- 
tillon’s system was replaced. in this country by one 
founded on finger imprints, a method which had been 
developed in India by Sir Edward Henry. It is popu- 
larly supposed that M, Bertillon invented the system 
of identification by finger-prints, but this is an error. 
Dr. Henry Faulds, in Nature of October 28, 1880, 
indicated how finger-prints might be applied to ethno- 
logical classification; and his was the first printed 
communication upon the subject, though public and 
official use of finger-prints had been made by Sir 
William Herschel in India some years before.. M. 
Bertillon added the finger-print method to his own 
about 1891, after its advantages had been urged by 
Sir Francis Galton. Although Bertillon’s system has 
proved defective in practice, still the merit of realising 
that a scientific system of measurements and observa- 
tions could be elaborated to serve the purposes of the 
State will always stand to his credit. Under his 
system an enormous number of observations of the 
utmost scientific value have been accumulated and 
placed at the disposal of anthropological students. 
Tue first Guthrie Lecture of the Physical Society 
will be delivered by Prof. R. W. Wood, of Johns 
Hopkins University, Baltimore, at the Imperial Col- 
lege of Science, on Friday, February 27. The subject 
of the lecture will be ‘‘ Radiation of Gas Molecules 
Excited by Light.” 
WE understand from Messrs. Gurney and Jackson 
that Major Barrett-Hamilton’s lamented death, referred 
to last week (p. 667), will not cause any break in the 
publication of his valuable work on ‘British Mam- 
mals,’’ as Mr. Martin C. Hinton has agreed to con- 
tinue and complete the work. 
On Saturday, February 28, Sir J. J. Thomson 
will begin a course of six lectures at the Royal Insti- 
tution on recent discoveries in physical science. On 
Tuesday, March 3, Sir J. H. Biles will deliver the 
first of three lectures on modern ships: (1) ‘‘ Smooth- 
water Sailing,” (2) ‘‘Ocean Travel,” (3) ‘‘The War 
