Fesruary 26, 1914] 
late Mrs. Elizabeth Mattox, of Terre Haute, the sum 
of goool. will be added to the general endowment of 
De Pauw University; and that Mrs. W. P. Herrick, 
widow of the late Mr. W. P. Herrick, has given to 
the University of Coiwrado icooi., te be used as an 
aid fund for worthy stuaents. 
A Bit was read a second time in the House of 
Commons on February 20 to amend the law in respect 
of the employment of children and their attendance 
at school. The principal changes in the law proposed 
are the grant of optional powers to local education 
authorities to extend the age of leaving school from 
fourteen years to fifteen; no exception from school 
attendance to be allowed for children under thirteen 
years; the abolition of the existing half-time system; 
the grant to local education authorities of power to 
require attendance at continuation classes; and the 
prohibition of street trading by boys under fifteen and 
girls under eighteen. The subject of the continuation- 
school system was referred to by Lord Haldane in 
replying to the toast of ‘* His Majesty’s Ministers,” at 
the dinner of the City of London Solicitor’s Company 
on the same date. He said the old days of appren- 
ticeship which did so much for us have long since 
gone by. Continental nations, and in a less degree 
the United States, are substituting for apprenticeship 
a very formidable thing—training in the trade con- 
tinuation schools. A British workman finishes his 
_ education at thirteen. In many parts of the Con- 
tinent that training is now going on until sixteen, 
seventeen, and eighteen; and not a training merely in 
general education, but in the chief point of the calling 
which the workman is going to exercise in the future. 
We shall have to face this in six or seven years from 
now. The London County Council is awake to the 
national peril, and that is true of other great cities 
in the United Kingdom. Lord Haldane is a firm be- 
liever in our capacity to keep our lead, but only if 
we think ahead and act ahead. We cannot afford to 
be inattentive to these things, and be slack as to the 
consequences. A national awakening will come, and 
it is our duty to see that it does not come too late. 
SOCIETIES AND ACADEMIES. 
Lonpon. 
Royal Society, February 19.—Sir William Crookes, 
president, in the chair.—Prof. G. Elliot Smith: The 
brain of primitive man, with special reference to the 
cranial cast and skull of Eoanthropus (‘the Piltdown 
man”). The small brain of Eoanthropus, though 
definitely human in its characters, represents a more 
primitive and generalised type than that of the genus 
Homo. Nevertheless, it can be regarded as a very 
close approximation to the kind of brain possessed by 
the earliest representatives of the real Homo, 
and as the type from which the brains of the 
different primitive kinds of men—Mousterian, Tas- 
manian (and Australian), Bushman, negro, &c., no 
less than those of the other modern human races have 
_ been derived, as the result of more or less well-defined 
specialisations in varying directions. From the 
features of its brain Pithecanthropus must be included 
in the family Hominidz, but it and Eoanthropus can 
_ be looked upon as divergent specialisations of the 
original genus of the family. Pithecanthropus 
represents the unprogressive branch which — sur- 
_-vived into Pleistocene times before it became 
extinct; Eoanthropus the progressive phylum 
from which the genus Homo was_ derived. 
Special attention is devoted to the study of the tem- 
poral region of the brain, which in all of these fossil 
men (not excluding Pithecanthropus) reveals features 
of great morphological interest. The opinion is ex- 
NO. 2313, VOL. 92| 
NATURE 
729 
pressed that the increased size of the brain (as a 
whole) which is distinctive of the Hominide, among 
the Primates, is ultimately related to the acquisition 
of the power of articulate speech, and that the very 
earliest representatives of the family must have 
possessed in some slight degree the definite faculty 
of intercommunication one with another by means of 
vocal sounds. The development of asymmetry of the 
brain was necessarily incidental to the acquisition of 
human characteristics, and must have been already 
present in the original Hominidze.—Prof. A. J. Ewart: 
Oxidases.—Dr. J. W. W. Stephens: A new malarial 
parasite of man. The blood-slide in which this para- 
site occurred came from Pachmari, Central Provinces, 
India. The peculiarities of the parasite are :—(1) It is 
extremely amoeboid. Thin processes extend across the 
cell or occur as long tails to more or less ring-shaped 
bodies. These processes may be several in number, 
giving the parasite fantastic shapes. (2) The cyto- 
plasm is always scanty; the amoeboid processes are 
delicate; the parasite has but little bulk. (3) The 
nuclear chromatin is out of proportion to the bulk of 
the parasite. It takes the form of bars, rods, strands, 
curves, forks, patches, &c. Abundance of and marked 
irregularity in the distribution of the chromatin masses 
are characteristic of this parasite. It differs from the 
hitherto described parasites of malaria. The author 
proposes to call the parasite Plasmodium tenue.— 
S. B. Schryver : Investigations dealing with the pheno- 
mena of ‘‘clot’’ formations. Part ii., The formation 
of a gel from cholate solutions having many properties 
analogous to those of cell membranes.—Dorothy J. 
Lloyd: The influence of the position of the cut upon 
regeneration in Gunda ulvae. In 1889, Hallez pub- 
lished a paper in which he stated that the difference in 
the regeneration of Triclads and Polyclads lay in the 
fact that the former could regenerate a head from the 
oral surface of a cut made at any level, while the latter 
could only do so if the regenerating fragment con- 
tained the cerebral ganglia. Experiments made with 
G. ulvae, a marine Triclad occurring in large num- 
bers at Plymouth, show that this generalisation is not 
justifiable. G. ulvae is found to differ from most Tri- 
clads and to correspond to Polyclads in its mode of 
regeneration. 
Geological Society, February 4.—Dr. Aubrey Strahan, 
president, in the chair.—C, T. Trechmann: The litho- 
logy and composition of Durham Magnesian Lime- 
stones. The formation maintains a highly dolomitic 
character, with important exceptions. Those portions 
which show a calcareous composition may be regarded 
as the result of one of three main causes :—(1) Original 
conditions of sedimentation, during which dolomitic 
deposition was arrested temporarily; (2) escape from 
secondary dolomitisation; (3) calcareous segregation. 
Evidence is brought forward in favour of the view of 
direct sedimentation of dolomite from the waters of 
the Permian sea. The question of the secondary dolo- 
mitisation of the Shell-Limestone reef is discussed. 
The dedolomitisation of the formation is due to the 
mechanical washing-away of powdery dolomitic mate- 
rial through the interstices of the rock. No evidence 
of any leaching-out of magnesium carbonate from the 
rock was found. The nature and distribution of the 
true cellular rock is discussed, and modes of origin are 
suggested. A summary of the general conditions of 
deposition of the Durham Permian, from the Marl 
Slate upwards to the Salt Measures, is given.—H. 
Bolton: The occurrence of a giant dragon-fly in the 
Radstock Coal Measures. The structure of a wing- 
fragment found upon the Tyning waste-heap at Rad- 
stock Colliery (Somerset), is described. The fragment 
consists of the proximal third of a left fore-wing. It 
is 64 mm. long and 40 mm. broad, the complete wing 
