Bee, Set Bis 
= 
trode construction are described. 
6 
JANUARY II, 1917] 
on living animals. The whole residue of the estate, 
apart from a few small legacies to servants and others, 
is left to the trustees for the purposes of the trust to 
form a maintenance fund for carrying out the objects 
named. Should there be any funds in excess of the 
requirements of the original scheme, the trustees are 
directed to utilise them for the establishment of ‘t Murchi- 
son of Taradale Memorial Bursaries” at any of the 
Scottish universities or places of secondary education in 
Scotland or elsewhere, for the assistance of young 
natives of Ross-shire of either sex of any age between 
fourteen and twenty-four, preferably those able to 
speak and write the Gaelic language. 
SOCIETIES AND ACADEMIES. 
LonpDon. : 
Faraday Society, December 18, 1916.—Sir Robert 
Hadfield, president, and later Prof. A. W. Porter, in 
the chair.—Ezer Griffiths and E. A. Griffiths : A carbon 
tube furnace for testing the softening points and com- 
pressive strengths of refractories. The paper describes 
a carbon tube furnace designed for the testing of re- 
fractory materials under definite load. The specimens 
are cut from the brick and ground up into the form 
of short cylinders. Pressure is applied by means of 
springs suitably connected to carbon rods which carry 
the specimen under test. Two simple forms of elec- 
In one of them the 
current is carried by two copper tubes bent into a 
zigzag form, and cast into two blocks of white bearing 
metal. The faces of the blocks are cast to the form 
of the carbon tube to which they are clamped. The 
copper tubes also serve for water cooling. The tem- 
perature of the specimen is directly observed by means 
of a polarising type of optical pyrometer.—Prof. E. D. 
Campbell: Do equiatomic solutions in iron possess 
equal resistances? The conception of steel as a solid 
solution has long suggested a relationship between its 
chemical composition and resistance. Benedicks, in 
1902, laid down the general law that equiatomic solid 
solutions in iron possess equal resistances. The ex- 
perimental work of Arnold has shown the assumptions 
underlying Benedicks’s law to be untenable, and the 
object of the author’s experimental work was to seek 
a more satisfactory hypothesis. The experiments, 
which are fully described in the paper, were carried 
out on seven steels of varying composition, and their 
specific resistances were measured in both the hardened 
and annealed states. The deviations’from the calcu- 
lated values cannot be explained on Benedicks’s 
assumption, but they suggest that it is the molecular 
concentration of the carbides in solid solution, and not 
the atomic concentration of the carbon, which deter- 
mines the influence on the specific resistance exerted 
by such solutes.—R. H. Sherry: Grain-growth in de- 
formed and annealed low-carbon steel. Coarse crystal- 
lisation or grain-growth in pure iron and low-carbon 
steels permanently deformed and annealed has from 
time to time caused no little difficulty to workers in 
sheet, wire, cold-drawn bar, and pressings of these 
materials. The present paper, based on an extended 
investigation, explains the conditions under which 
srain-growth occurs.—R. G. Parker and A. J. Dalladay : 
The union of glass in optical contact by heat treat- 
ment (see Naturr, December 21, 1916, p. 317).—Prof. 
W. C. McCullagh Lewis: The effect of pressure on the 
equilibrium constant of a reaction in a dilute solution : 
A simple proof of the expression. The paper indicates 
a simple mode of deducing the effect of external pres- 
sure on the equilibrium constant of a reaction in dilute 
solution. The method, which involves the simple con- 
cept of maximum work, may be found to be of use 
bv teachers of physical chemistry, as students gener- 
allv find the method of Planet: somewhat difficult. 
NO. 2463, VOL. 98] 
. 
NATURE 
383 
Geological Society, December 20, 1916.—Dr. Alfred 
Harker, president, in the chair.—Dr. Marie C. Stopes : 
Recent researches on Mesozoic ** Cycads” (Bennettitales). 
The paper dealt particularly with recently discovered 
petrified remains which reveal their cellular tissues in 
microscopic preparations. The distribution of a few 
of the most interesting representatives of the Bennetti- 
tales (including the cohorts Bennettiteze and William- 
po was shown in a table. The group is by far 
the most characteristic of all the plants of the Jurassic 
and Lower Cretaceous, during which periods its dis- 
tribution was almost world-wide. It was locally, if 
not universally, dominant, and was the most highly 
evolved plant-group of the epoch of which we are 
cognisant. Three chief points of interest are noted 
in the geological distribution of these plants :—(a) 
That the most numerous highly specialised trunks 
reach their maximum in the Jurassic and Lower 
Cretaceous periods, when their distribution was prac- 
tically world-wide; (b) that the oldest and therefore 
presumably the most primitive tvpe, Wielandiella, is 
externally less like the living Cycads than the com- 
moner later forms, while these latter are utterly unlike 
the living genera in their fructifications; (c) that the 
geologically youngest cone is the largest vet discovered, 
occurring in the Gault when the extinction of the group 
appears already to have set in. Contrary to what 
might have been anticipated from their external like- 
ness to the living Cycads, coupled with their great 
geological age, the fossil ‘‘Cycads’’ are much more 
complex and on a higher level of evolution than the 
living group. It seems to the author to be extremely 
unlikely that the fossil and the living forms have any 
direct phylogenetic connection nearer than a remote, 
unknown, common ancestor. The mooted connection 
between the fossil ‘‘Cycads”’ and the Angiosperms is 
highly suggestive, but lacks data for its establishment. 
Royal Microscopical Society, December 20, 1916.—Mr. 
E. Heron-Allen, president, in the chair.—A. Bacot: 
Note on the relation between the hatching and develop- 
ment of the larva of the yellow-fever mosquito (Stego- 
myia fasciata) and the presence of bacteria and yeasts. 
In sterile water or in ‘killed’ cultures of various bac- 
teria and yeasts, the author found that the proportion 
of mosquito eggs unhatched within a normal period 
was much larger than when a living culture or stagnant 
water teeming with organic life was employed. Of 
the ‘‘ refractory’ eggs first mentioned a large propor- 
tion hatched out at once on the addition of a small 
quantity of brewer’s yeast, or other living micro- 
organisms, to the previously sterile fluid.—Prof. S. J. 
Hickson : Certain sessile forms of Foraminifera. After 
discussing the observations of Schultze and Carpenter, 
the author gave his reasons for regarding the fora- 
minifer described by the former as identical with Poly- 
trema miniaceum, but that studied by the latter as 
being a different organism, for which he now proposed 
the new generic name of Homotrema; and then de- 
tailed the differential diagnosis of the two forms. The 
author next dealt with the form known as P. cylindri- 
cum, Carter, which he regarded as the type of a new 
genus, Sporadotrema; all these forms he regarded as 
having secondarily acquired the sedentary habit after a 
previous free existence, in contrast with the genus 
Gypsina, which he considered had always been seden- 
tary and encrusting in its habit—E. J. Sheppard: 
Note on an exhibit showing migration of nuclear mate- 
rial into an adjacent cell. A slide of the ‘“‘pollen 
mother-cells” of Lilium candidum was exhibited 
showing migration of nuclear’ material (chromatin) 
from one cell nucleus into the cytoplasm of an adjacent 
cell, the migration chromatin being preceded and 
almost surrounded by a liquefaction or absorption 
zone of the cytoplasm. So far no fusion of the 
