314 
Keith, Royal College of Surgeons of England—the 
last-named to serve as acting editor. At the same 
meeting a unanimous vote of thanks was given to 
Prof. Alex. Macalister, F.R.S., for the able manner in 
which he had managed and edited the Journal in past 
years and for his generosity in transferring its control 
to the Anatomical Society. 
An expedition in the interests of the Smithsonian 
‘Institution will leave shortly for the French Congo 
and certain of the neighbouring parts of West Africa. 
It will be known as the “ Collins-Garner Congo Expe- 
dition, in the interests of the Smithsonian Institution,” 
and will be headed by Mr. A. M. Collins, of Phil- 
adelphia, a well-known explorer and sportsman, who 
has made several trips to Africa and other regions 
in search of big game. Mr. R. L. Garner, of New 
York, who has already made extensive investigations 
concerning the apes and monkeys of Central Africa, 
is manager of the expedition. The other members 
‘of the party are Prof. C. W. Furlong, of Boston, 
and Mr. C. R. W. Aschemeier, of Washington, who re- 
‘presents the Smithsonian Institution as collector of 
natural history specimens for the United States 
National Museum. The natural history collections will 
go to the United States National Museum. 
Tue trustees of the Elizabeth Thompson Science 
Fund announce their readiness to consider applications 
for grants in aid of scientific work. Appropriations are 
restricted to non-commercial enterprises, and are in- 
tended solely for the actual expenses of the investiga- 
tion, not for the support of the investigator or for the 
ordinary costs of publication. Grants are made only 
for those researches, not otherwise provided for, the 
object of which is, broadly, the advancement of human 
knowledge; requests for researches of a narrow or 
merely local interest will not be considered. Usually 
grants are not made in excess of three hundred dollars. 
Applications for grants from this fund should be accom- 
panied by a full statement of the nature of the investi- 
gation, of the conditions under which it is to be prose- 
cuted, and of the manner in which the appropriation 
asked for is to be expended. The application should 
be sent to the secretary of the board of trustees, Dr. 
W. B. Cannon, Harvard Medical School, Boston, 
Mass., U.S.A., who will furnish further details. 
Mucu is being done all over the country to provide 
entertainment for our soldiers, but the Scientific 
Society of the Birmingham and Midland Institute 
appears to have opened up a somewhat new line. On 
a recent evening many members and friends of the 
society visited the Y.M.C.A. Hut at Sutton Coldfield 
to give the convalescents stationed there a ‘“ Popular 
Science Evening.” The tables were crowded all the 
evening, and the soldiers evinced the greatest interest 
in the exhibits and experiments. Exigencies of time 
had been carefully considered, so that the preparations 
in the room took only about half-an-hour, whilst an 
even shorter time served for clearing away. The 
following list of some of the exhibits may be a useful 
guide to other societies desirous of organising similar 
exhibitions :—‘‘ Rainbow Cup,’ showing colours of 
very thin soap films; Cartesian diver; radiometer; 
spontaneous combustion; shocking coil; fire from flint, 
steel, and tinder; floating magnets under a controlling 
* magnet; diffusion figures, formed by the spreading of 
dyes in blotting paper; harmonigraph (four-phase) ; 
“several microscopes; gyroscope, spinning eggs, etc. ; 
resonance experiments with tuning forks, resonators, 
‘swinging balls, etc.; soap bubble experiments. 
__In an address before the opening meeting of the 
Illuminating Engineering Society on December 15 
NO. 2460, vor. 98] 
NATURE 
me ’ 
P: 
[DECEMBER 21, 1916 
Mr. L. Gaster referred to the great loss which the 
society had sustained in the death of Prof. Silvanus P. — 
Thompson. A message of condolence from the Rus- 
sian Electrotechnical Associationy expressing admira- 
tion of Prof. Thompson’s great gifts, was also read. 
The address dealt mainly with the problem of war 
economies in lighting, which, it was suggested, should 
take the form of avoiding waste of light rather than 
aiming at indiscriminate diminution. The prejudicial 
effect of the darkening of the streets was illustrated 
by the progressive increase in the number of accidents 
during the past few years, and the economic loss 
involved in the interference with traffic was consider- 
able. The present inethods of screening lamps were 
in general uneconomical and badly devised, and the 
conditions varied greatly in different districts. These 
anomalies appeared to be due to the conflicting claims 
of different authorities urging respectively the claims 
of economy, the convenience of traffic and safety, and 
precautions against hostile aircraft. After two years 
of war the time was surely ripe for a systematic study 
of the present lighting conditions and for the estab- 
lishment of a central authority, acting under expert 
advice, to determine how these various requirements 
could best be met. ‘ 
Mr. J. Reip Morr has sent us, asan excerpt from the 
Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia 
(vol. ii., part ii., for 1915-16), a paper on a series of 
pre-Palzolithic implements recently discovered at 
Darmsden Hall, Suffolk, a place about eight miles . 
north-west of Ipswich. The sand underlying the 
pebble-bed is at present undatable, but the deposit was 
laid down prior to the excavation of the Gipping Valley, 
and the pebbles were deposited from the Woolwich and 
Reading beds. These Darmsden implements, which ~ 
are precisely the same as the sub-Crag specimens, are 
more-ancient than the Pliocene Red Crag, and can 
therefore be referred to an early phase of the pre- 
Palzolithic period. The human origin of the chipping 
is said to be certain. There is no evidence that they 
were fractured in the bed in which they are now 
found, and they show no signs of pressure flaking 
or scratches, the result of moving pressure. They 
have obviously been flaked by blows, and thé angles 
at which the flakes were moved show that such 
blows were intelligently directed. f 
In the Psychological Review (vol. xxiii., No. 6) 
K. S. Lashley raises the problem of the im- 
portance of the human salivary reflex. He points 
out that the experiments _of Pawlow have pro- 
vided a method of _ investigation which has 
proved useful in the study of the sensory physio- 
logy of animals, and promises to be even more valu- 
able in revealing fundamental factors of habit forma- 
tion and of central inhibition and reinforcement. He 
suggests that an extension of the method to man is 
desirable, as in the few attempts already made to 
investigate the conditioned salivary reflex in man the 
results are not in harmony with one another, due 
probably to differences in technique and interpretation. 
The ease with which the quantity of secretion of the 
salivary glands can be measured, the consistency of 
their reactions, and their relative freedom from inhibi- 
tion, make them especially promising for studies of 
the relation of the intensity of the stimulus to the 
organism, which studies have hitherto been restricted 
to the elaboration of the laws of psycho-physics. 
A sySTEMATIC entomological paper of much interest 
is one on the Dermaptera. and Orthoptera of the 
coastal plain and piedmont region of the south-eastern 
United States by J. A. G. Rehn and M. Hebard (Proc. 
Acad. Nat, Sci., Philadelphia, Ixviii., part ~2). 
