NOVEMBER 2, 1916] 
NATURE 
169 
inventions of English-speaking people. The bicycle 
and the aeroplane were devised on the soil of Britain. 
It was Faraday, they should be made to confess, who 
laid the basis of electromagnetics, and therefore the 
foundations of that amazing industrial application of 
electricity as a mode of motion. It was Davy who 
showed the elemental character of the alkaline metals 
—a discovery of the greatest moment. They must be 
made to realise that Boyle, Cavendish, Watt, Stephen- 
son, Leslie, Hutton, and Lyell, as well as John Hunter, 
Jenner, Simpson, and Lister, were Britons who made 
discoveries of the first importance. They must be 
forced to confess the supreme character of the work of 
Napier, the Herschels, Adams, Clerk-Maxwell, and 
Kelvin. We, on our part, always acknowledge the 
indebtedness of science to such Germans as Mayer, 
Helmholtz, and Ehrlich; whereas our enemies sys- 
tematically conceal their immense indebtedness for the 
enunciation of first principles to men of the English- 
speaking race. 
In regard to the splendid contributions to science 
of every kind made by the Italians and the French, the 
representatives of those nations must draw up their 
own lists, and they will not be short ones. The names 
they must contain suggest cardinal discoveries in every 
field of natural knowledge. It would be tedious to 
revert to the Italian Renaissance, because the names 
of the men of that epoch have become well known 
to anyone who knows anything at all of the story of 
the progress of science. 
Eustachius, Malpighius, Borelli, Spallanzani, Gal- 
vani, Volta, and Avogadro in Italy; Lavoisier, Laplace, 
Lagrange, Montgolfier, Cuvier, Lamarck, Claude 
Bernard, Chevreul, and Pasteur in France, are names 
writ large in letters of gold across the azure of the 
firmament of European science. Not one of the follow- 
ing is German: Vesalius, Van’t Hoff, Arrhenius, Hel- 
mont, Boerhaave, Mendeléeff, the Curies, Metchnikoff, 
and Pavlov. 
Are the Germans grateful to us for what we have 
done in science? Do they realise, when they use rail- 
roads and steamers, dynamos and telephones, that they 
are all of British origination? They realise nothing 
of the kind. Not only are they not grateful for the 
benefits conferred on them by British science, but 
they have entered into a conspiracy of silence with 
regard to them. 
Let us never forget that it was a German professor 
of physics who deliberately declared that German air- 
craft must destroy the tombs of Newton and of Fara- 
day. He also included the tomb of Shakespeare, 
which was highly inconsistent with the widespread 
academic delusion that our and the world’s greatest 
poet was a German. 
D. Fraser Harris. 
Halifax, Nova Scotia, September 3o. 
The Spectrum of Hydrogen. 
THE writer has examined the four-line spectrum of 
hydrogen as produced in Geissler tubes with a 1 mm. 
capillary by alternating current of 15 milliamperes 
without inductance or capacity. The light was analysed 
by a glass prism monochromator, and the intensities 
measured by a photo-electric cell of quartz containing 
rubidium in an atmosphere of helium. The cell was 
calibrated in absolute units by a carbon filament lamp 
the energy distribution of which in different wave- 
lengths is that of a grey body in the visible spectrum. 
The energy ratios of Ha, Ha, Hy, Hs were found to 
remain constant when the pressure exceeded three or 
four millimetres of mercury.. At lower pressures the 
relative intensities of the lines of shorter wave-lengths 
increased. The effect is visually obvious in water- 
vapour which suppresses the. many-line spectrum; this | 
NO. 2453, VOL. 98] 
er masks the effect when pure dry hydrogen is 
used. 
The results lead to the conclusions that the four- 
line spectrum is due to the recombination of a +H 
ion with an electron; that the method of ionisation of 
the H atom has no effect on the distribution of intensi- 
ties, but that the mean free path of the luminous atom 
and the nature of the atoms with which it collides 
give a sufficient explanation of the intensity changes 
observed. 
According to Bohr’s theory, the mean free path of a 
luminous hydrogen atom should be shorter as the 
emitted wave-length decreases. The distance travelled 
by the atom while luminous may be called the length 
of the luminous streak, and at high pressures this 
exceeds the mean free path of the luminous atom for 
all wave-lengths, so that a change in pressure affects 
all lines in the same proportion. As the pressure is 
lowered, however, the mean free path will eventually 
exceed the length of the luminous streak for Ha 
while remaining less for Hg, and so the ratio Hs+Ha 
may be expected to increase, as is actually observed. 
At still lower pressures the intensity ratios should 
approach a constant value when all the mean free 
paths are greater than the corresponding luminous 
streaks. 
Observation of ‘such ratios will give the relative 
energies in different wave-lengths emitted by the 
hydrogen atom when undisturbed by collisions, and ex- 
periments of this kind are in progress. 
A full account of this work will be published shortly. 
; R. T. Beatty. 
Queen’s University, Belfast, October 18. 
Origin of the Word “‘ Blizzard.’’ 
THERE have been a number of communications on 
the earliest use of the word ‘blizzard,’ but thus far 
there has been no suggestion as to its origin. At 
first sight perhaps it might seem unlikely that the 
name of some objectionable person was adopted to 
describe the extremely disagreeable features of the 
north-westerly snowstorm of the States. We have, 
however, ‘“‘boycott’? and other words added to our 
vocabulary with just as much justification as the old 
settlers in the West would have had for introducing 
“ blizzard.”’ 
In Amersham churchyard there is a tomb (now 
collapsing into the grave) of the Blizard family (Otto 
Bajer), and to this day, at the neighbouring village of 
Chalfont St, Giles, there resides a Blizard family. 
We are here in the heart of the Penn country, the 
Home of America. It seems highly probable that one 
or more members of the Blizard family of Bucking- 
hamshire emigrated with the earliest settlers, and 
it needs no great stretch of the imagination to realise 
how the name could have been adopted in the slightly 
altered form ‘“‘blizzard.” I offer the suggestion to 
the world-wide readers of Nature. 
Hy. Harries. 
Meteorological Office, South Kensington, 
October 24. 
“PREPAREDNESS”: THE AMERICAN 
WAY. 
ch problem of organising a nation for war 
has had to be faced and partially solved 
by this country during the act of war. The war 
has led the Americans to tackle the same problem, 
with the advantage that they are at peace and 
at leisure to study it scientifically, with all our 
mistakes and their own difficulties in the supply 
ic 
