296 
short training in India, was attached to the 1o4th 
Rifles in Mesopotamia, where he died on April g from 
wounds received in action on the previous day. His 
loss is keenly felt by all his colleagues.’’ 
WE regret to announce the death of Sir James B. 
Lyall, K.C.S.1., G.C.I.E., an ex-Lieutenant Governor 
of the Punjab, and younger brother of the late Sir 
Alfred Lyall. Both brothers were educated at Eton 
and Haileybury College, and through the influence of 
an uncle, a director of the East India Company, ob- 
tained appointments in the Indian Civil Service. The 
career of Sir James Lyall was spent in the Punjab, 
where he held in succession the posts of Settlement 
Officer of Kangra and Financial Commissioner, suc- 
ceeding Sir Charles Aitcheson in 1887 as Lieutenant- 
Governor of the province. He did not possess the 
learning and literary skill of his brother, Sir 
Alfred Lyall; but his Settlement report of Kangra 
threw much light on the customs and sociology of the 
Hindus occupying the hill districts. His most impor- 
tant work of administration was the scheme for the 
Chenab Canal irrigation project, which brought a large 
area of waste land under the plough, and gave wel- 
come relief to the more congested districts. After 
his retirement from the Service he was a member of the 
Opium and the Famine Commissions. Few men who 
have risen to the highest posts have been more univers- 
ally esteemed by Indians tand by their own country- 
men, and few have displayed more constant kindli- 
ness and courtesy, combined with frankness and 
strength of character. 
Tue death is announced, in his eighty-sixth year, . 
of Dr. Richard Norris, formerly professor of physiology 
in Queen’s College, Birmingham. From an obituary 
notice in the British Medical Journal we gather the 
following particulars of his career. During the ’fifties 
of last century Norris made his first important 
discovery—the photographic dry plate. In 1862 he 
made his first contribution to the Royal Society, 
‘Phenomena of Attraction and Adhesion in Solid 
Bodies, Films, Vesicles, Liquids, Globules, and Blood 
Corpuscles.”” In the same year he was appointed pro- 
fessor of physiology in his old medical school, a posi- 
tion he continued to hold until the absorption of 
Queen’s College by the Mason College, now the medi- 
cal faculty of the University of Birmingham. During 
the next few years he contributed papers to the Royal 
Society, chiefly on physiological subjects, with, how- 
ever, one on ‘Certain Molecular Changes in Iron 
and Steel during Separate Acts of Heating and Cool- 
ing.” At the meeting of the British Association in 
1865 he read a paper demonstrating that the opinion 
then held that muscular contraction caused rigor 
mortis was fallacious. But what he regarded as his 
chief work was the discovery in 1877 of large numbers 
of “invisible corpuscles”? in the blood. In 1882 Prof. 
Bizzozero, of Turin, claimed to have seen similar 
corpuscles, but Dr. Norris easily established priority. 
He maintained that these corpuscles were invisible 
in that they possessed the same refractive index as 
the liquor sanguinis. Later his contentions were 
challenged, but he maintained his own views. 
Dr. Prrer Quix Keecan, who died on August 10 
at Patterdale, in Westmorland, where he had lived for 
many years, was keenly interested in the colouring 
matters in leaves and flowers, and published notes on 
the subject in various journals. In Nature (vol, 1xi., 
1899) he described the results of some ‘‘ Experiments on 
Floral Colours,” indicating the effect of acids, alkalis, 
and salts on the anthocyanins of various flowers, and 
later, in Nature (vol. Ixix., 1903), discussed the rela- 
tion between leaf decay, or loss of vitality in the leaf, 
NO. 2459, VOL. 98] 
NATURE 
[DECEMBER 14, 1916 — 
and the appearance of autumn tints. He explained 
the greater brilliance of the American autumn tints 
as compared with those in England by, the greater 
vitality of the leaf induced by the favourable conditions 
of the Indian summer, which favoured “ the normal pro- 
cess of deassimilation (the development of coloured 
pigment from tannic chromogen).’’ He contributed 
notes on the same subject to the Naturalist, and also 
notes on the chemical analyses of some common 
plants. He approached the subject from a chemiist’s 
point of view, and does not seem to have been fully 
cognisant of the results of other workers nor to have 
appreciated the diversity of factors involved from the 
physiological point of view. | In the Naturalist (1910, 
p. 226; see also Knowledge, 1911, p. 15) he'sum- 
marised the results of his investigations on the colour 
of flowers thus : the production of pigment in the petal 
is a purely local action due to a process of deassimila- 
tion set up to supply the insistent demand for proteid 
for the development of pistil and ovules, whence he 
argued that, other conditions being equal, “those floral 
organs which habitually produce most ovules ought to 
exhibit the most vividly tinctured corollas.” 
Dr. Rowianp Norris has compared two methods 
for the preparation of anti-anthrax and other serums. 
In one the blood from the immunised animal is de- 
fibrinated by shaking with a coil of wire and then 
centrifuged; in the other the blood is mixed with 
potassium oxalate solution, which prevents coagula- 
tion, sedimented, and centrifuged; the plasma is then 
clotted by the addition of calcium chloride solution, 
and the serum separated. It is found that the oxalate 
method gives a much greater yield of serum, which 
is also clearer and of a better colour (Bull. 60, Agri- 
cultural Research Institute, Pusa), : 
Tuer meningococcus, the micro-organism of cerebro- 
spinal fever, frequently persists in the throat of **car- 
riers” for long periods. Lieut.~Col. Gordon and Capt. 
Flack have tested the effect of sprays containing 
chloroamine T and zinc sulphate for freeing carriers 
from the meningococcus. | When the infection is 
scanty both agents are generally quickly eifectual, but 
when the infection is abundant the condition is far 
more difficult to ‘‘cure’’ and chloroamine only is of 
use (British Medical Journal, 1916, November 18, 
p- 673). 
Miss L. H. Hive, in a paper on ‘The Bionomics 
of the Tiger-Beetle” (Proc. R. Phys. Soc. Edin., xx., 
part 1), describes for the first time the egg-laying 
habits of Cicindela. campestris. The female insect 
bores into the soil with her ovipositor tg a depth 
of 4 or 5 mm. “As the hole deepened, the beetle 
raised herself on her front legs till her body assumed 
an almost perpendicular attitude.” The hole is after- 
wards filled up and ithe surface carefully raked over. 
An interesting divergence from the normal feeding 
habit of its family—the Cecidomyide, or gall-midges— 
is shown by the larva of an American fly, Aphidoletes 
meridionalis; instead of eating and deforming plant- 
tissues it attacks and devours aphids or ‘ greenfly” on 
such diverse plants as garden pea, oats, and fruit- 
trees. A fresh account of the life-history and habits, 
with figures of the various stages, has lately been 
published by J. J. Davis (Journ. Agric. Research, vi., 
No. 23). ' 
Drs. RayMonp Prart and M. R. Curtis continue 
their ‘Studies on the Physiology of Reproduction in 
the Domestic Fowl’? with a memoir on ‘“ Dwarf 
Eggs” (Journ. Agric. Research, vol. vi., No. 25). In 
a period of eight years nearly 300 dwarf eggs were 
| examined at the Maine Station—one “dwarf” to 1158 
‘ 
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